The Chocolate Heart

by Laura Florand

  CHAPTER 35

  Summer left the hotel numb. In the early hours of a cold, crisp day, the sun shining down on the seventeenth-century palace façade. She didn’t tell her parents what she had decided, and she didn’t even tell the hotel director. She could send him a text from the airport. One of the hotel limousines pulled up, a car into whose depths she could sink, no need for any kind of contact, or anything to pull her out of the blank, white pain.

  Two of the doormen were herding another man back, glancing at her. Only when she was halfway in the limo did she look back at him, one last second of delay, for Luc to come running out of the hotel and grab her, saying no, he was out of his mind, he did need her, he did.

  But Luc was working, and even though the hotel gossip had to have alerted him to her departure, he didn’t appear. Summer fought the urge to crumple to her knees, half-hidden by the limousine door, clutching herself. She had to get out of here. To where people couldn’t hurt her this much.

  The man being herded back by the two doormen met her eyes, briefly, his so dark and glitteringly intense, revealing a stubborn passion in an aged, defiantly un-humble face. Straight shoulders and a bitter blankness to his expression, and a sullen, angry set to his jaw. Worn, worn clothes, worn, old lines around his eyes.

  “You could at least tell him,” the man said hostilely. “Tell him ‘Marko.’ At least ask.”

  Summer straightened slowly and came away from the limousine. “Tell who?”

  One of the doormen shifted to put his body between her and “Marko” as if the man was a threat. “It’s just one of the gypsies, mademoiselle. Please.”

  She shifted aside. “Tell who?”

  “Monsieur Leroi,” the other doorman told her, low, and shook his head.

  Summer felt a shock right through her heart, as if that heart was someone else’s. She slipped between the doormen up to the dark-eyed man, her hand going out instinctively to his arm. He looked at it as if it was a whip. Those same wary shields, those same intense eyes, only muted. This man had none of the perfection of Luc’s shields, of Luc’s intensity.

  She took a deep breath that cut through her and turned. “Please go tell Monsieur Leroi that I asked if he could—” What could she say that would protect his privacy? That wouldn’t headline to the whole hotel that his father was here? But that wouldn’t leave him unwarned, either? “Please just tell him what this man asked, that there is a Marko who is here to see him. Monsieur—” She touched the man’s arm again, but very lightly, catching herself at the last second. “If you would please wait for him inside.”

  She led him into one of their smaller conference rooms, saw the man’s eyes as he took in its opulence of gold and marble and burnished wood tables. Shock, hunger, envy, greed, resentment . . . hunger. Maybe even a confused, stunned pride.

  Her heart hurt her so terribly it could not possibly be hers. Somehow Luc’s had gotten into her body in its place. She was hurting in anticipation for him, so much she could almost forget how easily he had reduced her to—nothing. Nothing he could need.

  Luc got there so fast. She met him outside the door to the conference room, and his eyes caught hers, so black they could have been soaking up the last ray of light in the world. She felt nearly extinguished. And yet, as it had in the past, her own sense of herself flickered stronger under that gaze. He was in his chef ’s clothes, a streak down one cheek, another on the front of his jacket, and even though it was only nine in the morning, he had clearly been working himself into a sweat for hours, the dark hair damp on his temples.

  When he saw her, even though he must have expected her after the message, he rocked back on his feet, his face growing even starker.

  “I think it might be your father,” Summer said, and he grabbed both her shoulders, his hands digging in harder and harder, his eyes closed. She tried not to wince under the pain of the grip, and all at once it relaxed, and he rubbed where his hands had tightened, his eyes still closed tight.

  She reached up to cover his hands with hers, and he flinched and yanked them back, eyes opening at last. Her hands fell limply back to her sides. “Are you going to be all right?”

  Something whipped across his face and was gone. “I’ll be fine,” he said, so neutral he might have been sanded into nonexistence. “I’m strong. Don’t worry about me.”

  “No,” she agreed, low. “No, of course not.”

  He looked across the lobby at the great glass doors of the hotel and the limousine. “You were leaving?”

