The Chocolate Heart (28 page)

L
uc 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.”

L
uc 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.

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.

“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, although 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.