The Chocolate Heart

by Laura Florand

  She found her thighs squeezing tight together, trying desperately to get that barn door shut after the horse was stolen. Four times.

  “Not that damned polite, pat-me-on-the-head smile for this, too.”

  What was wrong with her smile? It disappeared. Was it not up to his standards?

  He stared at her, his muscles tightening and tightening until they propelled him off the bed. “Putain de merde.”

  He stood with his back to her, rage compacted in his body, in that fist by his side. But how was it her fault? He had been the one who kept taking control of her, not letting her wrap around him as she had been so eager to do, holding her down as he shattered her one more time.

  “Blame yourself,” she said sharply. Never accept it, when they reduce you. Never.

  He turned his head enough that she could see the tense, perfect line of his jaw. The backlighting from the window veiled him in a blur of shadow. “I do.”

  What? Somehow that didn’t seem right, either. Was she so much an object to be handled that she didn’t even have a role in the postmortem accusations?

  “I clearly—mishandled things,” he said, right on cue. “I was aiming for something a little different.”

  The pain of that curled through her. She didn’t see it coming and was surprised when she tried to breathe and discovered her lungs crushed so she couldn’t. Mishandled things. Aiming for something else.

  “Well. You let me know what thing you want me to be, and I’ll see if I can live up to your expectations next time.”

  He half turned, sharply. “What are you talking about?”

  “What are you talking about? In fact, why are you still talking? Aren’t we done yet?”

  His nostrils flared. Both fists clenched as he turned fully to face her. A dangerous, naked, aroused man, muscles straining for action, an atavistic wildness just lunging to get out.

  She stared back at him with no fear whatsoever. If he fell on her savagely, it might just set things right. She might even discover more energy left than she thought.

  He took a hard breath and jerked his pants on over his naked butt. She winced a little when he zipped them so savagely, but of course he kept in perfect control even then and didn’t do himself an injury. “You’re right. I’m not in a good state for this.”

  She stared at him in shock. She didn’t know why. Anyone would think she had enough experience of men to predict his ability to walk out in a huff over his sexual fantasy not going exactly as planned. Over her being, somehow—not good enough.

  He abruptly leaned over her, caught her chin, and kissed her hard on her open mouth. He was still pulling his shirt on as he stepped into the hall.

  Leaving her body empty, and in a vulgarly specific spot, her skin growing cold, and hatred growing. Into something powerful enough to save even her.

  The bastard. To have turned all his patience and control on her, to break her down infinitely until every bit of love and joy and desire slipped out of her and clung to his skin, and not ever once break open himself. Give her some of him back.

  When she had told him, no blunter way possible, that the absolute limit of what she wanted from him was to be fucked against the wall and left on the floor.

  The unutterable bastard.

  CHAPTER 24

  Luc wanted to howl.

  He knew he had screwed up. The icy shower beat it into his brain. To have her all his, so utterly and completely and helplessly his, over and over his, and to end it in a fight?

  Arousal had been some dark monster grown five times the size of his body, ready to burst out of his elegant skin and leave it in peeling shreds for all to see. But he had been controlling it still. Somehow, holding on to one last little shred of control and about to let it break, thank God at last—until the slap of that smile. That same damn smile she had thrown blindly over him the very first night, wrenching out his heart and giving him fifty euros in return.

  That warm, sleepy smile, arms sliding over his back, saying, Come down here, I may be exhausted but you are welcome here.

  “My God, I’ve never seen anything like it.” Patrick whipped a plate away from him and gave the destroyed flourishes of the Victoire a disgusted look. “You’re starting to break things just by looking at them. You don’t have any of those film crews coming today by any chance so they can see who the real star of the kitchens is?”

  He gave up on righting Luc’s mess as he spoke, pulling a new one together to replace it and sliding it through the pass to the waiter.

  Luc snarled.

  “I don’t even want to know how you got yourself into this state after what I saw of how things were going last night. Whatever it is, I’m quite sure it’s all your fault.”

  Luc’s snarl turned murderous.

  “I hear the hotel’s got a gym,” Patrick said. “I sometimes use it instead of hitting you over the head.”

  But on the way up for one quick, homicidal bout of pounding a punching bag or straining against some insane amount of weights, he ran into Summer.

  In coat and scarf and looking as if she’d slept like an angel.

  Which she probably had. An angel exhausted with pleasure, curled up among her pillows, unable to keep her eyes open.

  “Summer,” he said with deep relief. It would probably have been better if he had run into her after the gym, but still.

  She pulled her gloves on, giving him a vague, cheerful smile.

  Putain, he was going to kill somebody. Himself. Her. Death by shrapnel; he exploded. We never knew he had all that stuff in him.

  He bent down to kiss that cheerful smile right off her face, to make her look at him.

  She turned her head away so that his lips slid over her cheek.

  His hand spasmed with such a need to yank her head back around and force her mouth to take his that he had to take a step back, locking his hands under his elbows.

  “I’m sorry, I’m running late,” she said lightly, as if she made absolutely no distinction between a kiss, a conversation in the hallway, or another bout of sex; she was equally apologetic for having better things to do than all of them. “Let’s catch up later.”

