The Chocolate Heart (23 page)

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.

Her mouth twisted as his hand cupped her sex more fully.
“Je t'aime?”
she suggested ironically.

His whole body jolted, the heel of his palm grinding against her clitoris and her pubic bone. His eyes flew to hers.

Under that black gaze, the pressure of his hand already driving her frantic, she faltered. “That's—that's the safe word.” Wasn't that
obvious?
How could he think anything else?

His hand flexed involuntarily over her sex, and pleasure released through her like juice squeezed from a lime. He braced an arm over her head, the eyes just inches from hers a black gloss of fury. “You're going to pay for that.”

His hand moved again, and she shivered, dampening his palm, helpless to him. Oh, she knew he was going to make her pay. She just didn't entirely understand her crime. She put her chin up, her mouth cynical. “You're going to leave me like this?”

His thumb took a leisurely path up the folds of her sex, as if he had all the time in the world to explore her any way he wanted, and found her clitoris. He rolled it very, very gently, the most delicate of movements. Heat flushed her. She pressed her hands against the wall, trying to find some purchase as she lost all strength, but could not let herself cling to him.

“No.” He wound her hair around his wrist, pulling her head back. “I just want one price. You're going to look at me while I make you come. If you close your eyes, you don't get anything until you open them.”

She bucked against him frantically. He held her mercilessly. “What about you?” she cried, desperate and wounded and furious. “When do
you
lose control?”

“I don't. And you're not going to make me,” he promised her.

“That's not
fair.
”

“Then use your safe word.”

She bit her lip. Their eyes locked. The moment stretched, a silent battle, until he bent down and took her lip away from her teeth and bit it for her.

Then she fought him for control, because she couldn't use that safe word. She yanked at his pants and forced her hands in, trying to get to him before he got to her. He grabbed one of her wrists and pulled it over her head, but she managed to keep the other one free. He couldn't get it, without releasing the other maddening hand on her sex, and that one he wouldn't let go. He was ruthless with it, lethal, driving her even as she twisted and bucked away from her own orgasm.

She came helplessly, sobbing, her hand a vise around his sex, squeezing with every last desperate bit of strength in her as she fell into him.

He was breathing harshly, like some great beast in a wild fight. “Stop it.” He released her sex at last to pull her hand away from his penis. She held on as tight as she could, so that he had to drag her hand off him, and he shuddered violently, his head arching back.

“I hate you,” she panted at him.

“No, you don't.” He ripped her panties down. She was still wearing her damn winter coat and soaked with sweat. “Summer, don't say that.”

“I
hate
you.”

“Don't—” He was shaking all over, great spasms of his muscles. He yanked her hips in suddenly against his. “Shut
up.
” He kissed her deep, a complete invasion, so that she couldn't talk. She shoved his pants off his hips.

His muscles jerked under her hands as if he was being wrenched apart, and he bit at her mouth. She arched up against him in a sudden glimpse of a long-despaired of victory, twisting her hips against his.

His fingers spasmed into her bottom, so hard they hurt. And then in one hard thrust, he was inside her. He gasped, wrenching his mouth from hers and staring down at her.

“Oh.”
Her head fell back. Oh, that felt so
good.
So right. She could stay this way, pinned by him, forever.

“Oh, God,” they both said at the same time, in two languages. But
she
sounded as if everything had just been made right with her world. He sounded as if his was being destroyed.

He dragged his hands up her body and wrapped one in her hair, letting her own strength—and the wall—hold her up. She wrapped her thighs around him, dragging her hands over his chest, yanking at buttons stitched far too strongly for her to break.

“You're so beautiful,” he said desperately, ramming her back against the wall.

“Oh, God, so are you. You feel so good.” So perfect at last, to have him inside her and all around her and hers. Losing himself to her as she lost herself to him. “I love it.”

Wait, did that make her sound like a slut? The spoiled woman who loved
it,
who couldn't get enough of sex? “I love you,” she corrected herself. Not just anybody. Him, inside her. He was perfect.

