The Chocolate Heart (8 page)

“I asked for green tea,” she said. Her mother's little trick for suppressing appetite and resisting desserts. Summer's eyes snagged again on the gleaming sand. That was a tiny sesame seed, right there by the seemingly sealed door to the cave of chocolate. “I don't—I'm not much of a dessert person—”

“I'll try it!” Derek said hungrily.

The waiter shifted, bodyguard preparing to lunge. “I'm afraid Monsieur Leroi was very particular.”

“He always is,” Derek said dryly. “I've tried to hire him away from you any number of times,” he added to Summer.

“Monsieur Leroi thought you would like to be the first to try it,” the waiter said to Summer. “He calls it Aladdin's Cave.”

“I'm sorry,” she whispered, pushing it away. “I really don't eat sweets.”

“Summer, you are out of your mind!” Derek said. “He'll quit. You can't turn a top chef's specially made dessert down that way.”

“I can't,” she said through a tight throat and looked away. Across all those other tables, filled with beautiful desserts. God, all the times she had stared at tables full of fantasies in this very same room, always withheld from her.
I can't give him that power.
“Please offer my apologies to Monsieur Leroi, but as I've told him, I don't eat sweets.”

The waiter flinched visibly. Derek pulled out his phone. “Do you mind if I call him about two minutes after the waiter delivers that message? I've been wanting to find someone who can land us a third star at the Luxe for years.”

Summer's gaze was drawn back, irresistibly, to that dark chocolate cave. What would be inside it? What wonders would a man like Luc Leroi hide in there for her to be the first to discover? The magic of it tempted her so desperately. That excruciating longing to just once be good enough to taste one of those things.

And that was exactly what she wasn't going to play into. Desserts had no power over her anymore.

She turned her head away again. “Do as you like,” she told Derek.

At least if Luc left the Leucé in a temper, she would be safe from him.

With any luck, her father might get so pissed off he would let her go back to the island.

L
uc was in such a bad temper he couldn't even recognize his own insides. They fought with him like a feral child wrenched out of the Métro and away from his father into a place where love was some distant, pale light that would fall into his darkness only if he was absolutely perfect.

And Derek Martin, with his offers to double his salary if Luc came to the Luxe, could go fuck himself. Anyway, Alain had given Luc a raise three times already since Summer got here. It wasn't that Luc didn't care about money, because he had gone hungry quite a lot until he was ten, but now that he had more than enough to cover lodging, very nice clothes, and the world's best food, all the extra just funneled straight to his broker. Since he had more than enough in his accounts to open his own place if he ever wanted and still finance sous-chefs like Patrick when they finally set out on their own, salary increases were more like a polite compliment than anything else at this point.

And every single time Alain sent a note giving him another raise, he added a P.S. mentioning how many days remained until Summer Corey's departure.
Don't worry, she's not planning to stay. Eighty-three days left now.
Luc had ripped the last one into pieces and dropped it on the nearest open burner.

Putain.
Aladdin's Cave? She had managed to ignore Aladdin's Cave? The little sesame seed, even? That hadn't charmed her? She, who had been so thrilled at the hotel's Économat, hadn't been completely taken with the desire to see what was hiding under the fragile shell of chocolate?

Go ahead, you like to crack a man just by toying with his collar and breathing into his ear. Here's something you can crack. While I crack you.
The sesame seed was his little symbol for the moment when her mouth opened to his taking.

Unable to contain his temper within the kitchen, he stepped into the Coudrerie, the hotel's sewing room.

And discovered a butt sticking out from under one of the long sewing tables, in erotically patterned leggings, a flirty tunic top leaving little covered at that angle. Laughter came from under the table. “Here's another one! It's the little puppy! Genevieve!”

Laughter—
real
laughter—and Summer's upthrust, barely clad butt. Some great hand picked him up and shook him, back and forth, up and down, watching the way his insides fell out for its own amusement.

Jeannine, who had been a seamstress at the hotel for longer than Luc had been alive, was in the Coudrerie laughing too, more buttons spilled in front of her on the table beside her sewing machine. Because after twenty years of focusing on details he had lost the ability to miss anything—either that or,
merde,
because the first ten years of his life had been spent scrabbling for coins fallen among crowds of feet—Luc spotted half a dozen more buttons scattered across the floor.