  Oh, yes, he was going to kill someone. Her.

  “After all, I don’t want him to ditch me.” An amused shrug.

  He stared at her, eyes burning. “You don’t want who to ditch you?”

  “My therapist, of course,” she said with a little what-a-silly-you-are laugh.

  His nostrils flared. Hidden under his elbows, his knuckles dug into his muscles. “You’re really going to see a therapist to learn how to stop being attracted to me?”

  “Obviously,” Summer said with a wink, “I need some help.”

  His jaw clenched. He stepped very carefully aside to let her pass, because he could not trust himself to do anything else.

  And then he went to the damn gym.

  It did help. It helped to work himself into pure, livid exhaustion, until he was drenched in sweat and hanging on the bag to recover.

  A little.

  It made a space in his aroused, wild, frustrated mind for her face framed by his hands, her lips trembling uncontrollably and her blue eyes brilliant with tears she was trying not to let fall. Because he had made a whole room full of desserts for her, offering her everything that was most beautiful about himself.

  It made space for him to remember that.

  He took deep breaths, hanging on the bag. Pressing his face against the leather, letting his pulse return to normal.

  Oh, shit. Had he made her cry?

  The amount of times Summer pulled her phone out that day and nearly told her father she quit went beyond counting. She walked instead on foot along the Seine all the way over to the Gibert Jeune on the opposite bank, down near Notre Dame. It was the most beautiful walk in Paris, and she tried to tolerate it. Bridges strung over the stygian waters like bracelets of old bone over a long, brown arm leached of life. Far in the distance, Notre-Dame fought the gray sky, proposing itself as
salvation, fooling many a traveler into thinking it was just a few steps farther, press on, don’t give up and sink down into the Métro. Behind her, the Wicked Stepmother Eiffel loomed in inexorable pursuit.

  Summer knew the distance between the menace and refuge very well. Her boarding school had sat only a block from the tower, and God knew she had fled that as often as she could. Notre-Dame had been a good place for a teenager to sit and bury her face in her hands and slowly dissolve into tears of self-loathing and despair, while the rose window and the vast murmuring space kept alive a fragile, stubborn desire to love herself, despite the fact that everyone else hated her so much and even her parents had thrown her away.

  She walked toward Notre-Dame automatically now, in her high-heeled little boots, consciously torturing feet used to flip-flops. Paris’s beauty and glamour had always trumped every emotion Summer could ever have. No one could be lonely here. No girl who had been given Paris should want still more proof of love and affection. Not unless she was really spoiled.

  But Summer would exchange this, the most beautiful and most heartbreaking walk in the world, for a stroll down a beach in the moonlight, with the Southern Cross low on the horizon, any day of the week.

  A cold wind ate at her cheeks, and a few hardy men tried to harass her, but she barely noticed them. Her feet cramped by the time she reached the Boulevard St. Michel. The façade of Notre-Dame had had a good cleaning since she was last in Paris, and it glowed against the grayness, stubbornly pale and perfect. She stared at it, across the water, and the memory of all those times she had wept in it as a teenager rose up and choked her heart. She would not go back there. She would not be that girl again.

  She pivoted, crossing the street, which put her right under the glorious fountain of the warrior angel Michael, crushing the devil beneath his foot and challenging the masses of Boulevard St. Michel to do the same. Paris was persistent that way, forcing its superior beauty on you every way you turned.

  As a little girl she had thought the bronze was a strong, proud woman, defeating some merciless, sneering man with a curvaceous sword and graceful dance move. Take that, the woman had seemed to say, with her upraised victorious arm, her lovely face untroubled by all she rose above and defeated, her wings so ready to lift her and let her soar away. Liz, for all her passion for Paris history and love of sharing it with her charge, had never once corrected her. It had been later, at boarding school, that someone in her art class laughed at her and told her what she should have realized all along. It was the Archangel Michael. Not a woman triumphant but the angel who had cast Eve out of Paradise for being so stupid as to eat something lusciously tempting.

  She stood a long time looking up at the proud half smile on the elegant face. It could have been a woman. She tried to imagine Luc as the devil, looking up with craven rage at the angel triumphing over him, but it was impossible. Some man took advantage of her absorption to try to slip his arm around her waist, and his face instantly replaced the craven fallen devil’s. Damn.

  She shrugged the man off with difficulty and went into the bookstore, buying big piles of books for her kids that she hauled back in bags so heavy they cut into her arms and left no ability to reach for a phone and cop out of her kids’ future because a man had given her four orgasms in one night and she couldn’t handle it.

  On her bedside table sat a bouquet of two dozen chocolate marshmallow teddy bears on long lollipop sticks.

  She was not entirely sure what was a more evil thing for a man to do, give her four orgasms without ever losing control or give her a bouquet of teddy bears as a thank-you gift for them when he knew that cracked her heart wide open.

  She flung herself back out of the room before she could eat one and ran into a hard, supple wall. A gasp of scent—oh, God, he smelled so good today, some tiny, teasing spice she wanted to trace all through the citrus and caramel and chocolate on his skin, until she could figure out what it was.

