The Chocolate Heart

by Laura Florand

  Twice. He was thirty years old. She stepped into him, pressing herself against his chest and wrapping her arms around him, under his coat, holding on as tight as she could. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what else to offer.

  “And people say it all the time,” he added awkwardly, “when they eat one of my desserts. ‘I love this man, isn’t he amazing?’ ”

  Her arms tightened around him. She pressed a kiss through his shirt.

  His hand stroked her hair. “You’ve heard it a lot, haven’t you?” he asked, low.

  She nodded against his chest. “All the time. My mom loves to say it, and my dad doesn’t really say it to me—he’s not that demonstrative—but he certainly tells other people he loves me.”

  A very long silence. “The mother and father who spent one evening in your company, in public, before going off to do something else, after you had been self-exiled in the islands for four years?”

  Summer said nothing, but she pressed herself a little tighter against his chest. His arms circled around her, the hold changing so she couldn’t tell anymore if it was for him or for her.

  “And you’ve said it a lot, haven’t you?” he said very softly, as if he didn’t want to but he just had to know.

  She bent her head, defeated. Yes. She had many, many times thrown herself into loving someone. She had failed herself that way, and apparently him, too. Although every time, right there at the beginning, it had never felt like failure. It had always felt like hope.

  She turned away from him, but he stood and shifted, not loosening his arms, so that she ended up standing with her back to his chest, his arms still wrapped around her, both of them gazing at the Eiffel Tower. Oh, you damn bitch, I could beat you down with a sledgehammer.

  Except, of course, even without the police to stop her, Summer could batter those iron girders until her arms fell off and not even make a dent.

  The Eiffel went out as she glared at it, totally black, and Summer’s jaw dropped in shock and an odd terrified hope. And then, of course, the stupid taunting sparkling started, all over the blacked-out Eiffel, its last little act of gloating for the night. “I suppose you’ve never said it,” she said stiffly.

  “Oh, I’ve said it.” A twisted, old darkness in his voice, turned against himself. “When I was trying to explain to those two high school girlfriends why they couldn’t ditch me.” A vision, suddenly, of an intense sixteen-year-old, wilder, more ragged, no polish on him yet, begging, “But I love you!” Her hands flew up to close around his arms, her heart wringing. “I like to think I’ve learned better than that these days.”

  She squeezed his forearms, wishing one of those girls had picked up the heart thrown to them, so that he wouldn’t have been hurt, wouldn’t have learned to make so many walls. Except then, of course, he wouldn’t be here with her. She petted his arms uselessly, a lousy balm for those old wounds.

  “Summer, look at me,” Luc said.

  She didn’t want to, but, as always, his voice had that power over her, and it turned her around. That god’s forged face of his was very serious. “I love you, too,” he said quietly. Her heart gave one great leap of hope and fear, and his hands came up to frame her face. A spark, sheltered between two curved hands. “I suspect, unfortunately, in a very different way than you love me.”

  She stood caught, unable to say a word. “I love you” and “in a better way than you can ever love me.” Between the sweetness and the cruelty of it, those two curved hands had just clapped together and ground her into nothing.

  Why was she always the nothing in the equation?

  The night air against the parts of her he didn’t touch felt very cold. She couldn’t stand the thought of stepping away from his warmth into it. And Oh, God. I don’t want to be the third girl to throw his heart back at him.

  But . . . if his heart had so much worth to him, and hers had none . . . Her whole body felt clogged with tears, right up to her stinging nose. But her mouth firmed. Her chin went up just a little. “Enough to come back with me to the islands?”

  Something shook across his face. He stared down at her. “Summer. I can’t be nothing again.”

  She gathered all her will, all that precious still-fragile belief in herself. And she closed her hands around his wrists and pulled his hands from her face. “Neither can I.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Luc was very quiet as he led them down the slope from the Trocadéro, heading not back to the hotel but toward the Seine and the bridge across to the Tour. If she ended up in some romantic embrace under seven thousand tons of iron, she was definitely shooting that tower a bird.

  A pair of inline skaters barreled past them down the slope along side the fountain and the Jardins du Trocadéro, calling out to each other in laughing alarm at their speed. Luc pulled her safely out of their way, and his arm stayed tightened around her. “Summer. I’m very bad at this. I always did have to practice ten thousand times to get things right, and this—the practice runs just hurt too much. Don’t listen to me, when I say something wrong. Look at what I make for you. Taste it. You will never be nothing to me.”

  Sometimes she thought if she could sit him down in a hammock on her island, come home to him from a day of coaxing rambunctious kids to focus on subtraction, even she could handle this. “You have to believe in me,” she realized suddenly, out loud. “I can’t believe in you, if you don’t believe in me. It would be suicidal.” I’m just not that strong, yet. To keep believing in myself when the person I love doesn’t.

  Silence. He couldn’t say that he believed in her. But after a long moment, he lifted a hand to tuck one strand of hair behind her ear, and his thumb stroked her cheek before it fell. He took her hand again, and they walked on without saying a word, Luc so deep in thought that he never even glanced up at the Eiffel Tower as they passed under its dark feet. Summer tucked her free hand at the small of her back and shot La Tour a bird on principle.

