A Kiss in Lavender

by Laura Florand

  Which she knew about him.

  Plus, let’s be honest. It’s not like it’s that much of a hardship for him if you’re not interested.

  He could pick up another woman in five minutes, if he realized this particular woman wasn’t going to put out. Hell, he and his cousins had been able to get all the girls before he ran away and became a badass packed with so much confidence he probably couldn’t even let out a breath without toppling several weaker confidences in the wind.

  She’d seen these paratroopers operate when she sat at cafés in Calvi. Seen how long it took women to say yes. They'd hit on her, too—woman sitting alone in military country—so she’d actually felt for herself how hard it was to say no to that much sexy confidence combined with a hard-built body. If she sat alone for an hour in a café in Calvi, she’d get hit on with utter confidence at least twenty times. Sometimes three or four guys at once, entirely willing to compete to see who came out on top. Of her.

  She liked the quiet of him, in contrast to some of those guys. All that same confidence, perfectly controlled.

  “Just drinks?” she said.

  His mouth curved, subtle and wicked. He held her eyes. “Just whatever you want.”

  Chapter 2

  Beautiful view. He’d been telling the truth.

  A simply furnished apartment structured on two floors that he said he had rented online from a white-haired Italian woman who was sitting in the village’s little piazza when they passed through it and who gave Elena a judgmental look when “Julien” nodded buona sera to her. Set partway up the cliff at the edge of the village, its terrace gave them a view not only of Corniglia but of the four other villages of Cinque Terre, nestled into their cliffs along the sea to either side, all five luminous in the night.

  “Wow,” Elena said softly.

  “It’s your big decision time.” He stood at the rail beside her. Big, close...and now they were in private. And he wanted a decision. The butterflies went on high alert. She met his eyes. He smiled a little. “Water, red wine, or limoncello? The landlady left gifts. I think the wine is from a cousin’s vineyard, and she made the limoncello herself.”

  “I, uh…” had better stick to water, she had been going to say. Because if she did do this, she wanted to remember every detail. Every ridge in his abs, every rub of his calluses, every time his mouth curved as if he was getting exactly what he wanted out of her. But she was in Italy, and limoncello homemade by an old woman who sat in the piazza and kept an eye on her tourist-renter’s doings sounded like something she shouldn’t pass up. Seize experiences. They may be all you get to keep. Her life motto. “Maybe a limoncello and soda.”

  She followed him back into the little kitchen to watch him mix it because…well, there were limits. You haven’t seen him in fifteen years. And her hopeful trust in someone she wanted to have care about her had been betrayed many times before.

  One part limoncello, four parts Perrier, over three big ice cubes from the apartment’s freezer. He wasn’t trying to get her drunk. He didn’t need to get girls drunk, did he?

  The limoncello tasted delicious, tart and sweet and so lemony she could have been drinking one of the nearby groves in a glass. Lightened with the Perrier and ice to something cool and refreshing.

  “I think she uses her own lemons,” AKA-Julien said. “That grove that goes up the hill behind this building is hers.”

  It could be a perfect evening, if she let it. The view of luminous villages along the Mediterranean. The taste of lemon. A hot but courteous “stranger” who probably knew exactly what to do with his body for best results in every situation, including the one just a trip down the stairs to the bedroom.

  It could conceivably be the most perfect evening of her life.

  As long as she didn’t tell him why she was really here. Or rather, why she had started out here. Why she was really here now, in his apartment…come on, Elena. You know that has nothing to do with the job.

  She turned toward him. He reached out a hand and drew a strand of her hair through his fingers, long and slow, as he had earlier, holding the end and rubbing it a moment before he let it fall. His gaze rested on her lips.

  Her heart thumped. Her body felt flushed and wanting. “I shouldn’t be doing this.”

  Steady eyes assessed her without accusation. “Got someone who’s trusting you not to?”