  What if she learned him so well, she would know everything he had worked on that day just by burying her face into his throat when he came home at night and taking a deep breath?

  Shit, stop, Summer, stop! You’re not doing that, forming your life in this miserable place around a man who might notice you briefly at midnight yet never find you worth opening his heart to.

  “Summer.” Luc’s velvet night voice closed over her, and agile, perfect hands caught her before she could fling herself back into her room and slam the door.

  “Oh, dear, not you again.” A playful, mocking tone that suggested he wasn’t worth more of her. She winked at him ruefully. “To be honest, I’ve had about as much of you as I can take today. It was fun, though.” She lifted a hand to pat his cheek.

  He caught it easily, as if it was nothing to him, to catch it, to run his thumb over her pulse and send it skittering, all while pulling her hand away from his face, not letting her touch him. “Summer.”

  She gave him a bored half smile, her eyebrows faintly lifted. He stood so close she could have leaned right into him. And been his damn puppet again. His little doll he played with. It made her want to cry to think of the night in those terms. But what else had it been?

  “Summer.” His fingers stroked her wrist so gently as he drew it down by her side. Her heart pounded with the longing to hide herself against him, but she just couldn’t. You couldn’t hide yourself against someone who would manipulate your soul out of your body while staying in perfect control. “I’m sorry if I screwed up. Sorrier than you can guess, I suspect. I went too far. Apparently. And I was almost insane with frustration right there at the end; I had to leave.”

  Yes, of course. Leave rather than crack. Wasn’t it so lucky one of them had that option.

  “Summer, you know, when I’m working with . . . raw materials”—he stroked his hands up her arms, with familiar gentleness, as if he had the right to take control over everything around him and turn it into what he wanted—“I often have to try more than once, to get it to turn out just right.”

  Anger spiked. Was he going to practice on her until he got her just right?

  He leaned over her, hands sure, arousing, as they caressed her arms. His breath warmed her lips. “Summer. Let’s try again.”

  She jerked against him and he blinked, focusing on her anger with difficulty through a haze of other expectations. “So sorry you couldn’t make me perfect the first try.”

  His hands slipped over her body in surprise as she ducked free, and he caught her arm. His gaze searched her as if her failure to understand made no sense. “Summer,” he said softly. “I wasn’t trying to make you perfect for me. I was trying to be perfect for you.”

  She frowned at him, uncomprehending. “But you already are perfect.”

  “I have to work at it, all the time. You just are.”

  What? “You can’t possibly really believe that.”

  “Then why do I say it, Summer? What do you think I want out of you, that would make me lie to you?”

  Not her money, not her father’s power, clearly not just sex. Oh, God, this scared her so much. What if he really wanted all of her? What if she was just a bite he could so easily swallow whole and forget as he went on with the hearty, full meal of the rest of his life? She couldn’t stand it again. She wanted so desperately to disappear from this spot in his hold and reappear on her safe, sunny island that she was shaking, on the edge of tears. “You said I was a spoiled brat.”

  “You asked me to fuck you against a wall.” His fingers slipped under her coat so that they curved just below her throat like a Roman collar. “I believe, as far as insults are concerned, you hold the honors.”

  She gave him a bitter look. “Instead of which, we had to do it your way.”

  His hand tensed. “I beg your pardon?” His eyes locked with hers. And filled with stunned incredulity. “Are you complaining about last night?”

  “Isn’t that what you were apologizing for?”

  “I was apologizing for losing my temper and walking
out that way. I don’t see how you could possibly complain about—” He broke off, his face growing paler and paler, his body tighter and tighter. “Go ahead, Summer,” he said finally, his lips barely moving. “Tell me how you could complain about last night.”

  “Well.” She fell back instantly on her best defense, lightness, and shrugged. “I am spoiled.”

  A muscle ticced in his jaw. His hand flexed on her collarbone. He nudged her backward into her suite, black eyes boring into her as the door swung shut behind them. “You know, sometimes, it’s harder to resist your so charming invitation than you might think.”

  “Oh my God!” she exclaimed excitedly. “I gave you a teensy bit of trouble resisting something? Are you sure?”

  That hand on her collarbone pushed her with slow, steady pressure against the wall. Not rough. But inexorable. Luc never miscalculated how much power he needed to put into his hands. And yet for all his control, there was something violent in the long, tense lines of him that seeped out of that bronze skin and held her still. Her body was melting for him already, in recognition and readiness.

  “I told you,” he said, a little grimly, “I wouldn’t be averse.”

  Excitement shot through her like relief, sucking up all other energy, focusing it on pleasure. On him.

  “You’re not going to get away from me.” His hand flexed against her collarbone, holding her prisoner, while the other hand arrowed to her sex. “And by God, I’m going to give you what you want.”

  His fingers slid under her panties and parted the crease of her, that fast, the switch to intimacy too radical, the effect on her too hot. “Stop,” she whispered.

  He checked, his gaze stripping her face, and the lips of her sex curled around his fingers and clung, out of her control. Why was she the one who always lost control? And to think people had warned her against treating him like a toy. Because of all those dark emotions of his that were much too valuable to be spent on someone like her.

  “You might need a safe word,” he told her grimly.