The Chocolate Heart

by Laura Florand

  “Yes,” she said, and tried to escape, which made her slip off his lap and fall backward into the water.

  He hauled her out by her leg and laid her across his lap, resting her head against the side of the tub. “Summer. You’re not going to get away from me, so stop it.”

  His fingers dug so cleverly into her overused muscles. Climbing up her calf. Easing tendons around her knee. Digging into her lower thigh. She gasped and shivered, and water burbled more intimately against her sex, proving the lips of it had parted.

  From this angle, Luc’s face looked severe. Beautiful. It always hit her like a ton of bricks, those honed, high masculine cheekbones, that sense of a stripped-down, lean, dangerous beauty burned clean of everything but its hardest core.

  “You have a nerve.” She wriggled against him, and his arousal grew harder, his face more dangerous, and his hands climbed higher up her thigh, digging in relentlessly. “You can shut me out of your mind without any effort at all, but I’m supposed to decide this is worth something? Worth what? Me?”

  “Yes,” he said flatly. “Exactly. You’re supposed to decide I’m worth you.”

  That stopped her dead. She stared at him, a whole rush of things inside her that made her want to reach up and latch on to his shoulders to hold herself steady. The water foamed to her waist, hiding his hand as it traced calmly—and thoroughly—over her wet, open sex on his way to her other thigh. She shivered convulsively, glaring at the city stretched out before her.

  So many boyfriends, why did he feel like the first man who could reach in and actually take her? Your taste in men has improved. Yeah, improved to the point of being suicidal. Way to go.

  “Not a yacht. Not a smile. Not the change from your wallet. You.”

  “Is this revenge?” she asked, confused. “You’re still trying to punish me for that first night? Because that’s cruel, even for you, to want all my life as forfeit.”

  “Even for me?”

  She tried to hide her face in the water. He braced her up out of it with an arm. “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “Cruel?”

  “You’re right,” she said rapidly. “Let’s have this conversation tomorrow, when we’re both fresher. I’m not making any sense.” She started to duck out of his arm.

  It wrapped around her and held her hard. “Let’s have it tonight.”

  All through her, muscles eased, not just from his fingers but from the fact that he had locked her unyieldingly against his body.

  “I’ve never shut you out of my mind, Summer. Let’s start with that. And you have no idea how much effort I’ve put into trying to do so.”

  She twisted into his shoulder, sinking into him. It took so little. Just his hold. Just his reassurance. And everything in her yielded to him. Why was she so damn weak? Why had she always been that weak, that hungry for any scrap of love?

  One arm held her. The other drew her leg up, massaging her other calf. The position held her sex wide and not quite touching his arousal, water rocking gently between them. “Now maybe you can tell me what I’ve been doing that feels so cruel to you.”

  She shook her head against his chest. She didn’t want to reinforce what a spoiled brat she was, that he was cruel because she wasn’t the center of his existence and because he was so utterly exquisite a trap for her.

  “Summer. I can learn to make things exactly right. But you have to tell me what I’m doing wrong, first. I have no idea how I’m being cruel.”

  Her eyebrows creased against his wet skin. “Exactly right?”

  Muscles shifted against her face with his shrug. “At a minimum.”

  “You don’t have to be exactly right.”

  “I already said that was just a starting point.” He shifted her until she was astride him, his hands massaging deeply into her butt, so taut from the run. She shivered uncontrollably at the release, her sex rocking and rubbing against his with every press of his fingers. His eyes glittered, his need unmistakable.

  Why did he do that? Refuse to let himself go? “I like you the way you are,” she protested.

  He made a skeptical sound. Did he need reassurance? Everything in her bloomed with delight at the possibility of giving him something he needed.

  Abruptly she slid forward over him, taking him deep in her slick, welcoming body. He made a hard sound. She shivered with rightness, everything settling into its place. “I love this,” she murmured.

  She felt him stiffen at the “I love” and hurried the “this” out, before he could reprimand her. That was okay, wasn’t it? To love this.

  It seemed to be, because his body curved around hers. “Do you, soleil?”

  She nodded, her cheek rubbing against him.

  “Is it perfect?” he whispered.

  The acquiescence of her cheek against silk skin and muscle shivered pleasure and relief all through her. “More.”

  He rocked her hips very, very gently, very, very slowly, back and forth on him, so that the water twisted and poured around him, and he drew her almost, almost off him, bereft, and then oh-so-slowly pressed her back until she had every last bit of him. And then he held her there, grinding her harder, watching her squirm and twist and clutch for what she wanted and he controlled. “Tell me one cruel thing I did today.”

  This. But her body clutched around him so frantically, and her back arched so that her nipples thrust wet and taut into the air, and it wasn’t cruel. She loved it utterly.

  “Tell me, Summer.” He pulled her slowly off him again.

  She writhed at the threat of separation. “Just the truth,” she gasped.

  He rewarded her by letting her rock halfway back on him. She whimpered a little, astonished that she felt secure enough to let him see her beg. “Which would be?”

  She tried to turn her face away, and he leaned forward suddenly and caught it, kissing her and kissing her while her body was held mercilessly, half-impaled, nowhere near full enough.