  The only person with any interest in what she was doing right now was Colette Delatour, and the nonagenarian’s relationship didn’t extend to control over Elena’s personal choices.

  Oh, he meant like a boyfriend or husband. “No. I’m on my own.”

  And it’s better that way, too, she thought defiantly, just as she’d thought it every single time it came up—every day in her head—ever since she reached adulthood.

  “You don’t have to be on your own.” That big hand curved around her shoulder, callused thumb stroking her bare skin in a delicious circle of warmth. “Tonight.”

  She swallowed and took another sip of limoncello. Golden tart sweetness.

  You know, you really didn’t have to spell out it was only for tonight. I’m not an idiot. I wasn’t getting ideas of permanence.

  She knew way the hell better than to still get dreams of permanence. She wasn’t a kid anymore.

  But her fantasies were still dumber than she was, because they fluttered their stupid butterfly wings around a vacation fling. She didn’t have to tell him the truth until the end of it, right? It wasn’t as if anyone had ever cared about shattering her trust and assumptions after letting her indulge in them for a little while.

  So in the fantasy, they hiked together and picked lemons and caught ferries and made memories that were warm and strong and sexy and that a woman could pack up into a mental suitcase and carry on with her through life. Physical possessions should always fit into a suitcase. Otherwise you might have to leave something precious behind. But mental suitcases—well, she liked to pack those as full as she could, with every possible experience. She had gigabytes of photos.

  This night could be one that she remembered even when she was eighty, every time she took a sip of limoncello.

  That big hand stroked over her shoulder to the nape of her neck, warmth and calluses. Firm and easy on that vulnerable nape, leaving her the freedom to twist away, he spread his fingers up into her hair, curving against the back of her head, and pulled her into him as he bent and kissed her.

  Vivid gold surged through her, sweet and stinging, as if she was herself a slender bottle of limoncello and had caught the last ray of the sun. His mouth, like his hold, was firm enough to take what he wanted, but not so firm that she couldn’t break away if it was something she didn’t want to give.

  She dissolved into his heat like that sugar in the syrup his landlady must have used to make the limoncello. By the time he lifted his head, she was pressed against him, one hand on his hard chest.

  His eyes had turned the color of the dusk. “She makes a good drink.” His thumb tugged her lower lip. “Tart. Sweet. Makes a man want to taste it again.”

  She drank another swallow of the limoncello involuntarily. His fingers tightened in her hair, and this time his kiss went deeper and hungrier, his other hand coming into play to rub down her body to her butt and press her into him.

  His hard body felt like a dream come true. She folded her arms against his chest, trying to bury herself in him, get wrapped up as completely as possible. The limoncello spilled a little on his shirt and her hand, and he lifted his head again, his hand closing around hers over the glass.

  Big, strong hand closing over hers, big, hard body wrapping around hers…the taste of his lips and the lemon…the nightfall…the gorgeous view spread all around them. This overload of textures and brightness and warmth and a soft hush of dark where anything was possible.

  His great presence wrapped around her and said: You’ve been alone until me. But now I’m here.

  “Lucien,” she whispered.

  He jerked violen
tly.

  His body went taut. His fingers pulled free from her hair. His hand loosed her nape. He took three steps back, the cool air off the night sea rushing in where his warm body had been.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  Chapter 3

  A beautiful evening. A pretty girl. The scent of lemons.

  And all that time she’d been carrying a grenade, just waiting to pull the pin. “And what the hell do you want?” Lucien said.

  His stranger-for-the-evening stood very straight, that glossy auburn hair showing barely a hint of where his hand had been. Although his hand still felt its texture, and his lips still tasted sweet and tart.

  Like she was going to shake the hell out of his life but keep hers completely untouched.

  She closed her eyes tightly, then opened them and forced herself to meet his, holding herself with…the closest he could come to describing it was honor. Straight shoulders, a direct gaze. I have done this wrong thing. I am accepting your blame for it. “I’m sorry.”

