The Chocolate Heart (27 page)

O
n the counter sat mango juice. No Coke. Quick sugar but better for him. Next to it lay bags of sweet potato and beet chips. And she was making him a steak with Roquefort sauce.

If those little hands of hers squeezed his heart much tighter, he might break down and cry.

Don't leave me.
It was all he could do not to clamp his hands around the far edge of her counter, press his face into the cold granite, and beg.
Don't leave me for your island and your sunshine. I need your sunshine here. I'll do anything. I'll take care of you. Let me take care of you. I want to be the person you can turn your face up to as if I was your hero.

His father hadn't just left him? His father had come back and fought for him?

“Why do you hate Paris so much?” he asked.

She tried to peek under the edge of the steak to see whether it was seared without disturbing the marks from the grill pan. Hugo would have a heart attack and die at the way she was handling that steak, but Luc kept his mouth shut. She was doing this for him, which meant there was nothing she could do wrong.

“Well . . . it's really cold.” She shrugged. “And rainy.”

“The better to cuddle up under the covers with someone.” He slid off his stool, despite the fourteen hours on his feet that day, and circled the counter to wrap his arms around her from behind, just the way he had wanted to that second evening when he had offered her his coat instead. “Are you cold,
soleil
?” What a scared idiot he had been that night, to only offer his coat.

She shivered into his heat and flipped the steak. The scent of it made his teeth itch to bite something. Her shoulder there. Kiss her all over while the glorious thing cooked.

“I'm always cold here,” she said.

“Except now?” He let his breath heat the nape of her neck.

She shivered again, deliciously, and pressed still more snugly into him. “Not now.”

“You don't think you could acclimate?” Soft as a secret into her ear, his teeth tingling to bite into that little lobe, the slope of her bare shoulder . . .

Her adamant headshake nearly hit his nose. “I hate it here.”

He stroked her arms, fighting the venom in her tone. “Purely hate?” More than a place she had nearly been raped? He had grown up in Paris's streets and tunnels, and he
loved
the damn city, loved making it worship him. How bad could her luxury boarding school have been?

She transferred his steak to a plate, endearingly awkward compared to the professionals he was used to, and slid it across the counter to the spot where he had been sitting. Its scent was driving his starving body mad, but he kept hold of her. She bent her head very low. “It's so lonely.”

He drew her around the counter to the stool beside him, pulling it so close their knees bumped. “It might not be so lonely, if you have someone to”—
love you
—“hold you.”

Another quick little look. He cut his first bite of steak and proffered it to her lips, giving no indication of what it cost him not to snatch it for himself.

As she licked the sauce off her lips, he took the next bite—a big one—and nearly writhed into the bliss of it. God, that tasted so good.

“That's what I used to think,” she said. “But somehow it never worked out that way. Not for long.”

He so did not want to torture himself by thinking about her ex-boyfriends again. But he made himself ask: “What do you think went wrong?”

A little shrug. “I think it probably just doesn't work out when you put yourself with someone just because you're lonely.”

“So what about this particular someone you've put yourself with because you're lonely? Are you going to give me a chance to work out?”

Her eyes lifted to his, very wide. She didn't answer.

“How did it not work out? Somebody let you go when you needed him?”

She bent her head. “I think I might be very needy.”

He dipped his sweet potato chips into the Roquefort sauce in utter gluttony. “So what do you need?” He proffered the sauce-laden chip to her lips.

“A crazy, incompatible thing, probably. But I'm going to get over it.”

“Why don't you tell me what it is, before you decide whether you need to get over it or not?”

“I—” She shook her head. “No, it's too crazy.”

“You know, when I come up with ideas, I don't admit anything is too crazy or impossible.”

She hesitated, looking at him with so much—that was longing, wasn't it? He was starting to understand what he needed from her—her sunlight and her vulnerability, and something much much bigger that he still could only say with desserts. But what did she need from him?

“This is the most delicious meal anyone has ever made for me in my life,” he murmured to her, twining the compliment gently around her, watching the giddy power of his voice over her. “Your pasta yesterday is the only thing that can compete with it.
Thank you.
”

She blushed with delight. For someone who should be used to compliments, it was amazingly easy to make her feel special. Was that one of the things she needed?

“So what's this crazy, impossible thing you need, Summer?”
You don't think things are possible, but I think everything is. And I'll do whatever I have to, to keep this.

“Oh, just—” She made a sudden movement to slip away, but he had his thigh on one side of her stool, blocking her in. She shook her head despairingly and stared at the black granite counter. “Apparently I want an intensely ambitious, passionate workaholic who gives life everything in him. And I want him to choose
me
as more important than any of that.”

He stroked his hand over that irresistible hair and let the heat of his palm rest on the strained muscles of her neck. “How would he show you that you were more important?”

A little silence, and then that rueful, self-deprecating shrug. “Give me all his attention.”

“And how would you know you had that? How would you know that your ambitious, passionate workaholic always had some part of him thinking about you?”

She snuck a glance at him.

