“I don’t know why I came,” Antoine muttered, darkly.
Yeah, Elena didn’t either. She was about to jab him with an elbow to get him to behave in a more wedding-like fashion. Don’t sulk. Envy doesn’t become you.
Nor you, Elena Lyon.
Malorie reached across Antoine to introduce herself and was flatteringly (well, for Elena’s current self) astonished to realize she already knew her, but Elena was distracted by the sound of a powerful motor.
A motorcycle, the motor quickly softening as the driver slowed, coasting to the far edge of the crowd where he could park, trying to keep the motor quiet. He sat there a moment, as Elena glanced toward him and then glanced again. Straight shoulders in a leather jacket. A tall man.
He swung off the motorcycle and stood there, very still, before slowly stripping off his gloves, then his jacket. Elena’s heart started to beat too hard at the hard torso revealed. All those damn butterflies woke right up.
He brought his hands to his helmet, and hesitated another moment, and her whole body tensed in anticipation.
He pulled off the helmet and set it on the seat, never taking his eyes off the crowd.
It was him.
He’d come.
A military green T-shirt pulled tight across his chest and clung to hard abs and the swell of his biceps. His shoulders were straight, his hands loosely fisted at his sides as if he was ready for anything, even a fight.
Elena thought she felt Antoine stiffen beside her, thought maybe there was a jerk of awareness on the city hall steps from the cousins, but just then Damien and Jess came out, Jess with a weave of jasmine through her loose brown hair, Damien almost mercilessly handsome in his black tux.
The new arrival stood frozen as confetti cannons went off all over the place and inside Elena’s stomach, a burst of fluttering colors everywhere. Damien and Jess were married.
And Lucien was back.
Chapter 5
Lucien had faced plenty of tough days in his life. The day he’d learned he wasn’t actually one of the cousins. The brutal training of La Ferme in Castelnaudary. And the even more brutal training when he’d opted for the 2e REP. Brutality that had all turned out to be nothing but a warm-up for when the shit really hit the fan, in Mali. Afghanistan. Syria.
But this day made him feel all hollow. As if everything at his center had gone translucent and then been blown away by a careless breath.
He kept his shoulders straight, of course.
After all, every battle a soldier went into put his entire life on the line.
No exception here.
Usually he cooled down for a fight, way, way down, into a deep place of calm. But now he couldn’t lower his pulse.
As in any battle, he started pulling in every single detail around him, the utter familiarity of this place in the village where he and his cousins had grabbed penny candy or pains au chocolat after school each day before running or biking the couple of kilometers down the road and through the fields to the big house where their grandmother was, where they could pretend they didn’t have a stock of penny candy in their backpacks and get her to feed them baguettes and Nutella and milk.
The plane trees that shaded its cobblestones, the ripples of the stream, the little mairie with its French flag, catty-cornered from that same school. The café with its red awning. The bakery. The jasmine climbing up stone walls. Shutters that were the wrong color. Someone had painted them blue.
Odd details stood out sharply.
She was there, for one. Her hand on some man’s arm. She was watching him. Pulling a step back toward the man who shifted his hand to rest it on her shoulder.
For a second, his thoughts got arrested on the man, who looked like someone one of his cousins might have grown into, except for the wrong hair color. In his fifteen-year absence had one of his cousins decided to bleach his hair blond?
But no, Raoul and Matt and Tristan were there. He recognized them as soon as he saw them, a shot through the heart.
God, they were grown. Men. He’d missed all of it. He’d thrown fifteen years of knowing them away. A hurt boy, a wounded boy who’d been so goddamn dumb.
Jesus, Tristan was so tall. As tall as any of them now, no longer the kid who’d trailed around after them and always got into so much trouble but never once got blamed for it. Matt had finally fulfilled his dream to be one of the biggest of them.
And that was Damien, hell. Sweeping out onto the top of the steps, with a woman Lucien didn’t know on his arm, but she looked pretty. More important, she looked radiantly happy, soft with it, and Damien…damn, Damien was elegant. Was that just for the wedding? And had the over-controlled teenager he remembered really grown into someone that capable of showing so much emotion in front of a crowd? Because his eyes were burning with it, so much happiness he was clearly overwhelmed.
The Damien he remembered didn’t get overwhelmed.
Lucien had no idea who his cousins even were now. Of course, they weren’t really his cousins. Not by blood…and not by the fifteen years he’d lost with them when he…cut and ran.
Popping noises sounded all around him, and he flinched and caught himself as he made his brain grasp that they were confetti cannons. Fluttering colors soared into the air and rained down around the happy couple and everyone else, even him.
Damien hugged his bride to him, so damn proud, and Tristan—that was Tristan, right?—was looking straight at…Lucien.
Lucien stared back across the crowd, caught. Guilty. Emotions ripping inside him as if he himself was paper and they were shredding him for cannon-fodder.
Tristan shoved the cousins on either side of him, Matt and Raoul. They looked in his direction, too.
Lucien stood paralyzed. He wanted to run again. There had only been one thing he’d ever run from in his life: this. The family that wasn’t his.
Oh, fuck, how had he let a small gold ring and a pair of challenging brown eyes force him back here?
“It’s Lucien!” Tristan shouted, his face suddenly…alight. The youngest cousin leapt off the stairs with the same enthusiasm and inability to stay still that he’d had as a child—oh, yes, it was Tristan—and ran toward him, pushing through the crowd.
There were gasps and exclamations from the crowd as people turned, and—then Tristan landed on him.
Pretty much literally. Lucien braced at the impact and still staggered under it, as Tristan wrapped his arms around him. “Lucien, merde.” Tristan was shaking him and squeezing him, hard muscle, way the hell stronger than he’d been fifteen years ago, when he was only fourteen.