  Damn it. Even meeting that golden-brown gaze, his anger wanted to curl back down on itself already and quit blaming her.

  He grabbed onto it. Anger could get you through all kinds of situations that were much more painful when the anger faded away.

  He crossed his arms, as he did with his men when they got dragged in after fighting local police, and waited for her to say whatever the hell she was going to say in her defense.

  Fuck, she was a hell of a lot more gorgeous than his men, though.

  “I didn’t mean to…” Her fingers flickered to indicate the terrace, him, her glass of limoncello.

  Well, that was something. He didn’t let go of his anger for it, but deep down it was nice to know that he’d tempted her into doing something she didn’t mean to. He knew better than to soften toward a legionnaire who had screwed up, though, and he just gazed at her, grimly.

  Damn. Most objects of his grim gaze weren’t half his size. He felt mean, as if he shouldn’t be looking at her that way. And maybe he shouldn’t?

  It wasn’t that he wasn’t used to women, exactly. Having her approach him just because he’d stood still for ten minutes watching a view was pretty much how women had behaved around him whenever he left base since he was twenty. He’d never expected to have to spend the nights of his solitary vacation alone. Not if he didn’t want to.

  But in the daytime, for the past fifteen years, he dealt only with men. Hard men. Some of the hardest, roughest men in the world. She didn’t even start to belong in that tough crowd.

  Unless she was one hell of a lot tougher than she looked.

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Her gaze dropped to the limoncello in her hand, and for a second she looked…wistful? She touched that chipped glass heart pendant she wore, and then set the glass of limoncello on the table and straightened her shoulders.

  Her manner became professional, in a way that pissed him off. He clung to that anger. The fine line of temper was about all that was keeping him from falling into the gaping black panic of a past come back to destroy all the solid ground he had built for himself.

  “I got distracted,” she said. “I’m sorry.” A motion of her hand, pushing her distraction away, a twist of regret around her mouth, quickly suppressed. Clear brown eyes met his. “I was asked to find Lucien Rosier.”

  He gazed at her, grim, not speaking.

  “That’s you, isn’t it?”

  He said nothing.

  “I know it’s you.”

  “What part of the Foreign Legion did you miss?” he said between his teeth. “We don’t have a past, if we don’t want one. We start over when we sign up.”

  “Your family misses you.”

  God damn it. What did she think he was supposed to do? Go back? Hurt them again? Expect them to forgive him? When he wasn’t even their real cousin, and he’d run off and left them?

  “I made my own family.” He gestured toward the west. Where, far down the Mediterranean coast, lay Corsica and Camp Raffalli, the base of the 2e REP, the last airborne regiment of the Legion, one of the most elite fighting regiments in the world. Not so far from where he had been born and yet a world away. His world. The world he could belong to. That nobody could take away. That depended entirely on what he did, not who his father was. And where he’d been able to start from scratch and rebuild himself into a man even he could believe in.

  “How the hell did you find me? Those records are impenetrable.” Or they were supposed to be. He was going to go find some fucking office-boy Legionnaire and kick his ass.

  Elena stood very straight, her chin steady and her hands at her sides, loosely fisted. She could have made a good queen. On the scaffold, facing the crowd, making a valiant end as they cut her head off. Maybe she was tougher than she looked.

  “That’s part of what I do,” she said. “I find people.”

  “You must be pretty damn good at your job.”

  She didn’t react to the bitter compliment. She had the damnedest brown eyes, a sunlit brown, with a golden clarity to them. And right now, solitude filled those eyes like a light in a peaceful autumn forest, far away from the world.

  Expecting nothing of him or of anyone.

  Those brown eyes looked at him as if she and he stood on two different mountaintops and the one narrow wisp of a bridge had fallen down. And it was okay with her, because she had never really counted on that bridge anyway.

  Restlessness stirred in him. I can climb a mountain pretty damn fast. I can leap across gaps.

  Hell, he could build a bridge if he needed to. He’d built a few in the past fifteen years.