“Do you remember the little dog button, the little Genevieve?” Summer's bottom wiggled out from under the table and bumped into his legs. Summer sat back on her heels. “Oops.” For one second her laughter vanished, so radically erased that he wanted to hit himself in punishment. And he hadn't even done anything to her. Not one damn thing of all the things he wanted to do. Then her blue gaze crawled up his body, lingering thoughtfully at his crotch, just above her face. His whole body tightened, and he fought with everything in him not to let that body give her a visible reaction.

“Why it's Gorgeous himself!” Summer exclaimed happily. “What perfect timing. I was just wondering whether I should brave the rain to go over to the Louvre and look at all those beautiful Greek gods with hearts of stone. But why bother, when I've got you, right here?” Luc's eyes were still narrowing over all the different ways she had just managed to needle him in one sentence, when she turned back on her hands and knees, in a long, slow arch of her tantalizing
fesses
right in front of him. “Jeannine, do you still have the little princess button?”

Still?

“Oh,
pucette!
The maid was supposed to slip it to you before you left. You were such a sweetie, and it just broke my heart the way those tears ran down your face without a sound. You mean you never got it?”

Tears without a sound? It kind of broke his heart to even hear about it. It made him
mad.
Who had made her cry, and why hadn't he been there to stop it?

Oh, for God's sake. He was getting heartily fed up with his sixteen-year-old reactions to her.
Oh, did you break a nail? Let me kill myself so that you don't cry about it.
Sixteen had not been a good age for him.

The wiggling butt paused. Summer lifted herself off her knees enough to look over the table at Jeannine. “No,” she said quietly. “But thank you.” For a moment, her face was entirely naked and sincere.

She caught Luc's eyes on her, dropped back onto her heels out of Jeannine's sight—and the sweetie brought her thumb up to her mouth to nibble on the tip, her eyes resting vaguely on his crotch as if she had no idea where she was looking. Arousal washed him helplessly. She flipped back onto her hands and knees, her butt wiggling as that tunic top flared up and showed pretty much everything and then fell back again.

She just hid from me behind her own worse-than-naked butt,
he realized suddenly. And it was working. Visions were taking over any possibility of understanding her, leaving only thoughts of grabbing, pulling, stretching her out before him and stripping all her shields away, making her come and come and come for him until she couldn't think of anything else when she looked at him but . . .

“Summer got lost down here once when she was about five,” Jeannine explained to him comfortably, and Luc blinked with the shock of her grandmotherly normalcy in the midst of his fantasies. “She ended up playing with my box of buttons until I could get someone to track down her parents. They had the whole hotel shut down in fear of kidnappers by then.”

“Got my first nanny fired,” came Summer's flippant voice from under the table. “I'm hell on people, really.”

It was only Jeannine's odd, compassionate gaze that made Luc wonder how much he was missing that Jeannine saw behind that flippant manner. And now he had a picture in his head of five-year-old Summer with tears streaming down her cheeks. Why silent? Some of his little foster brothers would cry silently like that—as if their pasts had taught them that being discovered in tears might make their troubles worse—but didn't your average, healthy, normal five-year-old girl make noise when she cried? Because, you know, she believed someone would pay attention and try to fix her grief if she made them aware of it?

“What about the beast?” Summer called. “Do you still have that one? That's my favorite button. There's something about it that makes me think of you, your majesty.”

If crying hadn't gotten her the attention she needed, she certainly had learned some other techniques as she grew up, hadn't she?

“What can I do for you, Luc?” Jeannine asked, and he looked up to find her amused eyes on him. He had often wished that Jeannine was his grandmother. How strange to think that Summer might have wished for the same thing.

The butt just below his gaze flexed as Summer stretched to reach a button, moving into a position a woman would only otherwise take if . . . if . . .

He dragged his hand over his face and forced himself to meet those shrewd eyes again. “I wanted to talk to you about my buttons.”

“Why?” Blue eyes glinted. “You're not getting enough of yours pushed already?”