  His voice was so even, she felt flogged. She didn’t answer.

  He took a breath and straightened his shoulders. “Good,” he said, and her tummy flinched as if he had knifed it. “You should go.”

  Even with the knife in her stomach, she looked from him to the closed door and what waited for him beyond it. “You don’t—you don’t nee—”

  “No,” he said quickly. “I don’t need you to deal with my own father, Summer. I’ll be fine.”

  She took a step back. He closed his hand on the doorknob. They stared at each other. And then, in unison, they both turned sharply away. Luc went into the conference room and closed the door. And Summer climbed into her limo and rode away.

  CHAPTER 36

  Summer sat in the little house and sank into its scents of coconut and sea, and the leis of white star tiare flowers with which the islanders had loaded her neck, and the sound of the geckos running across her ceiling, chattering. All the tension relaxed out of her.

  To be back in a place where people needed her. Really needed her. Not just for stupid things that they could replace with restaurants or spas. Everyone here had been thrilled to see her back early. The mountain of leis that had risen to her forehead now draped the length of low concrete that was all that passed for a bedroom wall here. Only her substitute had not been overjoyed to have her stay on the island cut short.

  Summer, though, relaxed infinitely as the children piled all over her, full of excited stories of the things they had been doing with “Miss Kelly,” what the replacement hadn’t known and they had had to teach her, a fun new game Kelly had invented. Maybe it pricked her a little, to realize that if she had stayed away, Kelly could have taken her place permanently and served these children well, too. But the kids hugged her so hard, so glad to have her back. Summer blossomed into their welcome, lighting up as parents kissed her cheeks over and over, as a lei fell over her head, as someone showed up to bring her food. She relaxed into that need and love for her until, when night fell and everyone was back in their homes, she started to cry.

  She could not stop. For days. She walked on the beach, and thought how desperately Luc needed to have someone take him for a stroll on the sand. And she sobbed.

  She gripped a coconut palm, and the palm bark felt nothing like his skin. And thought how Luc needed to do something crazy and ridiculous, like learn to climb a coconut palm. And she sobbed.

  She co-taught with Kelly, and thought she had pulled herself together, happily centered helping her kids again. And then she got home, and no one was lying in the hammock to smile at her, and she burst into tears again.

  She ate the most delicious mangoes in the world. And thought of a human being so brave he could take raw ingredients—stupid things like sugar and leaves and flour—and create something God would envy. That no man had ever created before. He was like—he was like Ta’aroa, the island god of creation, in his shell in the middle of Nothingness, opening that shell and crying out into the Nothing, forcing beautiful things into existence with his will alone.

  Because he—

  —needed people. That was the story of Ta’aroa. He had felt so lonely, he had willed the world into existence.

  She drew patterns in the sand and thought of Luc making something so extraordinary, every day even better, that would be eaten in minutes. Everything into which he poured his life was fleeting. For someone else’s brief, intense pleasure.

  Why, he was just a man, she realized. All this time, sh
e had been treating him as if he was inherently above her, as if something deep down gave him that godlike status her father had had when she was a child. But he was just—a man. It was the most extraordinary thing about him.

  She stared down at her drawing in the sand—the Eiffel Tower. Deep-drawn and stark, stamping the beach. A big wave hit the reef, and its ripple across the lagoon climbed up past her toes. Leaving behind only a soft, gleaming trace of that tower, a humbled memory of her past.

  She gave the ocean a thoughtful look and a high five. And suddenly she laughed, on a surging sense of rightness. Fuck you, she thought gaily to the Eiffel Tower. You’re not beating me out of this one.

  And she got up, found Kelly, who was thrilled to stay on, and headed back to Paris.

  “It’s about time you got back,” Patrick said coldly, plates spreading out from his hands like a magician’s cards, and Summer stopped short. Every single person on the pastry team was glaring at her, and her first reaction was to curl in on herself, to hide behind an insouciant smile. People always hated her in Paris, damn it.

  She took a deep breath and forced her chin up. “Where’s Luc?”