His body bucked so hard and deep it hurt, and then froze there. She took deep breaths, adjusting to him so deep.
So good, so good, so good.
He could move again anytime. Her eyes fluttered open to find him watching her, utterly still. What . . . ? Oh, that stupid safe word. “I didn't mean that.” She petted his arms. That damn shirt was driving her crazy. “Don't stop.”

His eyes flared. “Didn't
mean
it?”

“Don't
stop.
” She dragged harder on his arms. “It just slipped out. Sorry. I don't know what comes over me sometimes.”

A hand slid into her hair, close to the roots, locking her head back against the wall. His eyes searched her face, supple eyebrows curled together, as if he could strip her soul out of her and shake it up to inspect like so much dirty laundry.

She tried again to hide her face in his body and met the imprisonment of his hand, holding her stripped and exposed like that. Her face crumpled in distress, and she twisted her head as far as she could to the side, tearing at her hair.

His hold loosened, letting her hide.

“Don't stop,” she begged, petting hard through his shirt, trying to fit between the infuriating buttons. “I love i—yo—I l—don't stop.”

That was okay to say, wasn't it? Don't stop?

It must have been. Because he thrust so hard into her she gasped for breath and couldn't talk anymore. And then all that blackness in him came out, and he completely lost control.

She wrapped her arms around him, holding on for dear life, as he took her like a raging thing, let loose and starving. Devouring her, thrust by thrust, until he shattered inside her. Burying his face in her hair as if she was the only thing that could hold him together.

 

Luc felt as if he had broken himself into a thousand pieces. It scared the hell out of him. He didn't know what he might
do
without all those iron bands of control. The essence of him might keep floating out to the edge of the universe.

Little atoms of him, millions of light-years away from each other in a vast void, lost and panicked.

Little atoms of him, curious and intrigued, calling,
Hey, look what's way out here! I think
I
might be at the edge of the universe.

He hardly dared look at Summer, he who had insisted she look at him. She was limp in her winter coat, damp with sweat, probably feeling battered. He forced himself at last to meet her eyes, feeling sullen and clumsy and like he wanted to kick some tin can across the Métro. Feeling wild still, with no idea in hell how he was going to get himself back in that iron shell.

She was gazing at him steadily, her eyes wondering, absorbed.

She was seeing him, all right.

Damn it, couldn't she have looked at him when he was at his best? All the rest of the damn moments of his life?

“Don't say you hate me. Summer.” His voice was rough. Had he shouted? Surely not. Probably just growled and panted himself hoarse. “Don't say that.”

“Well, I
did
hate you.” She petted his shoulders. He needed to get his damn shirt off.

He needed to get her coat off before she got heatstroke.
Bordel.
“Don't say you love me, either. That . . . isn't kind.”

Her face went blank. Then her eyebrows flicked together and she searched his face. It wasn't a good moment for her to be searching his face. For one of the first times in his adult life, he wasn't sure what someone else might see.

“This is what you wanted?”

She made a wobbly motion of her shoulders, not entirely sure. There was a hint of a smile on her face, but her eyes were somber.

“Did I hurt you?”

“No.” A flicker of something in her eyes. “I'm strong. Don't worry about me.”

He pushed her coat off her shoulders before she died of the heat, then her sweater. The camisole under that was drenched.
Putain,
he was a savage.

But she had
wanted
him to be a savage. And it touched something profoundly triumphant and hungry in him to have her so slick with sweat and vulnerable to him. To be peeling away her layers, to see how much smaller she seemed without them.
Merde,
he
was
a bastard. She was so small now, between the wall and him, without her winter clothes. Small and golden.

He traced the marks of a bathing suit strap, the paleness of her breasts and belly. The bikini image slipped—with some regret—from his mind to be replaced by that demure Speedo in which she swam like a dolphin in the hotel pool. A dolphin trapped in SeaWorld.

She was utterly beautiful. And she was in his arms. Now that he had her attention, maybe he could remind her how very, very good he could be when he was in control.

