The Chocolate Heart (3 page)

She gave the Eiffel a silky, sweet smile.
Fuck you. My water is warm at least, and you're out there getting drenched in forty-degree rain.

The Eiffel Tower kept glowing as if she didn't give a damn what Summer thought of her, which she never had. Meanwhile, all of Paris condensed itself in Summer's imagination into one black-haired, beautiful, naked man looking down at her own naked body with some hauteur, and she felt her nipples peak.

Great.

Summer turned her back on both the Eiffel and that imagined beautiful man, but then just felt as if both were watching her naked wet ass, with a little critical moue:
Pas mal.

She had never considered herself an exhibitionist, primarily because she wasn't that introspective. So desire hit her so hard and so fast that she had to curl her hand around the showerhead, stunned by its impact: Desire to have somebody pushing her back against that shower wall, a human shield, blocking the world out of her mind even while she thumbed her nose at it. Protecting her and taking her.

The body that pushed her back was golden, the hair dark, and that shouldn't have scared her, since her fantasy lovers always had matte skin and black hair, gorgeous Polynesian sea-gods.

But this man was a stranger, with a face forged by fire and cool dismissive eyes. She squeezed her eyes shut tight on her own fantasy, blurring his face in her brain, something that forged face resisted adamantly.

Let him just stay a stranger. Okay? Nothing wrong with the sex-with-a-stranger, exhibitionist shower fantasy, was there? She could guarantee she wouldn't be the first woman to indulge in it.

And the nice thing about a fantasy was she could dismiss
him
when she wanted to.

W
hen Summer got out of the shower, a linen-lined basket of golden
financiers
sat on the table like a gift of sunshine. One of the little gestures to welcome guests, no doubt. The buttery fresh scent drew her, heat from them caressing her outstretched palm. She started to touch one, oddly consoled against the vista of cold, rainy Paris misery, when there was a knock on the door.

“Summer!” Her mother flung her arms around her, but peeled almost instantly back to get a good look at her. Scent flowed around Summer, not one she recognized. Once, as a child, Summer had snuck into her mother's bathroom and tested out every perfume in her cabinet so that she would know what her mother might smell like the next time she saw her. It hadn't worked. Too little to use tissue as testers instead of her own skin, she had ended up, toward the end, spraying little bits on each toe, having run out of all her other body parts, trying to keep the different perfumes apart. Her mother still laughed about the cacophony of scents when she told the story to friends. “How I wish I could have taken a picture of
that!
She had such a headache afterward, too, poor sweetie.”

Not that Mai Corey had ever realized why her daughter had done it. Summer had gotten this idea she might need to find her mother in a dark maze and was trying to practice.

“A spa.” Her mother touched the corners of Summer's eyes. “We've got to get that sand scrubbed off you. Honey, you're going to need more than just exfoliation if you keep this up.” She double-checked the corners of her own eyes and smiled with relief. Summer had been told many times that she and her mother could be twins. But today anyone could tell them apart by Summer's too-tanned skin, her ragged, sun-bleached hair, her rough nails. “And
what
are you wearing?” her mother asked incredulously of Summer's cotton, hibiscus-printed blue sundress and bare feet. “Oh, Summer.” Her eyebrows crinkled for a moment in pure confusion. “Thank
goodness
your father finally figured out a way to get you off that island.”

“I don't want to be off the island,” Summer pointed out. “I'm happy there.”

“Summer. You told me yourself when we flew out there that you didn't even have a boyfriend. How could you possibly be happy? Now come on, we've got four years of shopping to make up for, honey, before tonight's gala.” Her mother spread her arms and waltzed through the room. “Oh, honey, I'm so
happy
to see you back in Paris again. This is going to be
fun
!”

“Maman.” American by birth, just as her husband and daughter were, Mai Corey had always asked Summer to call her “maman.”
So much more elegant.
Summer took a slow, purposeful breath, the way she had been training herself to do, and tried something she hadn't tried in a long time—honesty with her mother. “You do realize that I feel like I'm dying when I'm in Paris, don't you? I hate it here.”

Her mother paused in front of a mirror and gave her daughter a crinkled, worried look in it. Then she laughed. “Oh, Summer, what am I going to do with you? You are so spoiled. How could you possibly not be happy here?” Swooping up the basket of
financiers,
she upended them merrily in the trash. “Although you have to watch out!” she laughed, grabbing Summer's arm and heading her out the door, with a pinch of her waist. “Those chefs here will get you if they can.”

