The Chocolate Heart (32 page)

She shook her head against his chest. One giant fishbowl. “I can take out a canoe or go for a long hike or swim. I can be alone if I really, really want to.”

“Which happens . . . never, at a guess.”

“No, once in a while,” she protested. “I got used to it, you know. Being alone.”

His hands wove through her hair. “It's funny, I was never alone. But I think I got used to it, too.”

“Oh, Luc.” She pressed a kiss into his bare shoulder.

“I want you to be happy, Summer. I thought I knew how to let things go.” His arms tightened around her. “I guess, in the end, I'm still too much like my own father. Do you know he came back year after year to try to make contact with me again? That he got arrested twice? And until a week ago, I thought he just . . . let me go.” Tension flexed through his whole body. “I thought maybe that was what you had to do sometimes, for people you loved. Accept that you were bad for them.”

She wrapped her arms around him and held on tight. His own arms closed around her convulsively. “I'm so glad you're here,” he whispered.

“How did it go? With your—father?”

Luc grabbed fistfuls of her hair and used it to cover his face. “It was horrible. Coming right after you—” He broke off and shook his head. “Do you know how hard I've worked not to get ripped apart that way anymore? It was horrible. And I'm already giving him money, and he's already feeling threatened by my success, I can see it. When I marry you, it's going to explode his head. Unless you can get your father to disown you, maybe. That might help.”

Summer blinked at the word “marry,” but Luc didn't even seem to realize what he had just said.

“It would have been so much easier to leave him out of my life. But—he did come after me.
Tu sais?
He never forgot me. And I think he's proud of me, too, and just as torn up as I am. And”—could the moonlight off the ocean possibly be catching moisture in his eyes?—“I really needed you after that meeting, Summer. I really. Really. Really. Needed you.” His arms squeezed her too tight. “You ate the damn pomegranate seeds. You ate my
heart.
You weren't supposed to still want to go.”

“I
didn't
want to go. I was thinking how much I would miss this place and that it was going to be so sad to say good-bye to everyone here. And then you started in about how you didn't
need
me. And what is this about pomegranate seeds? You're not Hades, Luc.”

His mouth twisted. “I did try to tell you that.”

“I think the Fairy King was closer. But mostly—mostly you're just a man.”

One eyebrow went up. His mouth was very bittersweet, wry. “Never say so.”

“That's what makes it so incredible. What you do. You're just a man. A human mortal
man.
And you do—what you do.”

There was a long silence.
“Merci, soleil,”
he said softly. “After all those people who call me a god, I never realized you could give me a promotion.”

Again, a long silence fell, peace stretching, as they unconsciously let the hammock swing to the rhythm of the waves.

“I had an idea,” he said. “That isn't a choice between here and Paris. That has more sunshine in it for you.”

She traced a hand between the panels of his shirt, left open when he pulled it back on after they got out of the waves. He had such a lean, gorgeous body.

“The south of France. A nice old stone house and a garden. Maybe bordering on a lavender field. Or maybe an old house in one of the old hill towns, with a little courtyard for our garden, so it would be close to the restaurant. We would have to look around, see what house we fall in love with. Maybe you can help me with the business plan, since I've never had to do one, and you're so good at asking all the right questions. One of the first chefs I worked under did that, Gabriel Delange. He was
chef pâtissier
at the Luxe, and the chef there, Pierre Manon, fired him in a fit of jealousy at how much attention he was stealing. So he opened his own place in a little hill town near Grasse. He got his third star three years ago. He did so much for his little town's tourism, they built a fountain to him.” Luc gave that tiny, contained grin of his and admitted: “I wouldn't mind having a fountain built to me. And”—his voice got all funny again—“I have a really powerful vision of you with four black-haired kids in lavender fields.” He took a deep breath and watched her.

She
got all funny. As if her whole being had disappeared into a burst of butterflies, fluttering upward, outward. It felt dizzying and tickling and terrifying and lovely.
“Oh,”
she said very low and hard. A breath. Another breath. Butterflies were dancing in starlight. “Would you be watching us from a wooden swing under a grape arbor?”

Their eyes held, one of those moments when they realized that, despite all the surface differences, their souls were exactly matched. “That's what I imagined at first. Especially if it's been a hard day and I just want to watch you for a while and feel happy. But now I think I'll want to get up and play with the five of you.”

“F-four kids?”

A little shrug under her body. “I don't know. That's just how many I see.”

Summer's tummy could not whirl more. She squeezed her arms around him again, because she had to squeeze onto something for stability. She could see this, too. It felt so
happy,
as if they could patch together their two love-starved childhoods and make one whole family so full of love it was overflowing.

“You might have to help me. I don't really know how to play, except with food. Do you think you could help me with the restaurant accounting, too? Or at least help find someone good we can pay to do it. I hate to make you, but I do not have a summa cum laude from Harvard in economics, and I loathe doing it.”

“This is a really beautiful vision,” Summer whispered. She could barely speak. Butterflies made out of starlight couldn't speak. “One where I'm—an important part of it.”

“Oh,
soleil.
” His arms tightened hard around her. “To make a happy family? You're
crucial.
You're the one who figured out how to do that, all on your own, while I was just figuring out how to be the most important man in the room. I wonder how many years of living happily ever after in lavender fields we're going to need before we trust each other's role in it. I'll try to trust that you can stay with me, if you can try to trust that I will value you.”

“This is good practice,” she whispered into his chest. Scent trailed over them, with the breeze—sea and salt, and the gardenia plant growing by her bedroom half-wall.

