And, the thought rushed through him at the feel of her body in his arms, neither am I.
Her head rested back against his shoulder, but her gaze was still focused down the street. “You must get a lot of panties with cell phone numbers thrown at you from the Olympe’s dorm windows,” she said wryly, her voice light.
He laughed, but his fingers rubbed at the tension he felt in her ribs, her stomach pulled tight against a blow. “I don’t walk that way on a regular schedule anymore. It’s embarrassing.”
“You’ve never been tempted to pick a pair up?” she asked dryly.
“The panties of a fifteen-year-old girl who’s desperate for romance? Summer. I didn’t live here when I was a teenager.”
Her stomach was trembling a little, under his arm. But in the window he could see the ghostly reflection of that light smile. “Not your style now?”
“Summer!” He would have been angry, except that smile of hers in the window was so silky and light, and the muscles of her stomach were so tense. “Somebody picked yours up, didn’t he?” he realized slowly. “Some thirty-year-old disgusting enough to take a lonely teenager up on an offer like that.”
“They weren’t panties, it was a photo and a love letter,” she said stiffly. “He was quite cute.”
“Black-haired, I suppose,” he said with resignation. I had the most desperate crush on a dark-haired boy I met here. I used to fantasize about him for ages. Him.
God. Had she been looking for him all this time?
She shrugged against him.
“How old was he?”
Her stomach flinched. And he never would have known, if he wasn’t holding her. “My dad said he was thirty-four,” she said carelessly.
Ah. So her father had found out about it. Why did he know already that couldn’t have been good? “How old were you?”
“Fifteen,” she said and flushed, lifting her chin proudly.
“Barely,” he guessed, stroking her hair. “You were fifteen, barely.” He was surprised she had lasted that long. Hadn’t she started boarding school at thirteen? Meaning she had spent two years without love before she cracked?
“It wasn’t—” She stopped. “He didn’t—that is.” She turned her head away from the boarding school, but that meant she faced the Eiffel Tower. She looked away from it, and her gaze crossed his in the mirror. She closed hers finally as the only escape and bent her head. “He never went past panties.” Her face flushed deep red.
Luc felt sick. Some pedophilic asshole teaching her all the pleasures of her young body, all so gallantly. He could imagine her, all full of hope, learning her first orgasm at some bastard’s clever hands, feeling so loved for the first time in her life. “What did your father do?”
“Oh, Vincent was really going out with me as a lever against Dad, you know. That was why he was so careful not to go . . . too far.” Her throat was clogging. Luc tightened his arms on her, rocking her minutely. “So Dad gave him what he wanted, and let me see it, you know, let me see him choose money and power over me, and then he destroyed him, of course.” She had cleared the clog from her throat, speaking so lightly. He might have been fooled, if he hadn’t had his hand on her belly to feel the shudders . . .
“What did your father do to you?”
“Nothing,” she said, surprised. “I mean, yelled at me, of course.” Her belly trembled violently under his hand. “Told me I was a little wh-whor—” And suddenly she was sobbing, a violent convulsion of her body, so much worse than when she’d told him about the assault. He wouldn’t have thought anything could make Summer ugly, but these sobs did, crumpling her around his arm until he had to sink down to the floor with her. “A little wh-whor—and he was the only thing that got me through the day, the only reason I could survive, knowing I would see him again, that he lo—I thought he lov—” And she stopped trying to talk, curled so tightly into herself it was like she was trying to crush herself out of existence, and all he could do was hold that ball of her in his lap and curse her father and all bastards in a low, harsh rhythm, rocking her.
God, this is how miserable she was. This is how she sobbed, night after night, under the Eiffel Tower she hates so much. No one held her after that. They dusted her off their hands back into that boarding school and left her completely alone. She must have sobbed like this, in secret in her room, for months. Maybe years.
This is what I have to beat, to hold her here.
“God damn it,” he muttered. “I was nineteen years old. I was at my first job, right across the river. I even walked over here sometimes. Putain de bordel de merde de . . . Why couldn’t we have met then?” He might not have known how to stroke her just right through her panties back then—he probably would have dated her for a year before he even tried, she was fifteen fucking years old, after all. Even for a nineteen-year-old that was young. Besides, a passionate romantic took a while to work up the nerve to touch his princess.
But he would have been sincere. He would have been crazy in love with her, willing to do anything for her. They would have escaped to all the romantic spots in Paris, they would have been two almost normal, blissfully happy teenagers in love.
“You think you could have stood up to my father when you were nineteen?” Summer mumbled into his shoulder. Progress. At first she had been crumpled completely into herself.
“What could he have done to me? Tried to get me fired? If you think I’m arrogant when someone interferes in my kitchens, you should have seen the chef I worked for then. He would have eviscerated your father. And I might mean that literally. Knife skills.”
That convulsive tightness was easing slowly out of the ball he held in his arms. Her sobs were gentling, as if they had been some old ugly disease she had just had to get out. Not gone now, but not as ragged. “He probably would have offered you money. And then told me when you accepted it.”