 

“You found them in the trash?”

Frederic winced and tried to look away from the empty basket Luc held in his hands. “You did ask,” he muttered.

“All of them,” Luc said very evenly. “All of them in the trash.”

The little basket of sunshine he had sent for her to discover as—what, exactly? He didn't know how to say it in words, only with
financiers.
Little golden cakes that said things like
I'm sorry for leaving you cold like that, here's some warmth.
Or,
This is golden and warm and real, and is it at all possible that your golden, warm smile is real, too?
Or,
Think of me. I'm thinking of you. Do I taste good?

See, a basket of
his financiers
was so much more elegant and compelling than all those words. And a hell of a lot safer way to express himself.

The trash. His wrist flicked so that the empty basket landed hard on the room service cart as he turned around.

And straightened immediately at the sight of the man who had just come in through the back door, one hand slipping into his pocket, the other extending. “Monsieur.”

His foster father, whose degree of self-containment even Luc had never been able to entirely emulate, gave the basket a look of restrained indignation. “Someone threw
your
financiers in the trash?”

“We get anorexic blondes from time to time.” Luc made his voice bored. Although she hadn't felt anorexic in his arms. She had felt lithe and slender, a supple blend of muscles and softness, not bony. And she had felt tired and something else, clinging to him as if he was hauling her out of the depths of hell.

Bernard Durand shook his neatly cut, gray-brown head. “She would have to be very spoiled not to appreciate you.” He gave his foster son that look that realigned Luc's reason for being, that made him want to jump through any hoop out there, a look that held a world full of tightly contained pride. “You want to show me that Victoire of yours? I saw you on TV last night, but the camera crew missed the most important steps. How did you do that one?”

Luc contained his surge of pride to a faint curve of his lips. “I'll show you.”
Him
showing his foster father. He always loved that. The man who had showed and showed and showed a wild ten-year-old, a twelve-year-old, a hormone-crazy fifteen-year-old, sometimes making him do it one thousand painstaking times in a day, until he got it right.

“You'll come visit my new boys soon?” Bernard asked as Luc demonstrated the Victoire. “Show them what they can accomplish with a little discipline and focus? It's good for them to see you. Realize they can transition. Sometimes they were raised like animals. Well, you know.”

Some rebellious streak in Luc's heart still wanted to argue that his biological father had tried to do a bit better than raise him like an
animal,
but he thought of the cats and dogs dragged around with people in the Métro to milk more money. Bernard would compare his father's use of him to that of those animals, and he didn't want to hear that.

“I've been busy,” he said guiltily. It was a ninety-minute car trip out to the sprawling
banlieue
edge where his foster home was. An hour via the Métro and RER, if he could force himself to take it. Worse, every time he helped show this next generation of foster brothers what they could become via ruthless control and discipline, he felt . . . odd. Wrong. As if he should be modeling another way. Although what other way existed besides unrelenting control and discipline?

“And tonight I've got this gala. A thousand people to see the hotel handed over to Summer Corey. We'll have a dozen camera crews down here wanting a clip of us to add color to their coverage.”

“Of you, you mean.” Bernard didn't smile his pride, but Luc could feel it. Could lap it up.

“And with the new owner, things might be crazy for a bit.”

A new owner who thought Luc was a bellboy. And was going to pay for that by letting her soul float as soft as a golden snowflake down to rest in his hands.

A delicate operation, to hold a golden snowflake in one's hands. But he knew all about delicate operations. It was just a question of the utmost control.

 

Cameras flashed as Summer's father squeezed her shoulders and announced the gift of the hotel. Summer yielded with a big smile for everyone, because what else was she supposed to do at this point? The media was going to be full of ghastly photos of her frowning otherwise, and then people would be calling her a spoiled brat.

Again.

No, this way, it made a lovely photo, her father framed by his beautiful wife and daughter. She was still a spoiled brat to all concerned, but at least she looked happy about it. Meanwhile, crisply attired, her father controlled the room as chair of Corey Holdings, one of the great financial movers and shakers of the world. Gray-haired, his face too angular, he didn't have Luc Not-the-Bellboy's beauty, but he held power in him and everyone gravitated to it.