Merde,
what had he just said? “Cloths.” He dropped his sketch on top of the damned buttons. “I want to talk to you about doing a linen square for this.” A heart-shaped
coeur au fromage blanc,
soft delicate sweetness nestled in its own little box, wrapped in a linen square, like the artisan work of a small farmer. If that farmer could afford hand-embroidered linen cheesecloths. It would be one of the dessert's three artfully presented elements, pulling in red themes of passion and romance, using the early strawberries that might just be starting to come in from the Garrigue if spring arrived soon enough.

Otherwise he would have to import the strawberries from South Africa or get them greenhouse grown, but sometimes you just had to steal spring into your life any way you could.

“Oh,
look,
” Summer said from under the table. “It's a little cupcake button. I never saw this one before. Your majesty, you should have this one.” She poked up to set it on the table in front of him. It was pink.

He really should have known she had an affinity for other people's buttons. “I do not make cupcakes,” he said between his teeth. Unless . . . “Do you like them?”

Something flashed through her eyes—what
was
that roar of feeling she hid so quickly?—and then she disappeared under the table again. “I don't know. Are they sweet?” she called back up merrily.

If he ever made a cupcake for her, she might end up wearing the damn thing. On her face, or . . . actually he might rather smash it on her breasts, and . . .
control. Don't let her do this to you.

“Do you want an unfinished hem?” Jeannine asked of his sketch. “To give it that pseudo-rustic touch? Or something very elegant, like a queen's handkerchief?”

“Unfinished. Give it an element that feels real.” Like you could actually reach out and touch it and it wouldn't disappear on you with a smile and a promise of a yacht.

“Like it's not completely removed from life?” Summer murmured below, a little button clinking into the tin she held.

He
was the one completely removed from life? He filled lives with wonder, while she swung in a hammock on an island and . . . taught schoolkids, fine, in a place so remote that it apparently frequently lost electricity, but—

“How many do you need?” Jeannine asked. He tried to focus. Not usually something he found hard to do.

“Could you make eight hundred?”

“As long as we can use one of the machines to embroider the logo and your name,” Jeannine said sternly. “Don't start with your hand-embroidered spiel.”

Luc folded his hands behind his back and fixed dark eyes on her.

Jeannine made a humphing sound. “I don't know where you learned to look at a woman like that, but it should be outlawed. I'll see what we can do about the hand embroidery. Maybe my daughter would like to do some while she's at home with the baby. No promises. But we'll get you eight hundred,
perhaps machine-stitched,
by Valentine's.”

“The weekend before, really,” Luc said. “Since Valentine's is midweek. You know we book up then.”

“Anyone would think you were a very spoiled child,” Jeannine said severely. But he had a suspicion she knew he hadn't been, because she laughed and reached out to squeeze his arm. It was funny how hungry he was, to this day, for touches like that—casual, friendly, breaking through his isolation.

“I love you, Jeannine,” he said, quite sincerely, and she waved her hand at him and blushed, not buying it for a second.

Summer poked her head out from under the table and studied him.

“So how is it, exactly, that I look at you?” he asked Jeannine curiously to help him ignore Summer while the seamstress drew a copy of the linen he'd sketched, noting measurements. “That you say should be outlawed?”

Jeannine waved her hand. “All that pent-up passion and you being so ruthless with it. We feel sorry for it. Plus, I figure passion is like the universe. You can compress it down into a tiny dot, but eventually it's going to explode again.”

Maybe he shouldn't have asked this question with Summer Corey in the room. “Origin of the universe theories? You read too much, Jeannine. Shouldn't you be resting your eyes when you get home?”

“Audio books are a wonder,” she retorted, as he turned away and headed past Summer to the door. “
I've
got a long Métro trip.”

“Careful!” Summer snuck her fingers under his foot so fast she had to be trying to make him step on her.

He didn't, of course. Reflexes honed from much greater challenges than her, he didn't even brush against her.

“
There's
the beast,” Summer called to Jeannine, holding up a carved black button. He caught a glimpse of a wild, fanged face as he opened the door. “I knew it was around here somewhere. Although myself, I still think it's really supposed to be the Lord of Hell.”