A Kiss in Lavender

by Laura Florand

  “She’s very old,” Elena said.

  Shit, Tante Colette must be so old. She’d been eighty-two when he left. Fifteen years.

  Hell.

  “Seeing you again is very important to her.” Elena gestured to herself. “As you can tell.”

  “How much are you charging her?” he said bitterly. “What do you do, prey on an old woman’s sentimentality to drum up business?”

  Hurt slashed across her face. And then it was gone, her expression schooled. She moved to the farthest railing of the little terrace. “I think my rates are reasonable. But if you want to get involved in your elderly aunt’s decisions and protect her from predators, you might be better placed to do that if you actually see her from time to time.”

  He folded his arms against the accuracy of that hit. It was too late. A boy couldn’t run away and leave a family and then expect them to take him back in when he was a man. Especially if he’d never been a real part of that family in the first place, just a trick played on them by his mother.

  “Your cousin Damien is getting married tomorrow,” she said. “And Matt at the end of May.”

  Fuck.

  They were that old?

  Of course they were. Grown men now. He’d missed fifteen years he could never get back, never make up for. He’d made sure of it, that he could never pretend to fit in the family to which he had never belonged in the first place.

  He and the Rosiers were separate now. That past was buried.

  Sickness rose up in him again at the thought. Damn her to hell for dragging him back through this.

  “They’d like you there,” Elena said, and so much pain stirred in him he wanted to howl. What did she know about it, damn it? How dare she?

  “Perhaps you would like to witness the weddings?” Elena said.

  Just show up for the vows and the parties? As if he’d never run away, never failed to be the son, grandson, cousin he was supposed to be, never become a man with a different name? She was out of her mind. “You don’t know anything about family, do you?”

  A shock of hurt again. It took her a second longer to conceal.

  He reined himself back in. She was a civilian and a woman and no match for his destructive abilities whatsoever. No matter how much he was seething, he couldn’t let his anger slip. That was basic military training. It was up to him to control himself, to protect weaker, smaller, less well-defended people from him. He was those people’s defense.

  “I’m not related to them,” he said tightly, through his teeth. Still, to this day, that hurt like hell to say. This feeling of being lost in a vast void, his whole world gone to chaos and quicksand just where he thought it was his bedrock, so that he’d had to scramble to build another world for himself, one of a brotherhood that could never be stolen from him. The blood that bound his Legion brotherhood together was their own to spill. “Didn’t Tante Colette tell you?”

  Elena looked at him as if he’d said something offensive as hell. “You were born in that family and spent your first nineteen years part of it. They were there for you. They kept you. By my definition, they did a hell of a lot more to give you life and to be your family than a lot of biological families do. And you just dumped that in the trash.”

  His teeth ground. Yes. He knew. He was the one in the wrong. Going back to see his family was that simple of a choice—stepping from a world in which he was right into a world in which he was wrong.

  “If I want to discuss my sins with a stranger, I’m sure I could find a priest right there.” He gestured at the little village church below, its bell tower lit gently against the night.

  Elena set her jaw, glaring at him. Yes, I got it. You think I’m an asshole. That was a fast turnaround.

  Of course, maybe he was acting like an asshole.

  She reached into her little purse and pulled out a folded, sealed envelope. “Madame Colette said to give you this even if you wouldn’t come back. No matter what, she wanted you to have it.”

  He took it more reluctantly than if it had been a pit viper. Venomous snakes were easy, as he’d learned on more than one deployment. You just grabbed the machete by the door and cut their heads off.

  This envelope, though…the shape inside was small, hard, round. A ring?

  Elena stood watching him as if he was a child in a temper tantrum and she was going to smack his hand if he tried to throw this in the trash.

  He grimaced. His aunt had been very smart to send a young woman after him. He couldn't fight her, as he could have a man. And he couldn’t be a coward in front of her either. Hell. He must look bad enough to her already.

  Like a spoiled brat, apparently.

