The Chocolate Heart

by Laura Florand

  Well, of course she meant it. “I had been in the Pacific for four years. I just really didn’t know who you were at first.”

  “But then why—” He caught himself and shook his head. “Thank you,” he said simply.

  The waiter brought two white . . . plates didn’t seem the right word, since they were barely two inches wide and a foot long. Three tiny mouthfuls occupied each one: a delicate flat white spoon with a gleaming mint-colored jewel; a slender stick that speared two little orange-dusted, savory marshmallows; and an eggshell-size white cup of soup over which balanced a puff of something on a mahogany spoon.

  “Hugo’s newest amuse-bouche.” Luc smiled. “I was working with him on it. I invented something like this for one of my plates.” He indicated the mint-colored teardrop. “It’s the thinnest capsule of gelatin that holds it together, and then . . .” He broke off. “You’ll see. He wanted to do the same thing in a savory dish. And then these.” He pointed to the orange-dusted marshmallows. “I’ve dropped this particular dessert for now, the one where I did two little handmade fraises—a little play with the Fraises Tagada candy that most people loved as children here. But Hugo was always intrigued by the idea of doing a similar texture and look, but with something savory. The sugar is usually key in a marshmallow, so we tossed ideas back and forth for several days before we came up with this. Try it.” He sat back. “Taste. Feel what happens with the textures.”

  It was already so simple—the white on white, the small mouthfuls—and so elaborate and so completely beautiful. It reminded her, incongruously, of a Polynesian weaving of flowers, the sweet-scented white on green, simple in look and not that easy to do, rich with its own nature. She glanced up at him, wanting to show such a lei to him, to watch his creativity play with it, to see what dessert he came up with based on it, then caught herself and shut the thought down. That’s not going to happen, Summer.

  He’ll never give up Paris for you.

  A chef like him can’t give up Paris. It would mean giving up everything he is.

  He picked up his own teardrop-bearing spoon and lifted it to his mouth, raising his eyebrows at her expectantly until she lifted hers, so that they slid the spoons between their lips at the exact same time.

  Liquid burst into her mouth, cool and green, some bubble of spring. She smiled over it, laying the spoon down. He nodded to the middle element of the long, narrow plate, the marshmallow creation. Two transparently thin rectangles framed it below, and he indicated them first. “The switch in textures,” he said. “It’s the essence here.”

  Crackling on her teeth, a savory, nutty flavor on her tongue. Then the gentle, dusted warmth of the little bits at the end of the stick, which made her smile, they were so surprisingly like and not like a marshmallow. And then the savoriness of the light puff on the wooden spoon, and the reassurance of the smooth, pea-based puree.

  Luc watched her as she ate it. She, who had eaten so many of these things, so many elegant dinners, handling herself among the most mercilessly elegant company, began to feel self-conscious. “Do you have fun?” she asked suddenly. “When you guys come up with something like this?” Obsessive-compulsive perfectionists at play.

  Luc studied his little wooden spoon, twirling it in the fingers that had played with her knuckles. She kept feeling that touch, ghostlike, with every deft movement of the spoon. “Y-yes,” he said, with some reservations. He smiled ruefully. “Patrick is infinitely good for me, in terms of lightening me up.”

  “The same Patrick you had a fight with?” His hands today showed no signs of swelling, but the burn was a red, blistered mark on the back of his hand. “No one ever told me why that happened.”

  An odd little smile. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  Yeah, right. What had the fight been about, that no one would say?

  “Patrick said you had a sense of humor and joie de vivre.” She couldn’t keep the question out of her voice.

  His eyes narrowed. “When have you been discussing me with Patrick?”

  “I asked him what the fight was about,” she said impatiently. “When I saw he was the other side of it. He wouldn’t tell me.” Oh, yeah, and he had told her not to mention his comments about the joie de vivre, too. Oops. “You really have joie de vivre?”