“Summer. I’m not a practical person.” He had a vision of him throwing her father’s money back in his face, an impassioned teenager fighting to keep his golden princess. This was, in its way, an inane conversation, and a cruel one, a taunting counter-reality that should have been. But it seemed to be doing her good, to imagine it.
“You must have been a wild-eyed romantic at nineteen,” she agreed softly, loosening further, enough that her hands could creep around his waist and clutch. “My God, you still are. You just know one way to show it.”
“I’m working on the other ways. Summer, I love you.” He took a hard breath. It still felt like ripping his chest open. You would think filling that whole restaurant with desserts would have been more than enough self-exposure. But no. She needed something hard.
“More than I can ever love you, right.” She started to shift off his lap.
He held her. “I never said more. Just differently.” Harder. More permanent. An iron that couldn’t be shattered, not even by her.
Except it felt like atoms of light filling the whole universe.
He sighed and petted her hair. “You love so easily.” She could not possibly feel for him as much as he felt for her. No one ever had.
She flinched and crumpled.
No. He realized. No, not easily. It takes all her courage. You knew this already. Why do you keep forgetting it?
Because he wanted to stay in control. He wanted to be the one whose word love meant something. Because they had met again twenty years too late, and now he was a fucking coward. He was afraid of what would happen if he let himself go into those slender hands. He was afraid he would believe in her. And then she wouldn’t know what to do with him. And she would let him go.
“Summer. If anything, you love more.” More than this massive dark thing that pressed outward against his breastbone, striving to explode him, to bury itself in her, to bury her in him until he crushed everything there was of her in his need to make sure she was his?
“Better, anyway,” he said quietly, stroking her.
She looked up at him at that.
“I’ll practice,” he said, althou
gh it took all his much more meager courage. “What—what I feel will look better, more—palatable, over time.”
Her eyebrows knitted.
He lowered his forehead to hers and admitted self-mockingly, “It’s the most awkward, unwieldy, primitive raw ingredient I’ve ever worked with.”
“Luc.” She curled into him fully now, a warmer softer cuddle than the wretched sobbing ball. It made him feel as if he could breathe again, past her own hurt squeezing his lungs. “Palatable?” One of her hands petted his cheek. “I like the primitive, unwieldy. Real.”
Maybe, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t make it better. Into something she could never give up. He forced himself to give her one of her own smiles, glimmering, teasing. “Just wait until you see how good it can get, soleil.” He would take her to all those crazy romantic spots they should have seen as teenagers sneaking out, making out, in palpitations just to be able to hold each other’s hands. He would show her the sudden magic moments of winter. The first signs of a Paris spring. He had ten weeks.
Ten weeks to make her love her own personal hell and the man who wanted to trap her in it just because he so adamantly needed to rule over it.
CHAPTER 33
It was a satisfying feeling to bring Summer back to the hotel in the morning completely debauched, her lips full and bruised, her eyes blinking deep, heavy blinks, her body so full of the memory of him, he liked to imagine it still shivering and clutching, wondering how he could possibly not still be inside her.
Damn idiot. If he had done it the night they met, her first experience of Paris after four years might have been happy.
Her hair was just a little too perfect for the look, because he had fixed it for her when she couldn’t get her hands to do much more than rest on the nape of her neck, caressing herself lazily where his teeth had grazed. He reached out now and twitched a strand free, so that it hung by her face in just a suggestion of someone who had been completely undone. That was better.
She slanted him the best she could do at a warning glance from those heavy eyes. He smiled at her ruefully. “I might be a little . . . compulsive.”
“I’m not a thing.”
“I know.” He twitched the strand of hair so that it lay just so over her shoulder. “But I love playing with you anyway.” She blossomed in his hands. Glowed and came and clung to him and loved him. His whole world went right when she pressed her hands into his bare shoulders, laughing above him, her gold hair spilling down toward him like a stairway into heaven.
“If you’ve got higher standards than her, get your hands the fuck off her,” a hard voice said, and Summer jerked violently, that glow in her dimming low.
“Dad?” She turned to face the couple crossing the chessboard marble of the lobby.
“Surprise, honey!” Her twin mother swept her away from Luke into an eager embrace. “I missed you! Did you get that picture I texted of Prince Frederic? He’s getting cuter all the time, don’t you think? I wish you had come to his sister’s engagement party; your father even likes him.”
“I didn’t know my sentence allowed for furloughs to parties in Poland,” Summer said dryly, and her father gave a huff of impatience.
“Your sentence. Three months in Paris in one of the finest hotels in the world. Honestly, Summer, if you’re going to keep talking like that, I don’t know why we even bothered to stop by.”
Luc watched Summer go mute, as every need to express resentment, fear, unhappiness was silenced by the threat that if she did, they would walk out and leave her with no one at all.
He wrapped one arm around her shoulders and pulled her into his side. “You always shut your daughter up like that?”
Her father frowned at him. “Mind your own business.”
Luc raised his eyebrows with hauteur. “I honestly spend as little time on business as I can. It’s boring. But I’ll mind my own more important things, certainly.”
Summer stared up at him as if he had just done something heroic, but he had no idea what. Tell her father what a bastard he was? Honestly, it was pure pleasure.
Sam Corey glared. “Summer, are you dating someone who thinks business is boring? Why do you do this to me?”
