The Chocolate Heart by Laura Florand Read Free Book Online

of course. He was Luc Leroi, damn it. These days, other people could look at his life and long for it.
    â€œSo what’s she like?” Sylvain asked Cade. “Luc needs to know.”
    Luc sent him a dangerous look. Sylvain grinned. The chocolatier had been insufferably smug even before Cade sealed the one chink in his arrogance—women—by settling that straight gaze on him and leaving no doubt as to her choice. Now there was really no being around the man at all.
    â€œI’m pretty much her antithesis,” Cade said. “So I don’t really know her that well. Besides, I don’t want to comment on someone’s girlfriend in front of him.” She smirked in an exact imitation of her husband.
    â€œShe asked me to show her to her room and then pretty much passed out in my arms,” Luc lied, driven. “Wouldn’t you have picked her up?” he challenged the other two men.
    â€œBefore Cade, probably,” Sylvain said ruefully. “And gotten my heart broken.” Only an extremely observant, obsessive-compulsive person would have noticed the little squeeze he gave Cade’s waist in gratitude for the fact that his heart couldn’t get broken anymore. No reason at all for it to make a man conscious of how empty his own hands were.
    â€œNo,” Dom said. “Either she’s well enough to stand on her own two feet and just trying to manipulate me, or I need to call an ambulance.”
    Yeah, he talked big when Jaime wasn’t around, didn’t he? Luc gave him an annoyed look.
    What was wrong with manipulation, anyway? He didn’t mind if Summer wrapped that silky hair around his wrist to jerk his heartstrings. She could stroke her hair all over his body if she wanted. Or . . . merde. Maybe not. The key was to keep control, and twenty years of practice at perfect control might not be enough to overcome all the wildness still lurking from his childhood if she did that.
    But he could manipulate, too. He could control things that were hot and cold and fragile and hard better than perhaps any other man on the planet, and he had barely gotten started. In about fifteen more minutes he would set before her a golden heart held gently in a dark hand, and her eyes would light like a child’s, and her mouth would melt as she looked from it to him. That would be how he started, training her, until she couldn’t even hear his name without melting, without wanting.
    â€œI used to think she was pretty desperate for attention.” Cade shrugged. “It takes talent to have the media after her the way she did. Jamie had to be tear-gassed at G8 summits to get her picture all over the Web. But they never could get enough of Summer, and for a while she seemed to lap it up. The first year after she dropped off the face of the earth, I kept expecting to see a reality show turn up about her South Pacific life or something. But no, she stayed in the islands for four years, way past media reach. Jaime spent a week on a cargo boat getting out there once, just in case she needed someone to save her from a mad island chief or a sudden drug habit, and said she was relaxed, happy, and clearly adored by her schoolkids.”
    â€œHer what ?”
    Cade grinned. Seriously, far too much of Sylvain was wearing off on her. “You guys didn’t even chat a little to get to know each other first? She’s been teaching school out on minimally populated islands that don’t even have regular electricity. Her dad can hardly stand it. Well, he clearly can’t stand it anymore at all. Why else would she be here?”
    Because she had gotten fed up with tropical roughing it and wanted to spend a few months being pampered in a top hotel in Paris, luxuriating in every delicacy Luc’s hands could create? Although . . . four years was a long time for a spoiled heiress to last before she got fed up. “Isn’t she old enough not to do what her father