  A waiter brought a basket of breads, half a dozen shapes fresh from the hotel bakery. Luc gave her one, warm and faintly grained under her hand. “Summer, where do you think these desserts around you come from? Some arid, dry hole inside me? I don’t understand you sometimes. It’s almost as if you literally cannot see them.”

  She blinked warily. “I’d forgotten you thought you understood me most of the time.”

  “No, I don’t think that.” He broke off a bite of his own bread, smeared it with a tiny touch of fresh-made butter, and proffered it to her. “But I do think I look at you, I look at you every second you’re anywhere I can see, and for whatever reason, you’re afraid to look at me.”

  So of course she looked at him. Behind his head, the Eiffel’s sparkling subsided and the stars in his black hair went out. The stars in his hair had been cute, sweet, luring her in. Now without them, all blackness, he was irresistible.

  That wasn’t true, though, what he had said. She had stood in his kitchens for an hour once, watching him, and he had never looked at her.

  He turned her hand over, his fingers stroking her pulse. “Why are you afraid of me? That’s the real question.”

  She tried to pull her hand away. He gave it a warning squeeze. Oh, right, the critic. Damn it, she couldn’t do this. She was sinking down into darkness, and she wasn’t going to get back out.

  “If it’s because I hurt you, again, I’m sorry.” The subtle rub of his fingers at the most sensitive point of her wrist triggered every other erogenous zone in her body. “I didn’t realize I could.”

  Couldn’t they show the critic she respected him without touching so much? Wrestling her hand away would look bad. And the shimmers that ran through her body from her wrist stole all her muscles.

  She bent her head, her eyes closing just one second to shut herself in complete darkness. She wanted so badly to be spoiled by him.

  “Have I hurt you, Summer?” he asked very softly. His hand curved completely over hers and held it there, in its own little cave. What she would give, to be in a cave of him. What if she would give up herself?

  “I think this might be a bad idea.” She forced her eyes open and looked at him. “I think my own idea about what kind of contact we should have was better.”

  A bitter flash in his eyes, quickly veiled. “Thank you for doing it. I don’t think you have any idea of the damage a bad spate of rumors can cause. I really appreciate your willingness to . . . pretend.”

  Meaning she couldn’t just leave the table to save herself. She looked down at his hand on hers again, doomed.

  “So what made you regret that decision to stay on an island, only once?” His voice lightened to teasing again, but the choice of subject felt—like a little curlicue of sugar that might grace one of his desserts—anything but careless or casual. “Did you fall out of a coconut palm? Break your arm?” He ran his hand all the way up the length of her forearm and back, turning it, checking for scars.

  Summer stared at her forearm as if she could see the whole path of his fingers glowing against her skin. She shook her head mutely.

  “Cut your foot on coral? Get bitten by a shark?”

  “The sharks are actually too little to—”

  He shook her arm gently. “I know. Did I ever mention my mother was Tahitian? There were a couple of years there, when I was a lot younger, when I would read up about the islands and pretend I might go there.”

  He might as well have told her that he had dreamed about going to live on Pluto. Actually, that sounded much more plausible for him. Dark, remote.

  “Why didn’t you?” She had seen his salary. He could certainly afford to travel.

  One shoulder lifted and dropped. “I was bus
y.”

  Of course. Too busy, achieving too many wonderful things, for a vacation.

  “And my mother ran back home to Tahiti a few months after I was born rather than tough it out in Paris with me, so I admit my attitude toward the islands was . . . complex,” he said after a moment, his voice neutral.

  Shock ran through her. He had just stripped something out of his soul and was offering it to her, which must have hurt like hell, and yet she couldn’t tell it from his controlled face. Summer talked about the Paris weather with more passion. “Why didn’t she take you with her?”

  That control of his set a little harder. “I have no idea.” He released her hand and picked up his silver fork as the waiter slid sea urchin shells in front of them, filled with some kind of mousse. “I thought you must like seafood. It’s one of Hugo’s best dishes.”