  And why the hell did he want to prove that to her suddenly?

  Putain, but she was pretty.

  “Lucien,” she began carefully, and all the hairs on his body tried to lift to the name.

  “God damn it,” he interrupted, furious. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me who you were right away? What was this all about? Trying to soften me up?”

  She looked toward the sea. A wave of color swept up that composed face. She didn’t lose control of her expression, but she couldn’t stop the blush. “No.”

  Just that. No. Her willingness to come up to his apartment hadn’t had anything to do with a desire to soften him up.

  It had just been…him. Her.

  The fundamentals. His gaze traced over her pretty, so-alone body involuntarily, and a hot desire ran through him to turn back time, forget his birth name, and get back to fundamentals.

  “I’ve apologized already for my lapse in professional judgment,” she said, her chin up. “I shouldn’t have let that happen.”

  Okay, now he was really pissed off. Unreasonably so, and he couldn’t even put his finger on why. Let it happen? He'd orchestrated the whole thing. Easy, careful, a big, dangerous man scattering seeds in the snow before him and then sitting very still with his palm upturned and full of seeds, until the bird came to eat out of his hand.

  Well. That was what he’d thought he was doing. Finding out the bird had had a “professional motive” was a shock.

  Finding out that professional motive was his family…hell.

  “Are you sure you aren’t regretting having let your real purpose slip out that soon?” he asked cruelly.

  Her eyes flickered.

  His anger faltered. What an interesting reaction.

  Physically interesting. His dick stirred and begged, Can we forget about this ghastly family history and go back to what we were doing?

  She met his gaze assertively, making respect stir in him again. He’d always admired a person who could still meet his eyes when he was mad. First time he’d had the experience with a woman since he’d left his Tante Colette behind, but then, when in the past fifteen years had he gotten mad at a woman?

  “I was hired by your aunt, Colette Delatour, to help track down missing members of her family. I’ve been working with Antoine Vallier to put her in touch with her heirs.”

  Who the hell was
Antoine Vallier?

  His slim stranger knit her eyebrows, gazing at him as if he was some baffling creature. “All this time, you’ve been so close to your family. Just an island away. And you never even go to see them.”

  “It’s the Legion. I’ve spent most of my time overseas.”

  “It was a shorter drive to Pont-le-Loup from the Nice ferry dock than to here,” she pointed out unanswerably.

  He looked away. Not that this is any of your fucking business, he wanted to tell her. What the hell did she know about how it felt, to realize that everything you loved about your life, your entire sense of belonging, wasn’t true? “They’re not my real family,” he said flatly.

  When he was eighteen, he’d vomited in the pines in the hills at what he’d learned—what they’d all learned. That he wasn’t a Rosier. Now…shit.

  After fifteen years of making his own solid brotherhood around him to replace them, you’d think he could handle it. But it still felt like a knife in his stomach.

  No, worse. He’d actually had a knife in his stomach once, and a man could heal from that.

  “My client, who refers to you as her nephew, would like to see you.”

  He flinched, and his fingers curled into his arms. Did she? Still refer to him as her nephew?

  She would, wouldn’t she?

  Didn’t mean his grandfather still thought of him as his grandson, though. The man he’d wanted to live up to all his damn life, right up until he found out it was impossible. He wasn’t that man’s grandson.

  Plus, when the going got tough, he’d cut and run, and he knew damn well what Jean-Jacques Rosier thought about men who cut and run. A nineteen-year-old had thought running off to join the Legion was brave. A man who had learned the skills and discipline and responsibility to become captain knew better.

  “Her definition of family might be more inclusive than yours,” Elena said, and for one second a swirl of things showed in those clear sunlit-brown eyes. Longing, wonder…anger.

  Anger at him? She barely even knew him. His younger cousins, now, they’d probably never forgive him for leaving. Never understand why he couldn’t stay. Did they still even think about him? Surely not.