The Chocolate Heart (7 page)

Their eyes locked. Rage roared up in him like a furnace, and he
clamped.
Locked it down. “I don't think so,” he said very precisely. His whole team had just heard her offer him a fucking penthouse apartment as if she was upping her bid on a whore.

“Oh, dear.” She looked anxious. “You
are
hard to buy presents for. Well.” Her hand patted his jaw again, and he
hated
himself for the arousal that shot through his body. “I'll keep thinking.”

And then she turned and was gone, that blond head glimmering like some beautiful deity flitting back to heaven. Luc's jaw was set so hard he thought he might break the bone. He had no other choice. It was either that or lose control. He pivoted. Multiple people gazing at him with shocked, rounded mouths suddenly ducked back to work in all directions.

Except for Patrick, who leaned over and inspected the oozing ruins of the chocolate-gold heart. “Aww. That's so cute, Luc. You've finally let it out of its cage.”

H
e sent it to her, the sphere, on a day when the rain sheeted down like the end of hope: a delicate ephemeral shield of chocolate around a treasure of gold so brilliant and so fragile that it seemed to pulse there, a frozen mousse coated in gold leaf, hiding, according to the waiter, a melting heart, begging someone to eat it up, swallow it whole . . . and crap it out later, she told herself harshly.

It lured her, just like it was supposed to. It taunted her with its efforts to control her. It made her hurt, wanting desperately to curl up inside some better shield than that fragile veil of chocolate threads, so no one could see her heart so easily and eat it, so no one could mock her for it.

She nearly shoved it off the table, the dessert she hadn't ordered, and the waiter turned rather white. When he neared the door back into the kitchens with it, she saw him trying desperately to pass it on to some other waiter to take back instead of him.

“You're hard to please,” the man sitting across from her said as if he liked that about her. He would, of course. If her father had given him her new phone number, he had to be ambitious and competitive. Mike Brodzik, one of his investment managers. Handsome and attentive and very, very interested in her father's power. He was better than being alone.

She opened big eyes at him. “Oh, no,” she said with a limpid innocence, just to mess with everybody, especially herself. “I'm actually . . .” A slow, sweet smile straight into his eyes. “Very, very easy.”

Which kept his attention on her, all right, but made her kind of sick with disgust at herself. She wanted to go home.

 

When the fog crushed everything to gray, like the ghost of every misery past, he sent her three golden orbits of a star around a dark, proud mountain, the mountain a chocolate so pure and smooth it was like glass, to slide off, and hidden in amid the golden sugar orbits of the star, at the very peak of the mountain, a tiny delicate apple covered in gold leaf. She didn't know what the tiny apple tasted like inside the gold, or what was in the mountain, or how easily those golden star orbits would shatter at her touch, because she sent it back. Of course. Her throat closing, her hand curling slow and hard against her thigh under the table, as she tried very hard not to cry out her protest, to beg for it back.

 

When the setting sun sucked the last life out of the day, like a blood-gorged tick, and she was ready to sell her soul not to be alone in the night, he sent her a glowing ball of red sugar in the form of a most perfect apple; its red glistened in the light of the chandeliers, drawing the eyes of all the diners as the waiter carried it to her. Setting it as he had clearly been trained, the waiter turned it precisely one quarter, so that the other side of the gleaming perfect red showed: white. “It's called
Pomme d'Amour,
” the waiter said. The French word for caramel apple. Or Apple of Love. And that was no caramel apple. She wet her lips as she stared at that tempting, tempting red and white and what it might hide. She could just reach out and take it. Unlike when she was a child, no one could stop her. No one could withhold it from her. Except, of course, the man who'd made it, should he gain that power.

“I'll kiss you,” the man across from her murmured, an old fling from her wild college days come to look her up. “If it puts you to sleep.”

Snow White, right.

“I don't eat sweets,” she told the waiter for the fifteenth time and pushed it away. Inside, the child in her panted hard as she fought not to cry.