“Would he take all that passion and drive and discipline and make the very best thing his life could produce, and give it to you? And when you ignored that, would he try to do something even better? And would he keep doing that, no matter how insanely busy he was,
every damn day, twice a day?
”

Her eyes widened, locked on his.

“And when you rejected, over and over again, the best thing he could possibly be, would he change for you and try instead to make what you wanted, no matter how humble he had to be to do it?”

She had the bluest damn eyes. They clung to his; her lips were parted.

He sat back. “I'm just asking, Summer. How would you know?”

“I—I was just thinking he would give me hugs and like to have me around.”

He hadn't had a hug since he was fostered. Maybe what felt like an incredible glory of physical affection to him wasn't nearly enough for her. He stroked his hand from the nape of her neck to her far shoulder and let his arm wrap around her. Carefully. Not at all sure he was doing this thing called “affection” right. But liking it. Oh, yeah, he could do this one hell of a lot more, if she liked it, too. God, he would have to get used to it, though. There were moments when it made him feel like he was about to pass out.

“And I'm not staying here,” she said very rapidly to the counter. “I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not.”

On the plus side, she did have to say it five times. Like maybe the trap of him was closing around her. He grimaced at the image. “What's the hold your father has over you, to keep you here?”

“They need another satellite out there. He said if I would give running this hotel a try for three months, he would invest. I've been doing my best not to really run it—it's not like Alain needs my interference—but I have to stay here.” She darted him a glance. “I know it seems spoiled not to want a luxury hotel as a Christmas present, but . . . I really hate hotels.”

He
loved
this hotel. He loved everything about it. The gold and the marble, the chandeliers, the precise perfect elegance everywhere you looked, the rich and hungry people who flocked here for him, just for him. The absolute distance from anything resembling a dirty packed Métro car full of people who ignored him as he poured his heart out.

He squeezed her nape gently. “Well, let's get the hell out of it, then.”

T
hey walked down the Champs-Elysées in the middle of the night. Street lamps glittered like a stairway to heaven, curving up the slope of the Champs to the lofty glowing Arc de Triomphe. The car lights sparkled off the wet pavement in jagged dances, and Luc laughed, swinging her hand like a young man out on his first date.

His happiness fascinated Summer. She found herself relaxing into it until she was starting to laugh, too, for no reason, just because they were walking so firmly on the eggshells of her past.

“Look at this view.” He gestured from the Arc de Triomphe all down the wide bejeweled boulevard to the Place de la Concorde with its piercing proud Obélisque. “Summer,
look
at it. Is this not the most beautiful city to be king of in the world?”

He was like her mother, of all people. Mai's joy in this city was so triumphant that she could not conceive of any other way to feel about it. Where had her mother come from, she wondered suddenly, that she was so thrilled to play at princess? That she thought her daughter would rather be a princess than have a family life? Mai had never talked much about her childhood.

“It's freezing,” Summer murmured, ruefully.

He pulled her into the panels of his coat and kissed her until she was warm again, laughing triumphantly when he lifted his head. He seemed ten years younger, but in a surprised and delighted way, as if he did not recognize from his own youth how young he felt now.

He led her to the Trocadéro, where they stood on the esplanade above the great fountain, turned off for the winter. Across the river, the Eiffel Tower glowed her heart out, and Luc leaned against the esplanade and stared at it, exhilarated.

“Sorry,” he said a little sheepishly when he realized Summer was watching him. “I don't get out much. I love this city.”

She wanted to beat her head against something. “Of course you would,” she muttered. That damn
smug
Eiffel Tower.
Look, here's another person I can make love me better than he loves you.

Not that he had ever said he loved her, of course.

Unless you counted an entire restaurant full of desserts, designed for her, as a declaration.

She looked up at the exuberance in the normally taut profile, with the Eiffel Tower as his backdrop. Her head tilted. “You know, it does almost look beautiful this way.”

“Almost?” He sent a wry glance from the Eiffel Tower to her, then turned his back on the tower completely, sitting against the wall of the esplanade and pulling her between his legs. “I have less than three months to show you how beautiful this city is, don't I?”

He didn't seem to find it an overwhelming challenge. With Paris in his pocket, what man wouldn't be cocky? He didn't understand. No one ever did understand how she could hate Paris.

He didn't seem to be paying that much attention to Paris itself anymore, though, his thumbs tracing over her cheekbones and his fingers drawing through wings of her hair, in that musing absorption into which he sometimes fell, looking at her.

“I love you,” Summer said quietly.
Yeah, take that to the belly, Eiffel. You thought I would be afraid to say it so close to you, didn't you?

Luc's hands jerked in her hair, stinging, his face blanking as if he had been hit by a shock wave.

“No one has ever told you that, have they?” she realized, her hands rising to find his. He called his foster father
monsieur,
after all. And his mother had abandoned him.

His fingers moved uneasily in hers, as if he might be thinking of wrenching his hands away. “Twice,” he admitted. “Girls in high school.” His mouth curved reluctantly, an uncomfortable wryness. “It didn't work out for them. They had no idea how desperate and clingy it would make me.”

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.”