  “What is this, some kind of game to you?” Patrick snapped. “You waltz in and out with those kissy lips whenever you please, and tough shit for what it does to the person you’re playing with?”

  It had taken her seven days to get here. Communications had been out again, and though fortunately no child had been sick and in desperate need of a doctor this time, there had also been no way to call in a seaplane. There were a lot of black moments, when the words “I don’t need you, go” rang and rang in her head, in seven days. The stars overhead when she curled up on the deck of the cargo boat in the middle of the South Pacific were an incredible boost to courage, though. But now Patrick, the laughing, sweet one, was lashing her.

  Summer braced her feet, fisted her hands, and crossed her arms. “You cannot talk to me like that.” No smile.

  “What, now you’re going to fire me? Finally? What are you trying to do, completely destroy him? Now he needs me. I can’t walk out on him now.”

  Summer slapped her hands down on the marble. “Tell me where Luc is before I smack you.”

  “You know, if I ever want financing for my own place, all I have to do is threaten a lawsuit, at this rate. Where the hell do you think he is?”

  “At home?” Brooding in his apartment? Unable to force himself to work without her?

  “He’s halfway across the Pacific. Actually, I hope he’s made it to your godforsaken island by now, because otherwise he’s been captured by pirates.”

  Summer’s hands fell limp to her sides. She stared at him.

  “Summer.” The anger faded out of Patrick’s voice, and for the first time since she had met him, it went quite serious. “Have you made up your mind this time? You can’t leave him again.”

  “He told me to—”

  “He’s screwed up! Just because he thinks he has made himself absolutely perfect doesn’t mean you have to fall for that. You can’t always listen to what he says, Summer. Sometimes you have to be stronger than that.”

  Past Patrick, the intern turned her black head and looked at him, her eyebrows drawing together into a tiny crease.

  “But—now what do I do?” Summer opened and closed her hands in restless fists. “Do you think he’ll come back when he sees I’m gone? I don’t have any way to get in touch with him out there.”

  “Look, you’re the one who decided to isolate yourself on an island with half-assed communications. I guess you can figure out how to deal with that the same way everyone else you knew had to.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Summer’s footsteps slowed as she approached her little house. Well, that explained why no one had noticed the seaplane coming in, an oversight unheard of in their remote island life. Everyone on the island was gathered around her picnic table, laughing and talking. In fact, two more picnic tables had been carried in and set up to form one long table. On it were spread several hundred éclair shells, unglazed. Children bounced on their toes around the table, parents trying to keep them from touching.

  Luc came out of her house, carrying a red plastic bowl she normally used to serve potato chips at their little school events. He set it on the picnic bench, awkwardly low for chef’s work, and filled a pastry bag with the chocolate cream in the bowl. His face revealed his concentration, that purified focus. He could have been in his own three-star kitchen. Except that when little Vanina grabbed at his wrist, he blinked in surprise, looked down, and gave her an astonishingly sweet smile.

  Then Vanina spotted Summer and let out a squeal of delight, and all the children dove for her, wrapping their arms around her legs and waist as she tried to hug them all. One of the big fathers nearby tried to catch her shoulder and help her stay upright, but another child hit the increasing mass, and her feet tangled with someone, and she went down onto her butt in the sand, kids piling all over her.

  When her face reemerged from the hugs, Luc was squatting on the other side of the kids, watching her gravely. His feet were bare, that white shirt he liked was unbuttoned halfway down his chest, the sleeves rolled up to his biceps, and his Dior jeans were now cutoffs. The whole vision was surreal. “Why didn’t you come back?” Summer said. “I’ve been waiting for you for days! Finally, I got hold of Kelly, and she said you looked really good in a hammock and for me to stay the hell in Paris this time!”