He curved a hand over her shoulder, seeming entirely content to dust grains of sand off her skin, one by one. “Yes. It is.” They swayed for a while in silence. “I know it will be a wrench for you to give this up. I know it will break your heart. I just—do you think it's possible it might break your heart to make it
wider
? So you can move on to your next thing in life? You don't have to abandon this world entirely. I would love to come back here for a month every year on vacation, and you could teach me to relax. But I know you're probably worried about the school year, about who will take as good care of your kids as you.”

“I thought I could start up a grant,” she said, and his arms flexed around her. “A teaching assistant fellowship for new graduates. You would be surprised how many bright, enthusiastic people in their senior years at top universities dream of just one year of adventure before they continue their competitive lives. And if I word the fellowship right, and make it properly competitive, this is one they could put on their CVs to show future employers how amazing they are.”

Luc wrapped her hair around his wrist enough to nudge her head up off his chest. “Summer. How can you see how amazing that would be on someone else's life experience, but not insist people see it as just as amazing when you do it?”

She shrugged, instinctively self-deprecating.

“
Soleil.
I need you more than you can manage to understand yet, but I was right, what I thought that first moment I saw you. You need me, too. I'm not going to put up with you belittling yourself this way, or with anyone else doing it for you.”

“You used to do it yourself.”

“
One time,
Summer. I had just handed you my heart and watched you pass it on to some other woman because you didn't care for it.”

“ ‘Higher standards?' ”

“Oh, for—higher standards than to be your casual pastime, Summer. Not higher standards than
you.
It wouldn't be possible.”

Her heart sparked with joy.

“It wouldn't,” he repeated, tightening his hold on her waist. Again they rocked in silence for a moment. “So . . . your grant idea suggests . . . you've given this some serious consideration.”

She took a tight breath, a band constricting and releasing her heart, in a rhythm past her control, so that she had to grab for air whenever she could. “You don't have to give Paris up for me. As long as we find an apartment with a fireplace, I'll be
fine.
”

That compressed grin of his that she had come to realize meant so much laughter and happiness was welling in him that he didn't know what to do with it. “Summer, sometimes you have to let go of your past.”

“I know.” She peeked past the edge of the hammock to give the ocean a firm nod. “I'm going to sit on the Champ de Mars and watch fireworks go off all around the Eiffel Tower and thumb my nose. Uh—you'll be sitting with me, right? You don't have to work Bastille Day?”

He laughed, a deep almost sleepy sound. “I mean me. I want to let go of my past. I don't want to spend my life striving not to be that kid in the Métro. I
like
that kid in the Métro. He won a princess, didn't he? And I'm getting attached to the idea of sunshine and lavender and having a garden I can relax in with my family.”

Summer's happiness just grew and grew. “If we go to the south of France, maybe we could still take on some of Jaime's and Cade's interns and apprentices.”

“What?”

She explained.

“You said I would be good at that?” He searched her face.

She nodded firmly.

“I'm sure I could be persuaded,” he said ruefully, stretching her hair out in a pattern along the ropes of the hammock. “If you want me to do it.”

“Maybe we could even take one of the kids from here. If there was someone really interested in it. Dying to see the rest of the world. Or maybe they could just come visit.”

“I'm going to end up like my foster father,” Luc said with an odd smile, alarmed and intrigued. “All those foster kids and apprentices.”

Her hands closed over his palms. “Without the hot paraffin.”

He shook his head, but his fingers linked with hers and pressed them gently. “Nobody uses hot paraffin anymore anyway, Summer. And my foster mother was . . . very rigid. Not like you at all. You would bring . . . warmth.” He cradled her hands against his face, in what seemed retroactive longing to have had that warmth for himself. “He's a good man, you know,” he said softly. “He tried to do his best by us. It's strange to think that you might help me to become an even better one.” He said that in a low rush, like a caterpillar claiming to believe in butterflies.

“I love you,” she said, and his face split into a smile.

“It just pours out of you, doesn't it?” he said wonderingly. “I should have wrapped myself up with you that first night and never let you go. You might trust me now if I had. What an oversensitive, overcautious, arrogant idiot I was.”

Summer nodded.

He laughed and then was serious again. “Do you think you can learn to trust me with yourself, Summer? I know I'm terrible at this so far, but I really do know how to take care of beautiful, precious things. And I love you. I really, truly love you, however bad I am at it, just the way you are.”

She could feel herself growing more and more luminous with every word he said. But she repeated firmly, “I'm not a thing. Not for anybody. I think I had to learn that, too.”

His fingers, which had started to pick up strands of her hair and weave them again, paused. “Does that mean I don't get to play with you anymore?”

She blushed. “I'm not talking about that at all. Hush.”

He laughed a little, low and pleased. She could feel him growing a little aroused against her again, but he didn't seem in any hurry to do anything about it.

She sat up enough to look down at him. “And to answer your question—if you can trust me, I can trust you. If not, it all falls apart.”

He looked so perfect lying in that hammock in the moonlight. Exactly as she had imagined him there. Even to the stars in his eyes as he looked up at her. “If what you need to trust is that I will love you, and take care of you, and try not to hurt you, and try to give you what you need, forever, then . . . it would be my very great honor, Summer. But I'm going to need a lot of help.”

“I hope so,” she said. “Since I'm not planning on being just the object in a couple ever again.”

He smiled, his hands stroking gently over her lower back. “All that softness, all that gentleness, all that flippant, beautiful sunshine. I'll need you to give it to me. Just pour it out over me and trust me with it, Summer. I'm worth it. I promise.”

“Luc. Of course you are worth it.”

His face lit in one of those rare moments when you could see all that brilliance inside him. “See? That's what I need.”