Free The Chocolate Heart by Laura Florand Page B

chocolate-gold heart. “Aww. That’s so cute, Luc. You’ve finally let it out of its cage.”

C HAPTER 6
    H e sent it to her, the sphere, on a day when the rain sheeted down like the end of hope: a delicate ephemeral shield of chocolate around a treasure of gold so brilliant and so fragile that it seemed to pulse there, a frozen mousse coated in gold leaf, hiding, according to the waiter, a melting heart, begging someone to eat it up, swallow it whole . . . and crap it out later, she told herself harshly.
    It lured her, just like it was supposed to. It taunted her with its efforts to control her. It made her hurt, wanting desperately to curl up inside some better shield than that fragile veil of chocolate threads, so no one could see her heart so easily and eat it, so no one could mock her for it.
    She nearly shoved it off the table, the dessert she hadn’t ordered, and the waiter turned rather white. When he neared the door back into the kitchens with it, she saw him trying desperately to pass it on to some other waiter to take back instead of him.
    â€œYou’re hard to please,” the man sitting across from her said as if he liked that about her. He would, of course. If her father had given him her new phone number, he had to be ambitious and competitive. Mike Brodzik, one of his investment managers. Handsome and attentive and very, very interested in her father’s power. He was better than being alone.
    She opened big eyes at him. “Oh, no,” she said with a limpid innocence, just to mess with everybody, especially herself. “I’m actually . . .” A slow, sweet smile straight into his eyes. “Very, very easy.”
    Which kept his attention on her, all right, but made her kind of sick with disgust at herself. She wanted to go home.
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    When the fog crushed everything to gray, like the ghost of every misery past, he sent her three golden orbits of a star around a dark, proud mountain, the mountain a chocolate so pure and smooth it was like glass, to slide off, and hidden in amid the golden sugar orbits of the star, at the very peak of the mountain, a tiny delicate apple covered in gold leaf. She didn’t know what the tiny apple tasted like inside the gold, or what was in the mountain, or how easily those golden star orbits would shatter at her touch, because she sent it back. Of course. Her throat closing, her hand curling slow and hard against her thigh under the table, as she tried very hard not to cry out her protest, to beg for it back.
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    When the setting sun sucked the last life out of the day, like a blood-gorged tick, and she was ready to sell her soul not to be alone in the night, he sent her a glowing ball of red sugar in the form of a most perfect apple; its red glistened in the light of the chandeliers, drawing the eyes of all the diners as the waiter carried it to her. Setting it as he had clearly been trained, the waiter turned it precisely one quarter, so that the other side of the gleaming perfect red showed: white. “It’s called Pomme d’Amour, ” the waiter said. The French word for caramel apple. Or Apple of Love. And that was no caramel apple. She wet her lips as she stared at that tempting, tempting red and white and what it might hide. She could just reach out and take it. Unlike when she was a child, no one could stop her. No one could withhold it from her. Except, of course, the man who’d made it, should he gain that power.
    â€œI’ll kiss you,” the man across from her murmured, an old fling from her wild college days come to look her up. “If it puts you to sleep.”
    Snow White, right.
    â€œI don’t eat sweets,” she told the waiter for the fifteenth time and pushed it away. Inside, the child in her panted hard as she fought not to cry.
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    He sent her hot chocolate. It was waiting for her when she came in from the hotel’s little skating rink with a band of little kids. Summer