The Chocolate Heart (6 page)

Summer nodded understandingly. “Not like me, for example.”

That threw him a little. He obviously halfway thought that she did make a good toy, by her own choice, and therefore didn't know how to respond. He pushed on. “They're very . . . emotional.”

She raised her eyebrows. “He seems pretty in control of his emotions to me.” They were all packed in him until she didn't know how he kept the dam from bursting. She sighed a little, wistful at the thought of that dam bursting on her. Yeah, wouldn't
that
be a way to screw her life up so fast she might not get it back together again. She really did have crappy instincts about men.

“Luc is controlled,” Alain agreed. “Exceptionally.”

“Except when he hauls strange women off into elevators, of course,” Summer mentioned thoughtfully.

Alain's lips tightened. Clearly he blamed her for that elevator. “But I've had to handle top chefs all my career, and underneath that control, there's no way he can be so different from the others. He lives on his emotions. And his emotions are . . . bigger than ours. More passionate. More powerful.”

Hunger curled in her, deep and improper. “Of course.” She smiled easily. “It's the mark of a great man, isn't it?”

Of course his emotions would be
bigger
than hers. Who was she but a great man's daughter?

“It would be really disastrous for this hotel if he were to quit,” Alain mentioned.

Summer curled her fingertips into the tear in her jeans. “I'm sorry. Are you telling me that I should apologize to him for offering him”—
me, offering him me
—“a yacht? Just so I don't hurt his tender feelings?”

“A
yacht
?”

Luc hadn't gossiped?

“Mademoiselle Corey—a yacht? We need him in Paris! He's not only one of the world's greatest pastry chefs, but he has
showmanship.
The cameras just eat him up, with all that restrained, clean passion of his. He's
invaluable
to this place. What are you trying to do, steal him away from your own hotel?”

Summer was silent for a long moment. And then, low, “Obviously that would be a spoiled thing to do, wouldn't it? No. No, I don't know what I could possibly have been thinking. I'll apologize.”

After all, obviously when a woman offered a beautiful, exceptional man a yacht to run away with her, and he left her lying on the damn bed and walked out, an apology on her part was in order.

 

The first step into the kitchens shocked the smile off Summer's face. Hundreds of milling souls, fermenting chaos, lava bubbling, geysers shooting up, cries of “Hot, hot, hot!”
“Chaud, chaud, chaud!”
and the caught souls ducking away, pressing to their counters.

Oh, wow, this was
so
much better than her lonely, elegant hotel room. Or wandering around the echoing vastness of the Louvre, trying to force her mind to dwell on the art, until the museum guards kicked her out at closing and forced her to slink back to her boarding school, the way she used to the last time she lived in Paris.

Fascinated, Summer stepped forward. Metal clanged. Figures in white twisted around each other between open flames and boiling liquids as if they had been doing this for all eternity. Counters and stoves and stainless steel stretched in all directions. Black demons slipped in and out, tuxedoed waiters carrying great trays.

She pushed deeper, staring at flesh being hacked with great butcher knives, entrails being twisted, blood boiling over a low flame. Blades flew over roots and fruits of the earth she didn't even have a name for. White souls glanced at her occasionally, solidifying into chefs who were wondering what she was doing in hell.

“May I help you?” someone asked when she nearly ran into him as she rounded a corner. One quick hand touched her shoulder to steady her and then dropped politely away.

She looked up at a lazy smile, a sun-gilt, golden-brown Achillean hero who had got caught down here by accident, or maybe a confused surfer who should be hanging out watching for waves on some Hawaiian beach. He wore white chef 's attire, as did most of the people around her, but was bareheaded, no toque or white cap. “Just exploring. I'm Summer Corey.”

“
Merde.
I was afraid of that. I suppose that means you're looking for him.” He stepped back to reveal Luc Leroi.

Luc concentrated completely, not looking at her at all, that black hair clinging damply to his temples. She locked on him and all the chaos coalesced around her. A ferment of dangerous, beautiful creativity, completely controlled by that darkness at its center. A rich, complex dance where everyone knew his role, and those weren't screams, just firm calls of warning as a great bubbling pot was carried from a stove to wherever its contents were needed.

He was working on something beautiful, and it was crazy how powerful need ran through her suddenly, for him to ignore it in her favor.
Put
me
between you and that beautiful thing you're working on, forget everything but me, make me forget everything but you.

Yeah, right. Not that
she
would have any trouble forgetting everything else, but she was trying not to be such a damned idiot about what she expected from men like him.

His focus had no room for her. Seeing it explained a lot about how easy he had found it to dismiss her. Amazing how driven men could do that, shut her out like she was nothing. The concentration that let him achieve so many great things was a black hole for her, sucking all her light toward it until she felt she could be pulled through it into something beautiful.

She had
always
wanted to be sucked into the black hole. To see what was so impossibly wonderful that it was more important than anything she could do or be or say.

But still, she drew closer, even as she fought the pull. All her father's complex projects had been in his head, on his computer, things a child could never see. She could only see him not seeing her. Here, the fruit of Luc's concentration formed into incredible fantasy under his hands. She couldn't help looking at it: Something soft and gold nestled safely in a net of darkness, while the black-haired
pâtissier
carved holes in that chocolate darkness so that the gold heart was protected from the world, but not shut away from it.

She took a hard breath and looked away, trying to breathe under a high, crashing wave.

No. Oh, no.

She wasn't going to start letting desserts have power over her again.

Especially not wielded by someone like him. Even right up close, she didn't penetrate his concentration.