The effort to regain control felt like batting his hands at all those atoms fleeing free across the universe. He caught some of them, but the rest of them just floated away from the currents his hands made. Some of them were laughing. Some of them glowed as if they streamed from a supernova.

He picked her up like a baby. “Oh, and I don't leave women on the floor when I'm done with them.”

He headed toward her bed, with its welcome of soft comforter and pillows.

She turned her head away from him. Something he had said had just hurt her. “You leave them on a bed?” she said mockingly.

He lowered her gently among the pillows and slid his hand into her hair. “When I'm done.”

H
e left her in the morning, having slept from midnight to daybreak with one arm firmly around her waist, her body pulled snug against his, his face pillowed on her hair. He left her with her hair stroked back from her face and tucked behind one ear, and a kiss planted just beside that ear, the gesture slipping hazily into her sleep. Until she half wasn't sure if she had dreamed it, later. He pulled the comforter up around her to replace the warmth of his body, tucked it in over her shoulders, and slipped away softly, barely shifting the mattress, almost soundless in the suite. She fell into deeper sleep again and woke with the marks of him all over her body—the flush from his jaw and the ache of her muscles.

The mattress shifted and her eyes startled open. Luc settled on his side with his head propped on his hand, studying her. His face, when her eyes first fluttered open, was unguarded. Shields came up quickly, but not as many, perhaps, as there once had been. “
Pardon.
Did I wake you?”

She was completely naked, and the comforter had slipped. She flushed. Why was he always the one in control? Just for one brief moment the night before, he hadn't been in control. “I thought you'd gone to work.”

“I went to get things set up. Noé can handle things for a couple of hours. He's second sous, and it's good for him to get out from under me and Patrick.” He picked up a thick strand of her hair, playing with it with complete attention. “Go ahead and sleep.”

She did try, unnerved at the possibility that if she didn't, he might take it into his head to show her how utterly lost she was in him again. But she couldn't manage to. Not with those eyes on her, the eyes that looked at an utterly perfect—to her—dessert and said, “Who did this
merde
?” and tossed it in the trash, doing it over better. She had never been enough even for her own parents, and they were nowhere near the perfectionists that he was.

She opened her eyes and found him, just as she feared, watching her as if he could see every eyelash that might not be perfectly aligned. He curved his hand around her cheek, a thumb tracing over her eyebrow. Probably straightening out sleep-ruffled hairs that had started to drive him crazy. “I hit Patrick because he kissed you, and I didn't like it,” he said. “I shouldn't have, but . . .” He shrugged. Good lord,
Luc
of all people was flushing.

He might as well have just told her he was the Incredible Hulk. “
You
hit an
employee
over something that stupid? He was just being nice.”

His mouth compressed. “Funny how you can turn your cheek to
me
when I bend to kiss you.”

“You're not nice,” Summer pointed out. Though she still remembered that coat sliding around her shoulders, that quiet voice telling her “You're perfect,” the way he had wrapped her in the comforter before he left her.

His jaw set. “I'm not careless. It's inconceivable that I would walk up to a woman I barely give a damn about and kiss her, to be nice or for any other reason.”

Her fingers uncurled. She started to reach out to him. To tuck those fingers against a man who was never, ever careless.

“And I don't ever want to hear the word ‘love' come out of your mouth again unless you mean it.” His voice was calm, but it was inexorable.

“But—” Her eyes flickered over that unyielding bronze face and shut tight. Why did he think she couldn't mean it? It was true that she had said it before to men, although he only knew that by assumption. Once again, she had met a low expectation. Did nothing she said have any value, and was it always her fault?

“Are you planning more visits to your therapist?” he asked with a pretense of idleness.

“Definitely.” She rolled onto her back and stared at the luxurious dusky gray and rose. She hadn't actually been to see Jaime's therapist yet, but that was because she was a damn fool. “Yes, definitely.” Slipping out of bed, she found her bathrobe and the remote control and set the images of her islands scrolling again. Her own therapy. The one that had worked.