“Maybe she’s not doing anything to you. Maybe she’s living her life, and I make her happy,” Luc told him coolly.
Her father turned on Summer. “What the hell is going on here? I thought you told me he had higher standards than you.”
“Your daughter misinterpreted something I said rather radically. And you should stay out of it.”
“I think he’s cute,” Mai Corey told her husband, her eyes sparkling. “Come here, honey.” She looped her arm around her daughter’s waist, drawing her toward the elevator. “Let me show you this dress I got you in Warsaw. So pretty. I got you a size up from me, too, just in case, with all that island living and Monsieur Leroi here, but I can send that one back if the smaller size still fits.”
Luc stared after them with incredulous fury as Mai Corey pinched her daughter’s waist and swept them into the elevator. Summer, looking as if she had been dashed with a bucket of ice water, glanced back at him and her father, her brow furrowing anxiously as the elevator doors closed.
Luc pivoted. Sam Corey met his look with one of his own, one that probably cowed men he had power over. “What are you doing with my daughter?” he said again.
“Ah, when you told her to kiss up to me and keep me happy, you didn’t mean that literally? I did wonder about a man who didn’t give a fuck how his own daughter felt, as long as she made everyone else happy.”
The other man’s mouth compressed. “I never told her to kiss up to anyone. She’s my daughter. What are you doing with your hands on her?”
“You probably don’t want to know what my hands did with your daughter,” Luc said cruelly.
Sam Corey stiffened with incredulous rage. Ah, was it easy to get him to lose control? Was that one of the reasons Summer liked Luc’s control so much? Luc gave him an urbane smile. “I’m just guessing. I’ve never had a daughter myself.”
“You fucking bastard,” Sam Corey said softly, incredulously. “It’s true what they say about arrogant chefs, isn’t it?”
Luc shrugged.
Sam Corey pushed open the nearest conference room door. The Marie Antoinette room, all gold and soft blue, featuring a painting of a woman soon to have her head sliced off. With a grunt, he gestured Luc inside.
Luc raised his eyebrows.
“If you’re waiting for me to say please, of your courtesy, you’re going to wait a long time,” Sam Corey growled.
Luc held his eyes for a long, steady moment.
“You rather we have our first proper talk at dinner, in front of Summer?”
Luc inclined his head slightly and stepped through the door.
“You look beautiful, honey.” Mai Corey pressed her cheek beside Summer’s to give her a quick hug that posed them side by side in the mirror in Summer’s suite. Her mother’s eyes sparkled with pleasure at the reflection of them as twins. “Just like a princess.”
“Did you grow up really poor, Maman?” Summer asked suddenly.
Her mother stiffened. “What makes you ask that? Was it something I did?”
Summer shook her head. “You’re always elegant and perfect. I just wondered if you did. And had a really rich fantasy life about becoming a princess one day.”
Mai Corey’s mouth softened, and she stroked her daughter’s cheek. “You’re my princess, sweetheart. I want everyone to see how perfect you are.” She tucked the strand of hair Luc had loosened back up into Summer’s chignon.
“And you always wanted to go to boarding school in Paris, didn’t you?” Summer said softly. “Like Madeline.”
Mai Corey laughed. “I told you that when you went for your interview. Although it was kind of a farce, that acceptance interview, when your father could have bought and sold the place a hundred times over. But I wanted you to be accepted on your own merit. Paris boarding school!
How I used to dream of that when I was little.”
“That’s right.” Summer had done great at that interview, to please her parents, even though she had spent considerable time after the interview throwing up in a nearby bathroom. “I guess I just didn’t really—think about it, then.” It hadn’t occurred to her that the interview was a farce, either. She was only thirteen.
Her mother gave her a little hug, still sideways, facing the mirror. “Sweetie, you don’t know how happy it’s always made me, to be able to give my daughter all these things. I just—wish you wanted them more, honey. I’ve never understood what you do want.”
Summer hesitated and gave her a shy smile through the mirror, unable to say it face-to-face. “You know, my favorite times growing up were when you used to play Beauty and the Beast with me in hotels like this. You know how we would pretend wherever Dad was working was the West Wing, and all the staff were the magic hands opening the doors?”
“Oh.” Relieved delight filled her mother’s face, and she squeezed Summer again. She, too, still spoke through the mirror. “Really? Well, that’s all right, then.”
Summer nodded, even though those times had been so very sporadic.
“My parents were awful,” her mother confessed to her. “If it hadn’t been for my grandmother, I don’t know what would have happened to me. I tried to do better. Wasn’t Liz wonderful? I must have interviewed five hundred people to find such a good person to take care of you.”
Summer was silent for a second, before she gave her mother’s waist a little squeeze. Really, it was always true, that Summer was just too spoiled to understand how good she had it.
“We still look like twins,” her mother said with intense satisfaction. Her fingers stroked, light and sweet, over the corners of Summer’s eyes, finding them via the mirror, still without looking into Summer’s actual face. “Although I wish you would take better care of your skin, honey. The spa here can do microderm abrasion, or if you need a little more, I know someone in Paris who’s really good.”
“I’m twenty-six years old, Mom. Maman.”
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