Summer had, too, as a girl, though much good it had done her. Before she fled to a place where people liked her. Everyone had different goals in life and hers, it turned out, were love and affection.

Unfortunately, her father had just dragged her out of that warm place by her hair to try to force-feed her his own ambitions of money and control. Dragged her to the Leucé, one of the world's top hotels, with its Michelin three-star restaurant and its views of the Eiffel Tower. Her old home away from home.

She slipped away from him as the camera clicks slowed, dancing through the crowd. So many hands to clasp with delighted enthusiasm, so many people to promise she had not forgotten them, so many times to laugh and say,
Well, who wouldn't want to laze around on a South Pacific island?
So many times to meet a man's eyes with a warm smile as she passed, just warm enough that he thought she was going to approach and didn't react quickly enough to approach
her
before she wove on past.

Each glance calculating what a man could get out of her seemed to take a layer of skin with it, and she breathed deeply, trying to tap down into that golden core of island memories. For God's sake, anyone could get through three months.

The tip of a whip curled around her attention and she drew a quick breath, turning to discover her rescuer king from the night before nearby, watching her thoughtfully, a glass of white wine in his hand. Her breath went out with what felt oddly like relief, which didn't make any sense at all.

She wanted to hide her face in embarrassment, so she gave him her silkiest, sexiest smile. He tilted his head slightly, studying her smile as if he wanted to submit it for chemical analysis. He didn't smile back.

In the deceptively simple black pants and white shirt of a top designer, he exuded concentration and intensity and utter control, watching her approach with easy arrogance, in that whip's semblance of repose. Her breath shortened despite herself. To punish him for it she shifted discreetly, so that the silk of her dress slid over her body and glimmered in the light. Goosebumps rose on her arms as air-chilled silk slid against her skin. Paris was always too cold for her.

Luc Leroi sniffed his wine thoughtfully. The air smelled darker, within his personal space. Like somewhere she could curl up and be safe. “You really like your men tall, dark, and handsome, don't you?”

Yes, she supposed she had been rather obvious about that, when she'd offered him a yacht. “Now you're just being modest. I call you ‘Gorgeous' myself.”

A black eyebrow lifted slightly. His chin indicated the room. “They're the ones you flirt with the longest.”

Did she really? She nodded solemnly. “They provide such a good foil.” Desperate to unsettle him, she pulled a lock of hair free from its elegant coiffure and leaned into the wrist so near her head, wrapping the strand around it, a golden contrast to the dark hairs there. “See?” She smiled up at him, her cheek pressed against his forearm.

His eyes went pitch black, and one deep breath moved through his body. Sudden awareness of the strength in that forearm shivered all through her, not from fear but from a delicious knowledge of his control of it.

“It must do them good,” he said. “To have worked and climbed all their lives so that some blonde can consider them a good foil.”

She had spent five years in boarding school with a pack of other rich, abandoned, insecure girls, and she had defended herself in needling conversations against the best of them. “Well.” She gave a rippling shrug that shivered her dress over her body and smiled at him again as she straightened, her lock of hair sliding slowly over his wrist and then dropping to graze her shoulder. The touch of her hair fresh from his skin raised more goose bumps on her arms, but she blended her shiver into the shrug. “Some people dream bigger than others.” Implying that being her foil was the biggest dream a man could have.

“They certainly do,” he said evenly. Implying something entirely different.

Yes, she always managed to go after the ones who dreamed so big she vanished in those dreams like a little speck of light.

She straightened away from him, saw a man beyond him shift subtly, ready to take advantage of the window if she started to move away, and stayed where she was, in that potential circle of his arm. He didn't seem to be feeling any urge to wrap her up in his darkness again, the way he had the night before. He must be pretty damn fastidious, to get so turned off by the offer of a yacht.

Too fastidious for her, clearly.

“Were you drunk last night?” she asked suddenly.

A long silence. “. . . Yes,” Luc said finally.

In the darkness of his eyes, the image of herself in her silky pale slip dress danced like a tiny flame. “How much had you had to drink?” she asked suspiciously. He had smelled of everything but alcohol—chocolate and raspberries and sweat and citrus.

He touched the glass of wine to his lips, barely wetting them. The light from the chandeliers gleamed on the moisture left there. “How tired were you?”