  How could he do that? How could he have that much control? And—the thought teased at her deliciously—how and when could she break it again?

  “Tell me, Summer.” He left her mouth gasping for him the way her body kept clutching for more, kissed his way over her chin and down her throat.

  “That—you don’t need me to—” With each word he slid her just a tiny bit farther back onto his erection. When she stopped speaking, he stopped moving. “Accomplish anything.” Again she tried to twist her face away. He let her, but only to bite the strained muscle of her shoulder. “It’s okay,” she whispered to that merciless city sparkling in a half circle around her. “You don’t.”

  “Summer.” His hands left her butt, left that ruthless control of himself and her, and slid up to frame her face. “How could you think I don’t need you?”

  She settled onto him with a rush of relief, gasping with it, her body clutching him frantically. “Look at us right now,” she said hopelessly.

  “Summer.” His own head arched back, and his hips shifted against her, the movement making her whole body ripple. His thumbs traced her cheekbones blindly. “I don’t need you to accomplish things. That’s true.”

  She tried to turn away. Again he held her. Body gentle but inexorable, supple but iron-firm.

  “I need you for something else,” he said, very low.

  She stopped breathing. Opening her eyes, she found him watching her with absorption, as if against all that 180-degree view of the City of Lights, she was the brightest and most beautiful thing he saw. She might as well have been dipped, whole-souled, into a healing balm. That look made something wounded and hiding want to creep out into his hands.

  “You don’t even need me right now,” she said desperately. “You’re just—playing.”

  His eyes flared with astonishment, and then a sudden profound understanding—not of her but of himself. His hands curved around her breasts, and he rubbed wet thumbs over her nipples, making her twist helplessly, thrusting her hips against his in a way that only built her
pleasure, pushed the need higher and higher, without satisfying it. Only his hands could satisfy it, and only if he chose. “I am playing,” he agreed softly. “I like to play with you. I like to see what I can do with you. I like to make you utterly mine and utterly in the control of my hands. You may be able to shatter my control, and I may . . . love it, but yes, I’ll take it back the next time.” His voice went very deep, fierce, yanked out from somewhere deep in him. “I like it.”

  She began to shake, so aroused by the words that she couldn’t find that spot where she should protest them. Was she that beautiful to him? Every way he shaped her?

  He plucked her suddenly off him, over her wrench of protest, and turned her so that she sat with her back against his chest, facing the whole spread of the city below. “Oh, no, not—” She tried to twist back into him. He was supposed to hide her from that city, in her bathroom fantasy.

  “Shh.” He hooked her legs on the outside of his and spread his, holding hers tight with his hands until she stopped fighting and acquiesced to the way he spread her so wide, squirming with hunger and vulnerability. “I like this, Summer,” he whispered into her ear, a dark voice from behind, and his hand scooped between her legs, delving into her sex in a way that made her jump, her bottom writhing against him. “I like it, and I need it. I need you helpless in my hands. You have no idea how beautiful this is.” His other hand played with her breasts, squeezing them gently, rubbing the sensitive nipples so delicately. “It’s worth any amount of control to have it.” One long finger slipped deep inside her and twisted, supple and teasing, while she gasped on a rising crescendo. “Beg me a little, Summer?”

  “I love you,” she said, and his finger spasmed inside her. She moaned.

  “And you say I’m cruel,” he muttered. “What a cruel beggar you are. Don’t say that. Say please.”

  “Please, I love you,” she said helplessly, her body straining toward him, toward release, toward his every touch. “Please. I love you, I love you—”

  He wrapped one hand over her mouth and plucked her clitoris like the string of a guitar, over and over, a tiny, rapid, merciless rhythm until she lost all the words his palm extinguished and twisted and twisted against that hard hold and arched entirely off him with a scream muffled by his palm, her body shaking and shaking, emptying her soul into his hands.

  He turned her abruptly and shoved them all the way to the opposite end of the great tub and thrust straight into her, driving her back against the wall. She gasped at the force of it. “You’re so beautiful.” Water streamed off him, that lean body of his all wild, taut muscle, his face burned clean of anything but passion.

  He kept saying that as if she really was. She slipped her hands up those slick shoulders. “Let go,” she whispered. “Lose control.”

  His body shook in hard, long spasms that drove him deeper into her. “Hold me while I do,” he whispered. “Hold me together. Don’t let me go.”

  So she wrapped her arms around him as hard as she could and held on.

  And he let all the wildness out.

  The city looked so different, from a big fluffy towel, lying on her side with him behind her, gently stroking up her belly and breasts, between the folds of the towel. He had fed her a banana and hot chocolate from his kitchens, which had tasted heavenly after the run, a lovely, luscious darkness, barely sweetened, her secret childhood pleasure all grown up. Now they lay quietly, Summer thinking oddly that the city in fact looked very beautiful, sparkling like that. The Eiffel Tower, curtained by the rain that had started mid-run, looked a little dreamy, a little wistful. As if she wouldn’t mind bending her proud head and cuddling up for the night, too. Summer actually felt a little sorry for her.

  “Hugo has hit the roof about you closing the restaurant two days without his permission,” Luc mentioned idly.

