The Chocolate Heart (17 page)

Summer's hand closing around his wrist shocked all through him. The clumsy play had actually worked? Never, not once in his entire life, had anyone showed pity for his wounds. “Come here,” she said sternly.

Luc's body felt too hot, as he followed that bright head down the unlit hall, as she spread the antibiotic ointment over the splotch of the burn on the back of his hand. Sugar burns, the most frequent risk in a pastry kitchen, were nasty, the 320-degree caramel sticking to skin, hard to get off quickly even immersed in water. And ointment was the wrong treatment, but he let her do it anyway, bracing his hand against the sink, so close to her in the small bathroom he could smell her hair.

“Coconut,” he murmured. “And tiare.”

Summer's fingers trembled a little as she tried to open the bright blue chef 's bandage.

An image of a little blond girl in a beautiful, empty hotel room, cooing over her stuffed animals and bandaging their make-believe wounds in the absence of anyone else to pour love out onto, flashed through his mind and wrung his heart in passing.

Fuck, yes, I changed my mind, I'll be your toy. Take all that care and lavish it on
me.

Except he could barely absorb the tiny bit she was giving him right now.

“It's the perfect scent for you.” He lifted one thick strand of gold hair, breathing it in.

She looked up fast and bumped back into the sink. “What are you doing?”

He decided to go with honesty, mostly because protecting himself was just not working. “Trying a new technique.”

Her eyes flared in panic. She stared up at him like he was about to kill her for dinner.

“If you have a dream in your head, but every time you try to realize it you end up with a bloody mess, you have to try something different.” His mouth curved wryly. “Plus, two of the least qualified men in the world to give me advice on dealing with women have both recommended I adjust my technique, so obviously . . .” He gave a humorous shrug.

Summer let go of his hand—
merde
—and clutched the sink behind her. “That's not fair.”

“I don't actually know how to
play
with other people, so you'll forgive me for not knowing what
fair
is.” He touched that vulnerable lower lip of hers, just with his thumb. It trembled open for him. “I'm sorry it's taken me so long to adjust my technique. I don't have as much experience with this kind of thing as you do.”

Summer went white. And then flushed deep red. And then smiled her heart out. “Oh, don't worry, I'm sure when you've practiced as much on women as I have on men, you'll be marvelous.”

And she was gone, back to the refuge of the others, leaving her smile behind her like a damned Cheshire cat.

 

The others were setting dishes on the table when they got back to the living room, Luc still cursing himself. He didn't understand, when he was so elegant and controlled in everything he did, how he could keep bludgeoning her with thoughtlessness. He had only been trying, very cautiously, to let her know something about himself. Maybe that old wild child in him was determined to ruin his life.

He hated every other man who had touched her with a profound loathing. But he was used to trying over and over again to get something right. He couldn't judge her for it. In fact, he couldn't even wrap his mind around her courage, that she had thrown her heart out there again and again, that she had kept trying. How could she bear it? When he even thought of loving
her
and losing he—

Shock roared up in him. A clawing fear. He wanted to lock himself in his closet, curled over the box of childhood treasures he had managed to keep, and pretend that nothing precious could be torn from him ever again.

Putain,
he realized, staring at the back of her golden head as he tried to force his soul out of its fetal ball. That was why she was so afraid of him. Of anything but sex. Because he might matter.

“Mom always said you were the sweet one,” Cade told her cousin, eyeing his bandage ruefully.

Summer's step hitched.

“The angel-child,” Jaime laughed, rolling her eyes. “I remember.”

“She used to talk about Summer in the car with dad whenever we were on the way home from their place,” Cade told Luc. “ ‘The
sweetest
little girl, I could
smack
Sam and Mai.' ”

Summer stiffened.

“We were a little bit jealous,” Cade said, “since I was always getting in trouble for being too bossy, and Jaime for doing things like pitching an unholy fit on the lawn to save an anthill.”

“You
were
too bossy,” Jaime pointed out.

“The damn ants bit me all over!”

“You should have paid more attention to where you were stepping!”

Cade laughed. “But anyway. In contrast, you definitely stood out. ‘Such a loving little girl, it breaks my heart.' I think Mom wanted to adopt you.”

Summer threw Luc a sudden look, as if he was still holding that big umbrella and she was getting drenched. He took a step toward her and she slipped over by Jaime and Dominique
. Putain.
So now Luc was worse than Dominique?

“Dad, too,” Jaime said dryly. “Neither one of
us
could analyze P/E ratios as a dinner-table trick when we were five years old. That trick used to piss Mom off, too, though.”

“I could do it by the time I was seven!” Cade said defensively. Jaime rolled her eyes.

Luc tried to remember exactly what a P/E ratio was. Something to do with stocks, because his broker mentioned it on the rare occasions Luc actually let the man talk to him.
Summer
could recite that kind of thing when she was five years old? “Is that what you did over dessert?” That could explain a lot.

Pure, vivid hatred in those blue eyes. And a smile. “No, over desserts I was bored, mostly. I'm not much into sweets.”

Sylvain and Dominique both gave Luc looks of such appalled pity, he wanted to hit someone. Again.

“Mom would have lost it if she had seen you in college, in the tabloids all the time, going through all those boyfriends,” Cade said, and Sylvain winced suddenly, shot a glance at Luc, and closed his hand around Cade's arm.

