Read Online The Chocolate Heart by Laura Florand - Free Book Online Page A

Alain Roussel a tight, pinched smile, then realized it was pinched. She took one long deep breath and let the smile relax into something glimmering, easy. Her hair still clung wet to the nape of her neck, and she realized she had not swum far enough. She was still, after all, stuck in this damn hotel. With two more months and twenty-nine days before she could earn her freedom and get back home, bringing a satellite with her like one of those heroic animals in legends who brought back the sun. Which always left the animal burned to a crisp or blind, didn’t it?
    â€œThey don’t really make good . . . toys,” the geeky, elegant director was saying carefully, watching her as if she was a child with a bad temper made emperor of Rome. Seated across from her at the table in his office, he was ostensibly going over some basic figures of the hotel’s operations. But that hadn’t really been what he wanted to talk about. The newspaper photo that had been lying on top of those figures—her, being swept away in Luc’s arms—was now discreetly folded in four, a little matter they all needed to forget. “These top chefs.”
    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.
    â€œLuc is controlled,” Alain agreed. “Exceptionally.”
    â€œExcept 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?
    â€œIt 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?”
    â€œA yacht ?”
    Luc hadn’t gossiped?
    â€œMademoiselle 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.
    Â 
    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