  She had done it with stubborn determination to be angry and not hurt. She didn’t look at him. “Not you?”

  He shrugged, his body shifting against her back. “I kind of liked it. You asserting yourself in my life.” Humor slipped into his voice, like that secret smile. “I’m far too good at exerting control for you to need to make it easy for me.”

  His hand kept caressing her idly, no sign of temper in him, and she lay quietly, soaking up the sweet reassurance.

  “Besides, Hugo is just annoyed at the way you handled his ego. He has a family and he already takes two days off a week, except when it’s absolutely impossible. I’m the one who’s never been able to . . . let go. Excessive arrogant determination to be in control might be one of my character traits.”

  Might. She laughed. “You can’t even call it a flaw?”

  “It’s not a flaw.” But his lips pressed a smile into the nape of her neck. “If it was a flaw, I would correct it.”

  She laughed, and the urge to tell him she loved him swelled up again. She caught it, afraid to ruin the moment, but the need to suppress herself stirred up unhappiness. “So I’m your lesson in how to let things go?”

  His arm hardened around her. “No. I don’t need any more lessons in how to let things go, thank you. But two days off might help me hold onto . . . something else I want in my life.”

  Summer stared at the Eiffel Tower, her heart beginning to beat too fast. “It doesn’t start for three months. Alain pitched a fit at the idea of cancelling reservations.”

  “I know.” His fingers stroked gently up and down her breastbone, brushing the sides of her breasts in passing. “Spring can be really beautiful in Paris, Summer. Especially if you have someone to see it with.”

  She had seen spring in Paris many times before. But she couldn’t help wondering what that season for lovers was like for people who felt loved. Her chest tightened, her eyes stinging.

  Wait. A whole restaurant filled with delights for her, a gold heart melting at her touch, pouring out its dark insides . . .

  Her eyes stung harder, but her chest oddly relaxed for a breath that seemed to fill her whole body.

  “Do I hurt you?” Luc asked, very low. “When I lose control?”

  She caught his gently stroking hand and snuggled it to her, shaking her head. “I like it. It’s as if I matter.”

  “As if you matter?”

  She linked her fingers stubbornly with his.

  “Summer, when I don’t lose control, I do it to value you. And to value myself.”

  Everything that’s beautiful comes from control. She rolled over. “Who are you quoting?”

  “It’s something my foster father taught me. You use all your control to value the product with which you’re working, and to value what you yourself can do with it.”

  She stiffened in outrage. “I’m not your product.”

  “No, I didn’t mean—” He broke off. “But this is my product, Summer. This.” His hand encompassed her and him together. “Whatever I can make of it for you.”

  Annoyance built. “Do I have any role in it at all?”

  “It is your role. You’re everything.”

  “I just get to be?”

  An odd little shrug. “You’re already perfect.”

  So many things about this pissed her off, it was crazy that the “already” should be the last straw. As if he wasn’t. Lying there all forged and beautiful, with that indefatigable gymnast’s body. “Luc, you do not think I’m perfect. You think I’m spoiled and arrogant and annoying and—”

  “Hiding. I do not, by any stretch, think you are arrogant, Summer. Maybe that first night, when you were throwing money at me, but even that . . . isn’t that funny? Even that was a sign of how very little you value yourself.”

  “I actually like myself quite a lot,” she said wryly. “On the other side of the world from here.”

  His face tightened. For all the grace with which he could move, he carried more tension in him than any man she had ever known.

  She pulled at his shoulders as if to tug him down on top of her, and when he yielded his weight she slipped away through the pillows and twisted
to land on top of him. He tensed, bracing his torso off the bed. “Relax. You know, you don’t have to be perfect all the time.”

  He made an incredulous noise, as if she had just said he didn’t have to breathe all the time. So much tension surged through him that when she touched one finger to his nape, he made a sound as if she had plucked a note.

  “Give in a little. I’m not helping you do push-ups. Let me be in control.”

  He allowed his lower body to sink down, torso still braced. “Summer, I don’t think this is a good idea. What are you do—” A little gasp as her fingers curved around his shoulders and dug into those taut muscles that ran into his neck. “Oh. Oh.” He sank into the pillows. “Summer.” He buried his face suddenly in one arm.

  That bunched his shoulder up, and she dragged at that bent arm until he finally relented and let her pull it to his side. He pulled a pillow over his face to replace it. “I don’t promise my massage will be as good as yours. I’m making this up as I go along.” She traced the line of his muscles, learning how they fit together. If she pressed here, would that release tension? A muffled sound came from under the pillow. “So let me know if I hurt you.”

  “You won’t hurt me,” said the pillow. “It’s not possible.”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought,” Summer muttered, pushing deep with the heels of her palms, grinding them slowly into his muscles like a pestle into a mortar.

  “Summer. Putain.” His body shivered, arched, subsided.

  She lifted her hands. “Too much?”

  “No. Don’t stop. Soleil. Your hands. I’m being kneaded by sunshine.”

  Deeply pleased at the fancy, she took a minute to savor the smooth skin of his back before she began to apply pressure again, starting gently and working deeper. “I don’t really know what I’m doing.”