“Why?” He stood, an elegant and imperturbable contrast to her sleep-disheveled vulnerability. “What's so wrong with being attracted to me? You were the one who started this, Summer.”

“I didn't really know you at the time,” she said wryly.

A shadow passed over his face. She saw it hit and was stunned. Something she said had
hurt
him? What had happened to that invulnerable iron shield of his?

“No offense meant,” she said quickly, anxious.

He turned and walked to the window, giving her only his back against the morning sky. A clear cold sky, for once, with only a few long pale wisps of cloud behind the Eiffel Tower. They had turned no lights on in the room, and he stood in silhouette. Unreadable, one way or the other.

She had bruises on her butt that were going to show the shape of his fingers. Now how, exactly, should she read
them
?

“I'm not staying. I'm leaving in the spring. Ten weeks.”

He slipped his hands into his pockets.

“I don't want to get too”—
heartbroken
—“involved.”
I don't want to be here twenty years from now, trying to get you to look away from a window at me. Telling me not to tell you I love you because it can't possibly have any value, coming from me.

He turned suddenly. “What was your one regret?”

“What?”

He crossed to her, taking her hands before she could think to hide them in her bathrobe pockets. The man moved
fast.
“You said you regretted your choice of the islands just once. Why? What was the once?”

“Oh, I don't—” She pulled on her wrists, angling her body away. His grip tightened, flexing easily with her movement. “That's not—let's talk about something else.”

“We can talk about something else next, certainly,” he said. “Why don't we talk about this right now?”

It was that steady, night-velvet voice of his. Her wriggling wrists slowly subsided, her heart easing gradually into a deep, quiet rhythm. She closed her eyes, wanting to lay her face against his chest and let all her muscles go. His scents warmed her self-imposed darkness: him, a fresh shower, and aromas twining through from his trip to the kitchens that morning. Grapefruit, and something nutty, and something buttery gold.

“It was all my own fault,” she said roughly, quickly.

His fingers flexed around her wrists. She peeked up at him, but he just watched her, saying nothing. She inched closer to him.

There was no way she could tell him about this without him thinking what a spoiled brat she was. “Just some guy I kind of—dumped—got . . . upset.” She pulled very hard on her wrists, trying to catch him by surprise.

It didn't work. Tension flared through him. “What does that mean?”

She looked anywhere but him. It was so
cruel
of him to hold her wrists like that so she couldn't get away. “We had been . . . dating . . . for a few months when I fell for this other guy and—I was stupid, okay? It was just—he was all aggressive and macho, and I fell for
that,
especially since Tane was
so
laid-back that it was starting to drive me crazy, even though I loved it at first. But then, Puni kept leaving flowers on my picnic table and making me
laugh,
and—I don't know.” She was trying not to cry again over this raw, ugly thing that had happened.

A tiny silence. “Are there two men or three men in this story?” he asked.

She gazed at the floor.

“Three,” he said. “In four years. All right, you're a bit hard to hold, but I knew that already. I hardly think it's your fault that you're beautiful. There's always another man around ready to grab you if the first one isn't perfect.
Putain,
so would I be. Why are you this embarrassed?”

“In one year,” she told the floor. “It was a small island. After that, I had to move to a different island, and I stopped dating.”

Again the silence. “You had to change islands? Was the man who got upset the local chief or something?”

“No, but I mean—I didn't really realize the kind of impact my, my—sex life—could have on such a small community.” In other words, she had been spoiled and oblivious. He probably didn't have any trouble recognizing her mark on this tale. “I had screwed a lot of things up, and—” She shrugged uneasily.

Still more silence. “When you say he got ‘upset' . . . what did he do?'

Summer started to cry. She threw herself away from him, all her weight yanking on her wrists, and he caught her and pulled her back into him hard. “Oh, fuck,” he whispered, holding her very tight. “What
did
he do?”