  He drew her into the night-dark allée that ran between ranks of trees beside the Champ de Mars, and she squeezed her eyes shut against fate. “Never tell me you live around here?”

  He hesitated. “Why not?”

  “Oh, just”—she shook her head—“I went to school here.”

  Another step. “There’s a wealthy girls’ school right down the block from me,” he admitted reluctantly.

  “The Olympe?”

  He nodded, and Summer’s soul winced into a fetal ball. She cast frantically around for some happy memory of this beautiful city, the city that always made it inexcusable for her to be unhappy, and managed to call up a smile. “My nanny used to take me to play here a lot when I was little. You know that little carousel and the playground by it?”

  “I—do know it, yes.” It was too dark under the trees to read his always-difficult-to-read face, but his voice sounded odd.

  “I had the most desperate crush on a boy I met there once.” She laughed a little. “He was dark-haired, too, now that I think about it. Maybe he started the trend.” She shook her head, with affectionate reminiscence. “I thought he was so awesome. He could do everything on the playground. And he was so patient. After he finished showing off for me, he picked me up and helped me reach the bars. And he even played knight and princess with me.”

  Luc had gone peculiarly still.

  “I used to fantasize about him for ages. We would run off to an island and live off moonlight and flowers, that kind of thing. I suppose you can tell I didn’t have a lot of friends.”

  Luc was just one black shadow in the darkness.

  “I used to make Liz take me back here every day when we were in Paris, and I would drag out my playtime for hours, hoping to see him. But he never came.” And then the boarding school, so near that playground, had wiped the memory out for the longest time.

  “He was probably playing a tambourine in the Métro passing under your feet,” Luc said suddenly, his voice rough, strange. As if years of elegance had slid off it. “He would have liked to come.�
�� His hand flexed on hers. “You would have had to eat the moonlight, though, if he made it for you.”

  “In the Métro?” Her hand sought his face like a blind woman trying to recognize an old lover.

  The elegant, sensual mouth twisted against her palm. “Have you ever been in it?”

  “I took it sometimes when I was in school here. When I was sneaking out. I—remember.” Startling and exciting, the sense of doing something a little dangerous, the self-denigrating awareness that most people did it every day. The noise, the crowds, the—people begging for change. Sometimes with an accordion, sometimes a baby. “Luc. Why did you say that? Why would he have been in the Métro?”

  He didn’t answer, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders very straight. He had the most beautiful clean-cut shoulders. She traced his eyebrows. The boy had blurred so long ago in her brain, her own personal knight, with those dark, insistent, demanding eyes, holding hers . . .

  “Luc?”

  So very straight, those shoulders. Sheathed in a black cashmere Dior coat like . . . hand-tailored armor for a dark knight to forge his way up into the world. “Possibly because he had a Gypsy father who hadn’t found any better way to make his life than to busk there. And his mother had opted for the sun and sea and flowers instead. Not that she would probably have done better than my father, if she had stayed here. Disappearing on a newborn doesn’t suggest great force of character.”

  Her hands closed around his convulsively, in another stupid, vain wish to squeeze healing into all those old wounds. She drew his hands up to her face, tracing those long, masculine fingers, the fine dark hair, the incredible tensile strength of them. A boy swinging from the bars like a monkey, his grip strong. Then him lifting her up to try to help her reach them . . .

  She curved his hands around her cheeks and held them there with both of hers. She did not know what to offer him against this, other than her insufficient self. Shit, no wonder he had always had higher standards than her. “I thought you were fostered. By a very strict, workaholic perfectionist.”

  “When I was ten. The police picked us up in the Métro during school hours. My father . . . wasn’t judged fit to keep me.”

  “You didn’t go to school?”

  He stiffened and tried to pull his hands away, at an angle toward his pockets. “Not until I was ten. I was never very good at school.”

  She turned her cheek more deeply into one palm, nestling into the scent and texture. His hands checked in their flight. “I didn’t go to school until I was thirteen.” She kissed the base of his palm. “And I was very bad at it, too. I know it’s not the same thing.”

  Her experience never had quite the same value as anyone else’s. The money and the looks took it over. Only the media had ever felt different about that, which might have explained why she had encouraged the paparazzi so much back in the old days. Until she had stumbled onto all the hate groups on the Internet and realized the huge dark ugly underside of that media love.

  Anyway, it was true, you could hardly compare a luxurious education by a nanny to growing up in the Métro, busking for a living.

  “You were summa cum laude at Harvard, Summer.” Luc sounded pissed off. “And you told me your father didn’t buy that. Don’t put yourself down for me.”

  “I was bad in a different way.” Summer bit her lip to keep her cheek nestled in his hand. This wasn’t about her, and she didn’t need to turn away in hurt because her way didn’t matter. “I always had trouble making real friends.” She had spent her entire teenage years one raw mess, in fact. Having never, before the age of thirteen, spent any significant time with anyone but the nanny who adored her and was paid to do so. And then hitting full throttle, in the midst of an excruciating sense of abandonment and loneliness, the fact that most girls her age instinctively and viciously hated her.

