Read The Chocolate Heart for Free Online Page A

Summer Corey. She’s exactly your type.” Dark-haired poet Sylvain, media darling, regularly named the best chocolatier in the world, had a gift for sounding as if he couldn’t possibly be wrong, no matter what subject he talked about. He was at the gala because of his wife, Cade, presumably. Billionaires always stuck together.
    â€œNo, she is not.” How would Sylvain know? Luc rarely gave himself enough time to date. It didn’t work out for him. His dates declared him too controlled, too careful, not affectionate or attentive enough. And the couple of times he had let himself go as a teenager had been disastrous, reducing him to a clinging, desperate, love-starved person he could not stand to be again and whom the girl in question hadn’t been able to stand, either. It boggled his mind, the degree of touching and warmth and relaxation between someone like Sylvain and Cade. How did they do that? And, having attained it, how did they manage to go out in public, and not lock themselves in an apartment for the rest of their lives, wallowing in it?
    â€œLuc, please. She’s exactly any man’s type.”
    That set Luc’s teeth again. “Aren’t you married?”
    â€œNo, she is not,” Dominique Richard interrupted, sounding annoyed as he joined the conversation. “She’s the kind of woman who thinks she’s any man’s type, which isn’t the same thing.” He sounded as if he held a long-standing grudge against that kind of woman. But then, Dominique often sounded as if he held a grudge. Big, dark, aggressive, the bad boy of Paris’s chocolate scene had only recently been caught by a girl-next-door type who left him so softened and fragile whenever she was around that Luc had to look away. It wasn’t good for men like him and Dominique to have their raw-egg insides pouring out.
    Damn Patrick for that image.
    â€œI’m married, but you’re not married,” Sylvain pointed out. “We were talking about you.”
    â€œThen let’s stop. I’m sure talking about you would be much more interesting.”
    Which proved how knocked off-balance he was, to swell Sylvain’s head even further. “Inherently,” Sylvain agreed, with a gleam in his eye. “But I haven’t kidnapped a stranger and carried her off to her hotel room to ravage her recently.” He managed to look both pious and regretful.
    â€œIt’s not my fault your marriage is boring,” Luc retorted. Dominique laughed. He and Dom had worked for a while in the same kitchen on their way up, and Luc had always been one of the few people who could get along with Dominique. Possibly because each man had a fundamental hole in him from his childhood that the other sensed. “What do you do, gossip nonstop?”
    â€œThere’s a viral YouTube video of it, Luc. Some guest caught it, or some hotel employee, but I think you had better go with guest if you don’t want someone fired. According to Cade, Summer used to trail paparazzi like a comet before she disappeared for years.”
    Luc glanced at Summer, currently smiling up at yet another dark-haired man. Had half the men at this party dyed their hair black to play to her type, or what? In that glittering room, she shouldn’t have stood out as the most golden thing in it, but she did. The only gold that was real.
    Merde, really? Had he been working all his fucking life not to reign over this gold and marble palace around him, but to have her ?
    â€œAre they related? She and Cade and Jaime?” Cade Corey, the elder of two heirs to the multinational conglomerate of Corey Chocolate, had married Sylvain Marquis in a surreal turn of events the winter before. One of the best chocolatiers in the world and some producer of mass-market milk chocolate. Even Luc’s lip had curled in involuntary revulsion at the mésalliance. Sylvain had been accused of selling out more than once.
    Younger