What
was
it with her? After three damn years of celibacy, of getting her act together, how had she possibly, on pure instinct alone, looked around a lobby of strangers and picked out the one man who could ignore her as completely and utterly as her father had? How had she let herself be reduced so instantly to that little girl begging for attention again?

Another step.

She needed a therapist.

Luc didn't even glance at her. Long, lean, controlled hands flecked the heart with gold leaf.

Her own heart hurt so much, so suddenly. Her own heart wanted to ask,
Why do you take so much better care of that one than me?

And then she did a bad thing. The kind of thing she used to do to her father, when she was still little and brave enough, or to boyfriends, in the early days of hope, only then it was usually a computer mouse she jiggled. This time she just reached out and touched his wrist.

The chocolate net shattered, pieces spilling to either side of the golden heart. Summer jerked back and ran into someone who steadied her with a light touch on her shoulder before disappearing in the fluid dance of bodies around her.

I didn't mean to
ruin
it.
She almost yielded to the urge to turn tail and run. Instead, she set her shoulders, lifted her chin, and waited for his anger to burst over her. And at last he looked at her.

 

Luc had known the instant she stepped into the kitchens, from the shift in activity, and his teeth sharpened, a lion for a gazelle. Oh, so she didn't like sweets, did she?
Watch this.

Because he had figured out that dessert for her. It wasn't something melting and gold held in a palm of darkness. It was something melting and gold entirely surrounded, a sphere of darkness that held it prisoner, that wouldn't let it get away. And the mousse of the melting heart would be—passion fruit. Tropical, delicate, unforgettable. Saying,
Take me, oh, no, sorry, you can't, I'm only his. Held in this embrace of darkness.

He lured her in step by step. Knowing exactly what was happening to her, the way her mouth was watering, her body melting, the way temptation was rising in her until she was ready to beg for a taste. He would grant that taste with a smile and watch her get lost in him. Unable to find her way back out.
You think I want a pathetic yacht? When I could have you?

That elusive sunshine gilded over him. His chest tightened in hunger.
I've got her. She's mine.
Maybe no one else could catch sunshine, but these days he could do even that. It was what, after all, he had worked so hard to learn how to do.

Control. It was all about control.
The only way he could share his soul and turn it into a form no one could resist.
This is the sublime. This is who I am. Don't you ever drop money carelessly in my hand. But when you drop yourself—see how well my hands will take care of you?

Rich, feral satisfaction surged through him as she took that last step. As she reached, uncontrollably, for that chocolate sphere.

And then her touch on his wrist ripped his soul right out of its firm seating and lodged it under those two fingers, pulsing madly against them like a caught human heart. The chocolate shattered. She jerked back.

And his whole world swirled dizzily.
No. No, don't go, come back, I think you have my heart stuck to your fingers.

She rubbed her thumb over the two fingertips that had touched his pulse, as if she felt something unfamiliar there. Something unfamiliar and a little sticky that she needed to wash off.

“I'm sorry.” Her eyes flicked from the mess to him. “I didn't mean to—”

“It's all right,” he said, cursing himself for that flash of fear in her eyes, and even more for the mess of chocolate. What a wasted chance to utterly subjugate her.
Control, you fool. You have to keep control.

She relaxed visibly at his quiet tone. Had she been hearing stories about temperamental chefs and imagined him throwing pans at her head? If she thought he was capable of losing control so easily, he had only himself to blame.

“I just—you weren't looking at me,” she said and bit her lip too late to catch the words back.

No,
you
weren't looking at
me. “I'm looking at you now.”

She flushed. His fingertips caressed the marble counter in hunger for the heat of her skin. They stood completely still as chefs and assistants brushed by everywhere. “Is there something I can help you with, Mademoiselle Corey? Did you want to see how we work, perhaps?”

Oh, yes,
his whole body shouted fiercely,
watch me. Grow all absorbed in me. Unable to look away.

Her eyes flickered to his with a flash of pure hunger.

Yes!
Triumph licked him, thorough hot licks of her mouth on his skin.
Oh, yes, I can make you hunger for me.

And then her smile turned her whole beautiful, luminous, delicate face into something so impossibly wonderful that his hands—
his
hands—almost shook with the need to grab it to him, to
crush
it to him, and never let it get away. His hands. Shaking. Crushing.

“Oh, no, I wouldn't want to disturb you.” She sent a rueful glance at the utter mess she had made of his—
her
heart. “They always did say I shattered their concentration.”

The “they” she used, in French, was masculine,
ils.
Jealousy burned across his palms, pushing their urge to crush her to him. “Who?”

“Oh”—she waved a dismissive, amused hand—“my father. Boyfriends.”

He had been controlling insanely temperamental people—including himself—in kitchens for all his adult life. And he had never realized he had a jaw muscle that could tighten quite that way. “I'm not your father. And I'm most certainly not one of your boyfriends.”

Again that little shimmer in her smile, as if it had slid and settled back into place. Did she do it on purpose, the way she made that silk dress shiver over her body, until a man wanted to lock her in some dark closet with him and spend the night just running his hands over and over that silk against her skin? Fighting himself for control, to make her his and his and his again without cracking?

“Oh, dear, of
course
not,” she said lightly and reached up to touch his jaw in caressing condescension, right there in front of his whole team. The touch hissed through him. “I forgot we were still working out the details on that. It's
such
a quandary, about that yacht.” She tapped her lower lip with the finger of one hand while the other stroked down from his jaw to smooth the shoulder of his chef 's jacket, driving him completely insane with the need to strip it off, to feel that stroke against his bare skin. “I can't think what else to . . .” Her eyes lit. “I know. What about a penthouse apartment?”