  Like fifteen years had been sheered away from him and he was right back being that desperate, wounded boy again.

  He ripped the envelope open and shook the ring into his palm.

  A gold ring, simple, no jewels, only a twining rose symbol on it. He frowned over it. Very soft, pure gold with many tiny nicks, it looked as if it had seen a great deal of battering over time. He held it up, examining it, and spotted an inscription on the inside. He angled it. J’y suis, j’y reste.

  Shock ran through him.

  Niccolò Rosario’s ring.

  Niccolò Rosario. The legendary founder of their house, an Italian mercenary who had shown up with nothing more than the scars on his knuckles in Grasse, married the glove-maker Laurianne, and started the Rosier line.

  How many times as children and young teens had he and his cousins snuck into Tante Colette’s house, trying to find this ring and the other treasures Pépé swore she had hidden during the war? Hell, Lucien had broken his arm once, climbing over the old medieval walls of her garden, boosted on Matt’s or Raoul’s shoulders, and tried to claim he’d just been trying to steal her raiponce.

  The ring barely fit onto the tip of his pinky. He glanced involuntarily at Elena’s slim hands. It would have been intended for a hand like hers, this ring. Niccolò had had it made for his wife.

  J’y suis, j’y reste. The Rosier family motto. His grandfather—not his grandfather, Jean-Jacques Rosier—had carved the same words on the limestone cliffs at the end of their valley during the Italian and German Occupations.

  I am here and here I’ll stay.

  Exactly what Lucien hadn't done. Stayed.

  His fist clenched around it. “There’s some mistake. She can’t give this to me.” The ring stayed locked inside his fist as he said it. After fifteen years of climbing cliffs with fifty kilos on his back, of hauling himself out of rough seas into helicopters via a rope ladder dragged across the water, of fast-roping from helicopters, his grip didn’t break until he himself lost consciousness. Not if he wanted to hold onto something.

  Elena clasped her hands behind her back. “You’ll have to take that up with her.”

  “It belonged to the founder of our—of the Rosier—house. It’s one of our most precious—it’s one of their most precious family heirlooms.”

  “Niccolò Rosario,” Elena said quietly, looking out to sea. “The Italian mercenary who came from a lost war in Italy to seek peace. Roses. A family life.” An odd, wistful smile flickered across her face. “That’s very sweet.”

  It was? He’d thought of his—their—great-great-great-great-etc.-grandfather as tough, dangerous, adventurous. Powerfully willed, taking his circumstances and forcing them into something good.

  But…sweet?

  His grip which no force could break relaxed around the ring, and he touched it with a finger it couldn’t fit onto.

  “It’s kind of perfect to give it to you,” Elena said. Her butt was pressed against the opposite railing as she spoke, the farthest she could get from him. Absolute separation, a clear message: We do not belong together.

  The ring hadn’t belonged to Niccolò, Lucien remembered, with an odd tremor inside. He made it. But it really belonged to Laurianne.

  Who had given Niccolò a home. A hard man who had spent all his life fighting, defeated, exiled, gone fort
h to forge his way in a strange country. Alone. And he’d found someone who made him feel as if he could be part of a together.

  Or maybe he’d just seen Laurianne as a financial step up the ladder, hell. A successful businesswoman with a business the laws of the time would allow any male to take over if he could get her to marry him. Family legend probably over-romanticized the motivations of a mercenary soldier…

  Lucien frowned down at his soldier’s callused hand. Some people called Legionnaires mercenaries. It wasn’t true. They were part of the French army. But the slur got under a man’s skin.

  “I wonder if he was anything like you,” Elena said.

  “I don’t even share a gene pool with him,” Lucien said harshly.

  Elena’s eyebrows knit again. “I’m pretty sure you do.”

  “No,” he said grimly, snapping his fist closed around the ring again. “I don’t.”

  “How many generations is it, exactly? Fifteen or so? Around four hundred years since Niccolò arrived in Grasse? Anyone born in the Grasse region is likely to have as much DNA in common with Niccolò Rosario as your cousins do at this point.”