 

He sent her hot chocolate. It was waiting for her when she came in from the hotel's little skating rink with a band of little kids. Summer was laughing, deeply relieved to know she was capable of being happy even here. Proud of herself, the girl who had mostly hung out with her own nanny as a kid, finally able to get a few kids to play with her. Maybe that was why she had ended up teaching school, she thought wryly. A hunger to play with other kids. But at any rate, the ability to find a rapport with small children that she had learned teaching in the islands seemed to stand her in good stead with these rich hotel strays. They reminded her so much of herself that it broke her heart a little bit for them, and she played far too long in the iced-over courtyard, all of them coming in frozen.

The children were delighted to see the hot chocolate waiting for them, waiters pouring it from elegant pots into little doll cups.

The cup a waiter offered her was adult-size, smooth, curving warm and perfect against her palm. It almost got her, that sweet. The scent of it was heady, reminding her of how her nanny Liz would sneak her hot chocolate after bouts of skating exactly like this, their little secret from her parents who, as Liz knew, wouldn't let her have dessert later.

It had been years before her mother realized it, and Mai had kept the transgression to herself, not letting her husband know. Summer had sat through the whole conversation with her mother with acid eating inside her tummy, terrified Liz would get fired. But Mai had concentrated on Summer's own responsibilities: “Sweetheart, it's your body. Do you want to be beautiful? Do you want people to love you?”

Summer closed her eyes and set the chocolate down. Because anything—even never tasting another bite of sugar in her life—would be better than letting those tangled memories of her past control her again.

 

The next day she was in the hotel playroom with the six-and-under crowd, tossing a plush custom-made elephant sporting the hotel logo back and forth with a three-year-old, when a great tumble of candy arrived. Little penny candies spilled artistically across a great tray from a paper bag: chocolate-covered marshmallow teddy bears, strawberries and bananas made of marshmallow dipped in bright red and yellow sugar, little orange and yellow gummy rings flavored with peach. Only they weren't worth mere pennies, she saw as she drew closer, amid all the other delighted, excited children. They were made by hand, and the paper bag was not paper but constructed out of some near-translucent, edible sheets.

Liz used to buy her cheap penny candy from bakeries on their “let's play at Madeline” excursions. No need for her parents to know about the paper sack Summer would clutch in her hand, skipping off to combine a history lesson with a trip to the Père Lachaise Cemetery because Madeline had looked for her dog Genevieve there. Summer always ate it too fast, even though Liz never once yanked the bag back out of her hands and tossed it in the nearest trashcan because Summer skipped wrong.

She scrubbed her hands suddenly over her face as the children fell on the candies, and started to slip out of the room. Her head turned to keep glancing back at those candies like Lot's wife looking back at Sodom, she ran straight into a hard body and bounced away sharply, jerking her head up to see Luc.

Golden skin, a face forged from greater forces than she could even imagine, that elegant black hair, those impossibly black eyes, that sensual mouth so firmly disciplined. He seemed perfectly controlled, so she didn't know why she was so convinced he was pissed off.

“Cute,” she said lightly, not quite sure where not to look, between the taunting temptation of him and the taunting temptation of those candies. Why the hell did the world get off on taunting her with things she wasn't supposed to be good enough for? “Who made them?”

“Me.”

She looked back at him, and her smile slipped for a second and was almost real. That was kind of cute, too, to imagine impervious deity Luc making little-kid candies. She tilted her head, remembering what he had said about his Gypsy father, wondering if maybe penny candies had been a rare, special delight for him as a kid, too. “You made their day.”

“Not yours?” he said. “No hot chocolate after skating? No candy while you're playing with children? I thought you liked cheap candy.”

That wasn't cheap candy. Handmade in a three-star kitchen by one of the top chefs in the world.
Her heart tightened, old anxiety rising up. “I really can't.”
I don't deserve this, you know.

Summer,
stop!
You do, too, deserve whatever you want.

But she just couldn't do it. Or maybe she just couldn't yield him that power.

Bad enough she had let her father control her with the offer of a satellite, but what was she supposed to do? Keep her island cut off from the world to keep it safe for her, as if its entire population were her personal toys?

“Are you diabetic?” he asked.

She stiffened, lifting her chin in a gesture of dismissal she had had to learn very young. A lot of people wanted a piece of her father through her. “This isn't your business.”