  During college she started to pull herself together, but it probably hadn’t been in the best way, patching herself up with boyfriends and media attention and an intense determination to excel at something that might get her father to think she was worth his time.

  The Métro. Her hand flexed involuntarily on Luc’s, still held to her cheek. “Did you have a place to stay? And food?”

  “Sometimes.” His voice was neutral.

  “Luc.” Her hand seized his very tightly.

  His other arm wrapped around her and pulled her in close. “Not maternal at all, are you?” he whispered to her hair.

  She didn’t know why he kept saying that, when she felt so small and utterly protected in his hold. Not exactly childlike, because the moment was packed with far too much sensuality, but . . . as if she could yield all her vulnerability to him. And it would be okay. Those hands would stay cupped and careful and not crush her absently. A strange stupid conviction, given how absently they had just crushed her up there on the Esplanade.

  She certainly didn’t feel like his mother. She just wanted to take better care of him. She kept thinking no one else ever had. Not even himself. He had never learned to buy that sweatshirt of his own to sink into when he needed a refuge.

  “You have no idea how much good this does me,” Luc breathed.

  To hold her? Really? How? Wasn’t she the one being needy?

  “It’s cold, and I’m getting sick of the damn Eiffel Tower looming over me,” Luc murmured. His breath warmed her head. “Come to my apartment, Summer.”

  The idea seized at her nerves, like a test she could fail. But it filled her with longing, too. She glanced up at him, the great night-black leg of the Tour looming beyond him, as he led her away. “You don’t like the Eiffel Tower?”

  “She’s kind of smug, don’t you think? Like she knows she is the most important thing in the world, and there’s nothing anyone else can do to beat her mark on it.” Luc gave that iron tower a long, cool look. Clearly begging to differ.

  Even though his mark on the world was made with things that got eaten in minutes, shattered at the wrong touch, or melted if no one served them in time.

  “I love you,” Summer said quietly and very firmly, tightening her hand on his.

  His head angled sharply back toward her, Eiffel Tower forgotten. “Yes, come tell me about that, Summer. Come tell me all . . . about . . . that.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Luc had a brief qualm when he let her into his apartment, because despite the prime location and stately old Haussmanian building, with its staircase carpeted with red velvet, the apartment itself was like the bags of potato chips at the end of the day. It was neat enough, because his foster mother had been relentless in her training of a wild child picked up out of the Métro, and because he had never gotten into the habit of accumulating many things, but he just spent so little time or attention on it.

  But Summer’s face lit even more than when she had walked into Sylvain and Cade’s. She didn’t have much more experience of cozy, warm homes than he did, did she? Except on her island, he thought with a chill, and pushed the thought away.

  She slid out of her boots and let him take her coat, but slipped away from him before he could turn her against the door and kiss her, examining the place.

  “It could look like a showplace,” he mentioned, in case that mattered to her. “I’ve talked to Louis Dutran about it—I suppose you probably don’t know his name, either. He’s an exceptional architect and interior designer. He did the Leucé rooms in our remodel. He’s got some ideas for it, I just haven’t gotten around to thinking about them.”

  “You want to make your apartment look like a hotel?” Summer went to the window, hiding her face from him.

  “I want to make it look like whatever would make you happy,” he said firmly.

  Her eyes caught his for one bright moment, and then she looked back out the window. “You can see the Eiffel Tower,” she said reproachfully.

  The window looked across one of the allées and over the Champ de Mars. On the fourteenth of July the entire kitchen staff packed his apartment to see the fireworks. He had paid a
lot extra for that view. “I usually consider her a tribute to my accomplishments,” he admitted.

  Summer laughed, her face lighting with admiration. Oh, God, that was perfect. He could spend the rest of his life wallowing in that happy delight in him. “I really might be a narcissist,” he mentioned reluctantly.

  “No, you’re not,” she said, amused, and it was the first time he had understood that someone really could speak caressingly. Her voice stroked his entire body. She glanced back at the Eiffel Tower and shook her head. “I wish I had your confidence.”

  “You can have it,” he said quietly. He didn’t want her to be weaker or smaller than she could be. But he utterly loved the thought of holding her safe in his hands. Yes, she could have his confidence to wrap around her. He was pretty sure that was what he had built that confidence to do. Maybe it would even wear off on her over time.

  She gave him one of those long looks of hers, as if he had said something that had almost caught her—what, damn it? What else could he say that would help spring that trap?—and then looked back out the window, but in the opposite direction from the Tower. Her temple rested against the glass.

  His gut tightened as he realized what she saw. The corner of that boarding school, just visible. He could imagine her there now. See past the sexy silky glamour to a little girl so desperate to pour love out that she latched on to a boy in the park. She had never learned to build an armor of iron. And so she just flickered and slipped through the years of bruising as best she could, a candle flame beaten by the wind. Until she got herself to those islands, a sheltered place where she could finally let the full glow of her expand until it lit everyone around her. He had seen that glow in her photos. He just didn’t yet know how to take her off her island, drag her into the place she considered such a hell, and still keep that glow for him.

  The hell of Paris. She really was kind of spoiled.

  He stepped to her, wrapping his arms around her from behind. You’re not alone here anymore.