His juggernaut of a wife, of course, plowed right on. “She probably would have staged an intervention. Kidnapped you and submitted you to endless talkings-to.” Cade's expression grew wistful at the mention of things her mother had never lived to see. Then her eyes crinkled, rueful and sympathetic. “Carried you off to a remote island, perhaps, until you learned how to pick a man who would take care of you.”

Summer closed her eyes.

“So, Dom,” Luc said. “This bloggers' award for Best Éclairs in Paris. Did you bribe the judges, or do you think they just couldn't afford mine? Why weren't you on the list, Sylvain? Still haven't learned how to make an actual pastry?”

You had to hand it to the solidarity that developed when men survived working in brutal kitchens together. They would seek out any excuse to vent that old urge to kill each other—and they could always do it as a team.

And Luc, after years of heading the most brutal kitchens of any of them—those of a top hotel's Michelin three-star restaurant—had little trouble directing a simple conversation to keep it off Summer for the rest of the evening, especially when he let them rib him instead.

As the evening stretched, the men kept talking shop, since their careers consumed their lives, and the women, denied Summer's childhood as a subject, talked . . . saving the world. Once she forgot herself, Summer's questions about cocoa institutions and economic policy, government levies, taxes, tribal influences on politics in cocoa-producing West Africa, and smallholder farmers shaped the whole conversation. She didn't know anything about any of it, and yet she knew exactly what to ask, as if each question and each answer was part of a complex five-dimensional puzzle she was putting together for Cade and Jaime. Once the Corey sisters got over their surprised appreciation, their discussions grew both more excited and more focused, the sky their limit as they plotted the reformation of cocoa production. It hadn't been just money that she gave all those boyfriends-on-the-way-up, had it? Did any of her exes even realize how much she had focused their dreams?

The warm, happy female voices glittered over his skin. The only consistent female in his youth had been his foster mother, Pascale Durand, her rigid, unsmiling, relentless efforts to shape his savage childhood into something acceptable to her had pushed her to the margins of his life while Bernard Durand had quickly formed the center. She had been a dry well where the love Luc had so desperately sought was concerned, while from Bernard Durand he could, when he was merciless enough with himself and perfect enough, at least milk pride. After he left his foster home, starred kitchens were a brutal and often sexist world very few women survived in. Until his colleagues started establishing their family lives and inviting people over for dinner, he hadn't really witnessed, close up, the way men and women could unwind and relax with each other, the warmth and love that could buoy up a whole room.

Had Summer? he wondered suddenly. With her father who spoke to her as if a beautiful smiling daughter was some ghastly disappointment, with parents who after four years of rare contact had only paused at the hotel for a few hours before dashing off again to more important things?

Under that smile, was she as clumsy and terrified and tempted by all this as he was?

It would rain forever, shutting them in a car, in a room, under a comforter, buried in each other's warmth . . .

Summer pressed her head against the glass, focusing on the empty streets as the car slipped away from Sylvain's apartment.
Stupid. You could have asked for another car to carry Luc straight home.

“So you were a sweetheart as a child?” Luc's voice was gentle and warm, washing over her like the dark rain. It made her want to slip off all her clothes and bathe in it. But then, she had always wanted to bathe in him. He just hadn't thought she had enough to offer in return.

“So they say,” she said to the dark streets.

“ ‘They'?”

“My nanny, and apparently Julie Corey. My mother, too, I guess.”

In the reflection in the glass, she saw Luc turn his hands palms up, studying them. “I wonder if you were sensitive. And fragile. And easily hurt.” His dark-lullaby voice had an odd note. As if he was trying, with great care, to wrap his mind around a beautiful alien species.

Even the Eiffel Tower was extinguished by the rain at this hour, an almost invisible shadow. She fought not to look at him as they crossed the Pont Alexandre III. “I'm quite strong, actually.”

“You must be incredibly strong,” he agreed, stunning her into glancing at him. One finger traced around the bright blue bandage she had put on his hand. “But it's a different strength than mine, and I may have . . . misunderstood you. I'm sorry if I've hurt you, Summer.”

Her heart began to beat very fast. She waggled her fingers at him, staring back out the window, vague and dismissive: Who,
you
? Hurt
me
?

The touch of his hands shocked through her, closing around her hips. Lifting her, he brought her astride him, manipulating her body as easily as if it was . . . nothing. “You have no idea how poorly I respond to dismissal,” he said, slipping his hands under her coat, stroking them up her ribs to cup her breasts. She gasped on a wave of eroticism. They were in the back of a car, and he had just taken her body as if he had the right. And she wanted to whimper and rub herself against him, beg him to use her however he wanted.

How
she hated herself.

“You probably had a lot of toys growing up, didn't you?” He cupped her breasts completely, caressing them, supple, clever fingers learning from every expression that shocked across her face. Her body sighed forward and those same hands braced her off him.
“I didn't.”
His fierce voice closed around her like handcuffs on her wrists. “I had almost no toys, and I've kept every single one I ever had.” His thumbs pressed in a deep circle into her nipples, sending her arching in complete submission.
“Forever.”

He set her back in her seat. She stared at him, uncomprehending. Something savage washed across his face, and then his hands flicked out, lightning fast, and buttoned her coat just before her door opened.

Summer looked up at the doorman holding an umbrella for her and then back at Luc, blind. He was already sliding out of his side of the car. She fumbled to her feet, shaking, as she darted a glance at Luc across the car roof.