  Lucien stared at her.

  “I know being the heir to an unbroken line of kings is a really romantic story when Aragorn does it.” She shrugged. “But in real life it’s total bull shit. That’s not how genetics work. Anyway, it doesn’t matter where you came from. It matters who you are.” She put her chin up when she said it.

  “Tell that to my grandfather,” he said dryly, and then cursed himself for the my again.

  She stared at him. “He fought in the Resistance during a brutal, terrifying Occupation. He saved Jewish children from genocide. And you think I need to tell him that what a person does matters more than who his ancestors were? You tell him yourself, if you think he’s such an idiot. I’ve met Jean-Jacques Rosier, and frankly, I’d rather not insult him to his face.”

  She turned and walked out.

  Chapter 4

  Before the little stone Mairie in Pont-le-Loup, the place was full. Hundreds of people had come from all over France and as far away as Quebec and Argentina for the first Rosier wedding in a generation, and most of them couldn’t fit into the tiny city hall where Damien and Jess were currently signing their marriage certificate. Elena had arrived too late to have a chance of fitting inside, and she might have trouble fitting into the not-much-bigger village church for the second ceremony, but maybe she’d be able to peek through the door. As much as she loved weddings, churches always made her feel awkward anyway.

  The Rosier cousins poured out of the Mairie and lined up on the steps, so Damien and Jess must be about to come out. Various members of the Rosier clan moved through the crowd, distributing confetti cannons. A job well done, Elena thought to herself. You found Jess a home.

  And she’d found one for Layla, too, over there with a confetti cannon, happily waiting for the couple to appear. She loved finding other people a home.

  But she’d screwed up with Lucien.

  “Well, that went well,” she told Antoine Vallier dryly, stopping by his side.

  “At least you made it back in time.” Antoine glanced over her. “What, he didn’t take the bait?”

  Elena wasn’t about to tell Antoine that she had actually tried using herself as bait. Antoine wouldn’t even look judgmental if she did, and she couldn’t get her rebellious instinct going to protect herself against that kind of matter-of-fact acceptance of her. Antoine was tricky that way.

  “No,” Elena said with a huff. “He was pissed.”

  “He didn’t even think about it?” Antoine studied an unlit cigarette between his fingers a moment, green eyes narrowed as if he and the cigarette were having a hostile discussion. They stood off to the side of the place, near the lemon tree stretching its branches over the wall of Madame Grénier’s garden, and no one had reached them with the confetti cannon distribution yet.

  “I might have gotten a little pissed off, too, and stomped out. Can you imagine, rejecting a family like this?” She waved.

  She wished she hadn’t lost her temper, though. He’d been hurting her, and it was Lucien, her hero, and…she closed her hand around her lionheart. Sometimes she was just afraid that if it got one more chip, it would shatter. But you can’t be a lionheart if you’re afraid of breaking yourself.

  Antoine studied the crowd of extended Rosier family and all their friends and drew a breath in and let it carefully out. “But it’s definitely him?”

  “Yes.” Would it have helped if she had stayed and argued more? But Elena had learned a lot growing up about trying to handle all kinds of difficult men, and it seemed to her that a man capable of joining the Foreign Legion and then thriving in it must be freaking hardheaded. And hardheaded men only got more stubborn the longer you argued. Maybe it was best to plant a seed and let it grow?

  He had the ring. Surely he wouldn’t just keep such an important Rosier heirloom and stay estranged from the family. Of course, he could always mail it back in a box with no return address.

  “Bon,” Antoine said. “You can tell Madame Delatour later, after the ceremony, and she can make her decisions about what to do.”

  “She can send his cousins after him,” Elena said. “I’m sure they would have much more influence on him than I could.”

  Antoine flicked a discreet sideways glance once up and down her body, raised an eyebrow, then refocused on his unlit cigarette. “I don’t know,” he said sardonically. “Fifteen years in an all-male military. He might be more susceptible to you than you think.”

