The Chocolate Heart (29 page)

I
t 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.”

“I know, honey.” Her mother's fingers stroked so gently, a maternal healing touch. “That's what worries me about these. You're so young to have lines already.”

“They're from laughing.”

“And being out in the sun too much while you do.” Her mother patted her shoulder with affectionate reproach. “Try holding it back to a softer smile when you can, sweetheart. It will help.”

 

Sam Corey slammed the door of the Marie Antoinette room shut. Luc suspected it was Sam Corey's favorite conference room in the hotel, one where he could imagine everyone else losing their heads to him.

“What are you doing with my daughter?” the older man snapped.

Luc smiled sweetly. “Whatever I want.”

A fist thumped hard on the carved gold door. “Goddamnit, man.”

“You know, if you didn't want your daughter to fall in with so many wrong men, you probably should have spent more time with her, teaching her how to recognize the right ones.” He noted that on his very short list of rules on how to bring his vision of a happy, black-haired, delicate-featured little girl to successful fruition . . . way down through to when
she
got married and lived happily ever after and had kids and . . . whoa. He pulled himself back from a dizzying brink.

“Has she been complaining about how little time I spent with her
again
?” Sam Corey snapped.

“No. She never complains. I think she might be afraid to.”

“And well she should be,” Sam Corey said roughly. “There's never been a more privileged child in the whole freaking world.”

Luc closed his hands around the edge of a table, leaning back against it, and just looked at the older man. Second note on his short list:
If you give her everything but a belief in herself, you've screwed the fuck up. Also, no matter what trouble your fifteen-year-old daughter gets herself into, never, ever call her a whore.
“Let's talk about something else. Why don't you tell me your daughter's good traits?”

The other man glared at him and shrugged. “She's beautiful, but she knows it. She's got a brain on her like you wouldn't believe—given the way she's wasting it. She could talk P/E ratios when she was five years old—”

Luc supposed it was a better way of being a performing monkey than playing a damn tambourine, but it still made him nauseated every time he heard that.

“—and instead of doing something with it, she's teaching a dozen kids on some godforsaken island.”

“Maybe it's not godforsaken,” Luc said whimsically.

“Huh?”

“Nothing.” He hadn't been in a church since he left his foster father's house, and even back then it had only been for foster-cousin baptisms and first Communions. It was a weird thought to pop into his head. But if he had been one of those little kids or their parents, a bright, loving woman who was happy to do her best for them and didn't think there were “better” things she could do with her life would have seemed like a gift from God to
him.
“Can you say one full sentence about your daughter without taking away the compliment in the second part?”

Sam Corey set his jaw and glared at him.

“Try,” Luc said. “Try hard. It will do you good.”

“She could be so much better than she is!” Sam Corey burst out. “The
privileges
she had. The opportunities.”

“You're right. It's a good thing we're not having this conversation in front of Summer. Back up and try again. You're not convincing me it's a good thing for Summer to have much contact with you, and I might end up having some influence on that.”

Sam Corey's jaw locked. His eyes tried to bore through Luc's skull, but that iron only weakened for sunlight.

“
Allez.
Your precious daughter. You want her to go to a man who can take good care of her. Right? Work it from that angle. Tell me something special about her.”

Sam Corey strode across the room to the portrait of Marie Antoinette. At first, Luc thought the older man had dismissed him, and maybe that was his intention. But the hard face slowly relaxed, with memories. Her father gave a little laugh, suddenly, and turned. “All right. She always had focus, that girl. I remember how she used to slip into my office and just watch me. She'd watch me for an hour at a time.”

“That must have felt nice.” Luc could fit a little girl of his up on the counter beside him and delight her whole little world. He had no idea how to do anything else, where little girls were concerned, but he figured he could handle that part. Right, and if a nine-year-old boy helping a little girl climb on the monkey bars could have such an impact, he bet his little black-haired vision would be all over having her own dad do it. Three things on his list, now.