  “I’d take you with me,” Summer said involuntarily. A dark-haired intense little boy for her son. Maybe she could get him to hang upside down grinning from a mango tree. A dark-haired intense adult for her lover. Maybe she could get him to rock in a hammock and smile at her. She couldn’t imagine leaving either child or man behind.

  His fork halted. He set it down beside his plate, food untouched. Something grew in him as he looked at her, pressing out against his shell, like a boiler about to explode. Wild and very, very dark. “My God,” he said, very low. “That’s why it was a yacht.”

  She flushed crimson and looked down at her plate. “No good roads for a Bugatti there,” she mumbled, trying her best to make it flippant and funny.

  Across from her, absolute stillness. She couldn’t look at him, still blushing. “Excuse me.” He came suddenly to his feet. “I have to check on something in the kitchens. I’ll be right back.”

  Colleagues and employees filled the corridors. Luc’s office was half-walled with glass. Nowhere could a man lose control in private, and it had never been a problem before. He had never lost control.

  He finally locked himself in the bathroom and stood with his hands gripping the sink, which had the disadvantage of putting him face-to-face with a mirror. He pressed the top of his head against it instead of facing that wildness in his eyes, and stared instead down at his hands, gripping the edge of the sink. Strong hands. Powerful hands. Hands that could control anything, that could do anything.

  Bronze hands, because of his mother.

  I’d take you with me.

  Everything in him fought to roar out of him and grab her, in uncontrollable starvation.

  All this time he had been offended, believing himself worth more than a yacht. When she had curled her head into his shoulder the first night she saw him and tried to take him with her. To live with her on that island.

  One woman, who should have loved him, had left him for life in the sun when she barely knew him.

  One woman had tried to take him with her into her sunlight the first minute she saw him.

  It didn’t mean anything, of course. She had been punch-drunk with fatigue, as she said. And probably would have ditched him a month later for someone else she gave another yacht to.

  It didn’t mean anything. She would still choose the sun over him, if he didn’t go with her.

  It didn’t mean anything.

  It meant everything.

  He couldn’t go, of course. Twenty years of passionate intensity to be the very best, to rule over his world, couldn’t be put on an island of three hundred people. He would probably recarve the island into its ideal form, spoonful by spoonful.

  But . . . she had extended the offer.

  Now he just had to find a counteroffer that would beat life on a tropical island. When all he had done to create value in his life—his desserts, what he could make—was exactly the thing she had always refused to touch.

  CHAPTER 21

  Summer had eaten so many elegant meals, and yet none more charged than this one. It was fraught with pleasure, the tension of it pulling everything tight, so that when he lifted a spoon to his mouth and nudged her, with supple eyebrows, she felt as if the string that pulled her spoon up to his bidding was actually passing through her heart so tightly it might snap.

  Guided through every bite by a man who had helped create the symphony of tastes she was experiencing. Who knew intimately every flavor and texture in her mouth.

  By the end of the dinner she was braced against the coming dessert like a small child with her heels dug into the ground, watching the Hoover Dam above her break, but Luc cast a thoughtful glance over her face. And then smiled at her and stood again. “Give me a minute.”

  Summer wanted to get up and run. As the minute stretched to five, she bowed her head, rubbing the prickling nape of her neck. Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he decided I didn’t deserve one of his desserts.

  Oh, damn it, Summer, grow up, get over yourself.

  At the next table the waiter was describing Luc Leroi’s special Heart of Winter dessert menu in passionate terms. “Just launched tonight, messieurs, mesdames, une surprise, unannounced, you will be among the first ever to taste these . . .”

  A teddy bear arrived before her, dancing, twirling on a long wooden stick in callused, clever fingers. She started to look up at Luc, but her eyes got caught on the little bear, so cute, so funny that her braced heart softened and her face broke into a smile.

  Fresh-made marshmallow dipped in chocolate, the bear’s face picked out in whimsical colorful touches, a red scarf around his throat, little yellow buttons down his front. One of the marshmallow-bear lollipops off the Goldilocks-themed kids’ delight of a dessert that she had spotted earlier. Those marshmallow bears that he had once offered to her on a tray, sprawled among all the secret candies of her childhood.