  “I’m not sure I’m suited to a hammock,” Luc said. “Maybe it would feel different with company. I’ve mostly been walking along the beach and swimming, and your neighbors invited me to a couple of cookouts where your kids did a dance performance for me. They said it was one they choreographed all by themselves as a school project for you, about Ta’aroa, the creator god. And then I decided to test the effects of this much humidity on pastries, and the effects are terrible. But people seem to enjoy them anyway.” He stretched his hands across the slowly calming children and picked her straight up with him as he stood, swinging her free as the children laughed and caught at her. “You know my world. I wanted to see yours,” he said. And kissed her, fiercely, his hands locking in her hair until the roots stung. “Thank you,” he whispered, “for going back for me.”

  She grabbed on to his hair and gripped it until it must have stung, kissing him back so hard she almost bit him. “Why did you tell me to go if you didn’t want me to go? That hurt!”

  “Because I thought I could be a better person than to trap you in your own personal hell, if you wanted so badly to get back to paradise. I was wrong. I’m not that good a person. Twenty damn years of working on it, and I’m still that same desperate kid.” He loosed her hair abruptly and dragged her back over to the picnic tables. “I’m sorry, Summer, but it’s so fucking hot here it’s about to ruin the cream. Oh, pardon,” he said absently to the little kids. “I grew up in kitchens, mostly. I have nearly as foul a mouth as your teacher by now.”

  Summer gave him a reproachful look. “They don’t know I have a foul mouth,” she muttered. “I can pretend.”

  “Yes, let’s talk a little bit more about your ability to pretend once I get these people served. You didn’t have to fucking smile at me when you walked out, Summer. Why don’t we make a deal that you’ll only smile at me from now on if you mean it?”

  “Sure, just as soon as we can make a deal that you never hide what you’re really feeling, either. I’m not going to start second-guessing when I smile, Luc.” Along with everything else she second-guessed. She watched, fascinated, as he picked up the pastry bag again, and realized abruptly that it was a Ziploc bag with a corner cut off as an approximation of a pastry bag. “What did you do for a tip?”

  He angled it to show the wood. “Some of the boys carved a few different sizes and shapes for me.”

  “Me!” Moea shouted happily. “I made that one!”

  Summer grinned at the twelve-year-old and gave him a thumbs-up. “Where did you get all the ingredients?�
��

  Luc shrugged. “Once I said what I would need, people kept bringing things.” He lowered his voice for her ears alone. “The eggs are nice and fresh, heritage local, but please don’t get me started on the damn candy bars I had to break up for the chocolate. I think they’ve been melting and hardening in people’s cupboards for years, and they were a very cheap brand to begin with. I even had to melt down Corey Bars, Summer. Pour l’amour de Dieu.”

  Summer grinned and patted the nape of his neck because she just had to touch him. “Poor baby.”

  He held up a stoic hand. “It’s okay, Summer. You could have warned me, so I could have packed properly, but I’ll survive.” He squeezed cream stuffing into the éclairs at lightning speed.

  The children danced around him excitedly, and adult members of the audience gave impressed murmurs. One of the teenage girls, to whom Summer had lent her camera at her departure, started clicking away. That shot was definitely going into Summer’s collection, the elegant, perfect, world-famous pâtissier making éclairs for hundreds on picnic tables under the coconut palms.

  “I love you,” she murmured, uncontrollably.

  He stilled a fraction of a second, his eyes closing. “God, I’ve missed hearing that.” His hands flew on. It would have taken Summer hours to try to fill so many éclairs, and there would have been a mess everywhere. It took him a few minutes, and despite his tools, not a blob of cream fell out of place or burst through the shell of an éclair. “I love you, too, Summer,” he whispered suddenly, in the midst of it, as if he finally remembered she might need to hear it, too, and gave her a hard, fierce kiss that barely interrupted the flow of his hands.

  He apparently already had some of the teenagers apprenticed, because they ran into Summer’s house whenever he started to run low on cream in the too-small bowl and brought out a replacement from, she supposed, her refrigerator. The electricity was presumably working. When he was done stuffing, he handed the bowls and what was left in the bag to the kids to eat and disappeared into the house himself, returning with a big pan of chocolate glaçage. An expression of acute pain crossed his face as he started to spread the icing on top of the éclairs.