  Elena felt herself flushing. Thank God Antoine didn’t know the professional line she had crossed.

  “They certainly are a handsome group,” she said to change the subject. Raoul, Matt, and Tristan had lined up on the stone steps on one side, Gabriel and Raphaël Delange on the other, Léa and Daniel and Layla and Allegra just below. Damn, the Rosiers were good-looking. More than just the looks, though, it was the strength and confidence that came off them. It made a woman feel that all her problems were going to run for their lives if ever a Rosier man strolled in her direction.

  “That’s what I hear,” Antoine said dryly.

  Elena laughed. “Don’t worry, you hold your own against them. If you were up with that group, you would fit right in.” His hair was a tawny gold, unlike the mostly black-haired Rosiers, but he could have given Damien Rosier a run for his money, in terms of looks, and even in terms of lean, cool irony.

  Antoine said nothing at all.

  “I wonder what it’s like,” she said. “To be part of a family like that.”

  All those people around you. All those personalities to deal with constantly, but also all that humanity that was attached to you, that linked you to the world. The support and the power and the way they strolled through the world as if they’d been born to rule it.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Antoine said.

  No. She slipped her hands in her skirt pockets. She wouldn’t either. A big body, steady, assessing gray-blue eyes, a hard quiet…stop it, Elena. “I don’t understand how Lucien could do it.” The word Lucien tried to curl around her tongue and linger. “Abandon a family like that.”

  Antoine tapped the unlit cigarette against his lips and studied the end again, for all the world like a man who had just taken a long, contemplative draw on it, but without the inhalation part. “If you’re not truly part of it, I can understand why you might not want to be an extra. Taken in on the fringe out of courtesy.”

  “She gave him Niccolò Rosario’s ring. That’s not fringe.”

  Antoine’s lips twisted. “I think it would be safe to say that Colette Delatour’s actions are not in line with general family preferences.”

  True enough.

  Antoine tapped his cigarette against his thigh.

  “Are you trying to quit or something?” she asked. “Or do you think one of the Rosier cousins poisoned it?”

  “If I were trying to quit, I would have quit,” Antoine
said coolly. “I have a will.”

  She suppressed a smile. He did, indeed. One he enjoyed flexing against the Rosier cousins—in fact, she was halfway convinced he took these inheritance cases for Colette Delatour just so he could butt heads with the Rosier cousins when they burst into his office threatening to strangle him.

  In fact, he probably only smoked for the pleasure of blowing thin streams of smoke when they were in his office and watching the way their sensitive nostrils pinched to try to block the smell.

  But that was probably overestimating the Rosier cousins’ influence on him. Even Antoine wouldn’t destroy his lungs just to thwart them. Would he?

  “And I think they want to kill me too much to use poison instead of their bare hands,” Antoine said, with a faint curl of satisfaction to his lips.

  A little laugh from the other side of him, and Elena realized that Malorie Monsard had stopped beside them and was handing Antoine a confetti cannon. She didn’t think Malorie had recognized her yet, but then she had been a year behind Malorie and Antoine in school, nearly two years younger when you threw in the differences in their birthday cut-offs, so even if Elena hadn’t changed so much, it was pretty normal that Malorie never have noticed her. Elena had trailed around after Antoine, obviously, but Malorie and Antoine hadn’t really been friends, per se, just rivals for top spot in class.

  “So how’d you end up at the wedding?” Malorie asked Antoine now. “If they can’t kill you, invite you to join them?”

  Antoine studied the tip of his cigarette. “You could say that.”

  Sometimes Antoine was really odd about the Rosiers, even Elena had to admit it. Right now, his gaze drifted to Louis and Véronique Rosier, Damien’s parents, who had just come out of the city hall and were beaming at everyone, hand in hand. They moved down to the bottom of the steps and turned to wait eagerly for Damien and Jess. Even tough, ruthless Louis Rosier, businessman first and everything else second, looked openly proud and happy as he waited for his son.