  Tears backed up in her so suddenly they clogged her heart, which started pounding frantically to drive them through. It was so innocent, and so cute, an exquisite version of the bonbons she used to see in boulangerie windows in Paris, tugging on her nanny’s hand when they were out for walks, until Liz smiled and bought her a tiny bag of them.

  The secret little treasure that no one had ever tried to withhold from her.

  “Not too much?” came Luc’s gentlest, darkest voice, as he sat across from her again. He was smiling, but again the darkness in his eyes shut out everything else in the room, until the only light left was her. Leaving her, therefore, brilliantly exposed.

  She bit her lip.

  A tiny flex of his eyebrows. “Still too much?”

  She twisted the little bear in her fingers.

  “Or there’s this, if you prefer,” Luc said, and a waiter slid a pure white plate in front of her. The dark chocolate sphere that she had shattered once before, revisited, the bars of it strong this time but wide, so there was plenty of room for the golden heart to look out. To escape. The heart itself, the size of her fist, sat supported on another cradle of darkness, gently curved. Snow-frozen mousse entirely covered with gold leaf, it gleamed in the light from the chandeliers. “I think I finally got it right.”

  Her heart burst. She covered her face with her hands. The bear, forgotten in her fingers, caught in her hair, and Luc removed it deftly, tugging the strands. “Summer.”

  She pulled her hands apart just enough to stare at him between them, hiding her face from the rest of the room. Her lower lip trembled uncontrollably.

  “Summer.” He leaned across the table, and his hands came up to frame her own, adding their larger shield to her face. “What do you think I’m trying to do to you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never—it’s like I could have any dessert in this room I wanted. It’s like they were all made for me.”

  “You could,” Luc said. “They were. I made a special dessert menu, so that everything, at every table, was designed for you.”

  Heart of Winter. With everywhere, a ray of sun.

  “Summer. Why does that make you want to cry?”

  She struggled to breathe evenly. Summer Corey did not cry in public. She only smiled. “This is—I’v
e never seen anything so beautiful in my whole life.” All those things held out of my reach because I wasn’t good enough—none of them were as beautiful as this.

  His face suffused with something. An energy seemed to push against his skin, making him bigger, until his soul filled the room, leaking through cracks in that iron control. “Thank you,” he said, stifled.

  “How could you do something like this for me?”

  He looked at her as if nothing about her made sense. “Summer. How is it even possible that no man has ever truly spoiled you?”

  That made her eyes sting again. Her skin shivered with the need to be spoiled, to be cherished. She stared down at the dessert.

  Luc’s chest rose and fell in light, shallow pants. “Summer. Are you going to eat it?”

  She picked up her spoon, shaking all over. Afraid to touch it, because it was so beautiful, and she might never see something like it again. She gestured at the top half of the sphere with its carved bars. “Is that to close back over people who get lured inside?” she whispered. “And capture them so they can never get out?”

  Luc’s will pressed at her, eager, barely held back. “Go all the way through, Summer. In one fell swoop. No half measures.”

  It took courage to press her spoon down, down, cutting through gold, into more gold, a gently yellow frozen mousse, and then—darkness spilled out like a shock. Molten dark chocolate, gushing over her spoon like blood from a deep wound. Luc made a tiny sound, as if he had just been stabbed. She looked at him.

  “It’s all right.” He waved her focus back to his dessert, although he had a hand pressed to his chest.

  She drew the bite at last to her tongue, the spoon trembling, her lips trying to press closed in resistance at the very last second, so that she smeared her own lips. But it was in, inside her mouth, and everything about her liquefied. Cold and sweet, hot and melting, luscious and intense. Luc made a hungry sound.

  The taste of it broke her. A lifetime of resistance. She dug into it again, greedy as a child, and when she got two bites down, three, and still he had not jerked it away from her, her face grew slowly radiant. He had given this to her. As if he found her worth every good thing he could imagine.