“You're worried about your weight, aren't you?” He flicked an incredulous, angry glance over her slender body.

“No.” At least . . . she tried not to be. She didn't worry about it on the island. “Excuse me.”

He didn't move. No qualms whatsoever about asking her invasive questions about her personal issues, about using his bigger body to control where she could go or what she could do. And all while that flick of his glance over her body, the anger and contempt in it, still burned over her.

She smiled at him and leaned into him confidingly. Her hand came up to toy with his collar, fingers grazing his throat. “You see, I can put my mouth around—almost—anything,” she murmured into his ear and dropped back onto her heels so he could catch her own blissful savoring of her lower lip. “But that particular flavor seems better suited to children, don't you think?” She smiled at him, and let her pat of his cheek linger as she strolled on past him and glanced back. “It's really sweet of you, though.”

 

The Aladdin's Cave appeared right in the middle of an attempt to ask her out. Derek Martin, vice-president of the hotel chain whose luxury flagship the Luxe was one of the Leucé's rivals, had joined her for lunch because, of course, her father's heir had a line of men out to the other end of Paris who wanted to join her for meals, and when it came to that or trying to face her lonely hotel room or cold, lonely Paris, she had an unfortunate tendency to choose the coward's way out. When the dessert arrived, dark, ambitious, attractive Derek had reined all of his aggression in to one gentle, possessive touch of her hand, his thumb caressing her knuckles, as if he
knew
how desperately she needed warmth and gentleness.

But then, maybe she was just transparent. Maybe that was why men always saw right through her, to her father. Not on purpose, even, but that was an awful lot of money and power to not remember when you were flirting with a woman. You would have to have a really weird brain—completely indifferent to numbers—to forget Sam Corey was in the picture. Derek Martin's brain wouldn't be able to shut him out. She knew that. But he did do a good job of pretending, with that focus that driven men had, right at the beginning, that ability to convince her that she could be the most important thing in his world, if only she would let herself be caught by him.

“They would love to have you at the Abbaye perfume launch, you know,” Derek said. “And I would be proud to escort you.”

Dread clenched in her at the thought of a luxury house affair, all the models and power and women who had to be the most beautiful in the room no matter what. She didn't want to go back to that. Besides, Abbaye had nearly talked her into pairing her name with a perfume back in college: Spoiled Brat, they had wanted to call it. She had never forgiven them for it. It had been during the period when she had tried assuming the title defiantly, flaunting slutty clothes, wild behavior. She had gone through the negotiations right up until it was time to sign the contract—the perfume was going to be her first “real job” after she graduated. And then she had hopped off that yacht in the South Pacific and never looked back. Abbaye had found an actress who seemed to be delighted to carry on the Spoiled Brat publicity, but Summer was pretty sure the Abbaye people were still a little pissed at her. And some part of her still felt a violent hatred for them, that they had tried to stick that label on her stupid twenty-year-old self, a label that a top-selling perfume and twenty-five-million-dollar advertising campaign would have cemented to her forever.

“Or if the Abbaye perfume launch doesn't appeal,” Derek said quietly, stroking her knuckles, “why not something more relaxing? I know. We could fly to Nice for the day. It's warm down there.”

Escape Paris? That sounded enticing . . .

And then the dessert slid in front of her.

A long, rectangular plate, crossed with a path of edible sand, glinting with specks of color and light, as if jewels had been ground to dust in it. They almost had, she realized, inspecting it. The hint of gleaming colors must come from colored sugars, but the gold was actual flecks of gold dust. Across that sand trailed serpentine footprints, made by someone's fingertip, leading to a rugged cave of chocolate, its door sealed shut.

A cave of wonders. It was a cave of wonders, for only the person with the magic word to explore. Were those Luc's fingerprints?

No, surely he didn't make every single item that came to her from the kitchens himself. It had to be that dark-haired intern she had seen, or . . .

“This is a new one,” Derek said. “I've never seen that on Luc's menu before.”

“It's for Mademoiselle Corey,” the waiter said firmly, as if he was the dessert's bodyguard and was prepared to defend it against anyone who wasn't supposed to get near it, no matter how wealthy and powerful Derek Martin might be.