It calmed her almost instantly, the tightness of that hold. She could press her face into his chest, and this time she didn't have to pretend her own darkness, this time she could have his. She scrubbed her face against him, trying to bury herself deeper. He curved a hand around her head, and she hiccupped and stopped crying, every muscle in her body relaxing. This felt so good. So exactly what she had been seeking, all her life. Just this moment, making everything about her okay, for the rest of her life. “Nothing,” she whispered against his chest, and he took a gasp of breath. “Nothing. He just kind of—lost it, and he—grabbed me, but then—someone else heard, and—it was okay. I know I shouldn't have—I just—everybody
loved
me, and they didn't even know about my father's money, and I just—I shouldn't have been so—spoiled.”

He petted her back in steady strokes. She lay against him until, under that stroking, she saw nothing at all. No images of accusation and raging hurt and hard hands ripping at her, no thud as her body hit the sand. Just steady, enveloping darkness, and the scents of citrus and something warm and dark. Oh, she could stay here forever.

“I didn't mean to be,” she said despairingly into his chest. It felt easier to say this, when she could only see and smell him. “Tane was so cute, and he kept playing songs for me, and it was the first night I was there”—the hand stroking her checked just the tiniest bit, but then continued—“and I was so
happy.
But then, he was
so
laid-back, I mean his house was filthy, and he just lay around smoking marijuana, and he drove me
crazy.
And we had only been dating for a couple of months, and
he
didn't seem to care, and Nato was all aggressive and macho, and he just
went after me,
and—I don't know. Everyone was so exotic, and
I
was so exotic to them, and I guess nobody seemed real to me yet. It was like I was living in a story. It was easy to just fall for him instead and not think about the effect. But then—he was so bossy, and jealous, and he thought I should be cleaning his house but then he would get so mad at me about how I didn't do it right, and—then he moved into
my
house, while I was at the school. And I just wanted to get away from him, and Puni was so funny, and he was always leaving me flowers, and . . . I don't know. I didn't really understand I wasn't the only main character in this story.” She went ahead and said it for him: “Spoiled.”

He said nothing for a while. He had stopped the long, steady strokes, but one hand still rubbed gently on the small of her back. “You were—how old? Twenty-one? Twenty-two? Fresh out of Harvard, via a yacht cruise?”

She gazed downward somewhere in the vicinity of his navel, her eyes barely open against his chest. His voice was so quiet, so calm.

“How does getting summa cum laude at a place like Harvard work?” He sounded neutral, a researcher gathering information. “From here, we have the vague impression that it's the top university in the world, but very expensive. Is the summa cum laude something your father bought for you?”

Everybody always thought that.
“I worked for it. I worked all night on presentations, I locked myself in the library and studied for exams, I wrote papers until eight in the morning. Then fell asleep on top of one and had my grade docked for turning it in at 9:30 instead of 9:00.”

“No favoritism?”

Sometimes she wanted so desperately to be back on that island where no one cared, she thought she would crack into a million pieces just so she could be more easily shipped there. “I think the professors who were impressed by my father, and maybe graded more lightly, were balanced out by the ones who graded harder because they thought I was spoiled, or because they were trying so hard
not
to grade too easily that they went in the other direction. I worked. I met with professors when I got bad grades on exams and tried to figure out a way to do better. But—you know, they
are
good at long-range planning, at Harvard. How much, behind the scenes, might have been influenced by the hope of having one alumna and her father leave with extremely good impressions of the school . . . I can't know that.” Ever. Never, in any situation she had found for herself, except teaching school on that island, could she know for sure how much was to her credit. “And they give some kind of cum laude to half their graduating class, so . . . I don't know. I did work for it, but it doesn't mean anything.”

Her father hadn't thought it meant much. And he was one of the few people who knew for sure that he hadn't openly bought it.

Luc cupped her face in both hands and studied her a long moment. “You know how you are spoiled, Summer? If I talked to myself the way you do to yourself, I would be sleeping under a bridge. It's quite a luxury, to be able to spend your life beating yourself up and still sleep in a suite like this. Quit.”