Before Lucien could recover or even come out of the embrace, there were hands grabbing his shoulders and—that hand was Raoul. Gripping hard. Their eyes met, Raoul’s so glad and so—sympathetic, too, a bracing, I know how hard this is, don’t run away.
He and Raoul had been so damn tight back then, only a few months apart in age, and…
Matt. Looking burly and flustered, overcome with his emotions, the same way he always got when he didn’t know how to express them, as if he wanted to hug Lucien and punch him both. Matt folded big arms, then suddenly unfolded them and grabbed Lucien and hit him and hugged him and then kissed him on both cheeks, hard.
This was way the fuck more than Lucien knew how to handle. He’d left them. How could he possibly, possibly deserve this?
And then the groom was there, Damien, dark-haired, intense, and brilliant like a diamond. Good God. Damien was crying? Was that what getting married did to a man?
“Lucien,” Damien said. “It’s about damn time.”
Lucien had no idea what to say. Feelings jumbled in him, too jagged, as if his cousins’ happiness to see him was some kind of bomb, only instead of an IED that left men burning and broken, it did something else to his insides, something he couldn’t master and didn’t know how to recover from.
He felt eighteen again, all his pride and confidence destroyed until he was once again that frantic, hurt boy who had to run away to
become a man.
I thought they’d be mad. Or distant. Or over me. Or—I didn’t think they’d cry.
Don’t they remember I’m not really one of them? Wasn’t fifteen years away enough to confirm that? How could they forgive him that? He couldn’t. It was unforgivable.
The male mass parted a little. Lucien froze deep to his marrow at who was revealed.
When Lucien was a kid, his mother always talked about how Lucien was the only cousin who had inherited Pépé’s blue eyes. She harped on it, that similarity between Lucien and Pépé. Lucien had been so proud of it, this special link that he had with his hero grandfather that none of the other cousins shared.
And his mother knew. All that time. Knew he wasn’t related to Jean-Jacques Rosier at all.
Shit.
It had taken fifteen years of combat experience to teach him the toughness he needed to walk back into this.
And now those blue eyes were meeting his. Measuring him. Pépé was so damn old. Seventy-six when Lucien left. Now he was ninety-one. Still straight, though.
“You must have some stories to tell.” That time-roughened old voice squeezed Lucien’s heart. Hell, he’d loved his grandfather. Pretended to be him in war games with his cousins all through these hills.
Loved him more than his own father, really. Which probably made sense, considering that it had turned out Michel Rosier wasn’t his own father.
“Oui.” Fifteen years of military life squeezed his tongue. The oui needed something after it. Oui, colonel, oui, adjudant. Whether speaking to a commanding officer or someone far down the hierarchy, you added that respect of a title. But with his grandfather, when they were in trouble, when they were supposed to show respect, it was oui, grand-père. And now he had to make a choice between that and oui, monsieur. He couldn’t. His tongue ground to a halt, and all that old tearing started inside him, the tearing he had left for military solidity. He’d thought back then that it would be easier to be torn by bullets than torn by his family.
He’d been nineteen years old. The age when a man really did think it was better to charge into a bullet-ridden sunset and die a romantic, glorious death because he didn’t belong.
“I guess we’ve got some walking to do then,” that old voice said.
Lucien’s breath hurt in his chest. His eyes wanted to sting. The last thing he could allow them to do in front of his grand—Jean-Jacques Rosier. But walking was what they had always done. He and his grandfather, walking through the fields or the hills. Long expanses of silence out in the roses or the maquis until Lucien started talking, about why he was having so much trouble with a teacher at school or why he’d gotten in that fight. And they’d figure out, somehow, by the end, whether Lucien was doing what a man should do to handle a tough circumstance or whether maybe he might have better strategies if he took a step back and analyzed the situation.
Lucien knew his grandfather had had similar walks with all his cousins, one on one. But his times with his grandfather always felt unique. Focused on him. Teaching him to be a man.
“Oui,” Lucien’s voice was too clipped, the one word too rude. Oui, grand-père. Monsieur. Grand-père. Fuck, why couldn’t he just have a sir in his language, like the American Army guys got to use?
Time-faded blue eyes studied him a moment longer. “It’s good to have you back, mon grand.”
Lucien’s breath stuck in his chest. As if a balloon had gotten lodged in his air pipe and now someone was pumping it full of helium. “It is?” His grandfather thought so?
“God damn it, Lucien, of course it is,” Jean-Jacques Rosier snapped abruptly, like an old colonel out of all patience.
Beside him appeared Tante Colette. She, too, was still as straight as ever. Her arrival a relief. He’d never had any trouble with what to call Tante Colette after the revelations about his true parentage. She had never been related to him by blood anyway. With her, family was always about something else than biology. He’d always felt she understood.
Niccolò Rosario’s ring burned against his chest under his T-shirt. He’d had no idea what to do with it to keep it as safe as it needed to be. So finally he had strung it on the same chain as the one thing he owned that was conceived to stick with a man in all circumstances and not get carelessly lost—his dog tags. Which held the name FONTAINE, Julien.
Tante Colette smiled just a little, old eyes profoundly contented. “For once, I agree with your grandfather,” she said.
Damien grabbed him. “You’re just in time,” he said, his eyes brilliant. “To be a witness at my wedding.”
Chapter 6
Elena sat in the corner of the old lavoir, on the stone bench, her arms wrapped around her knees. She’d come looking for Antoine. Antoine was terrible with these happy family reunions, and she didn’t know why he had to insist on going to Damien’s wedding, because he was by far the worst about it when the happy family was the Rosiers. As if they were some giant symbol to him of what he could never have.
Let it go, she would tell him. We make our own families. But sometimes she thought that, just the way she’d never been sufficient as family to any of the foster families who had taken her in, she also wasn’t sufficient to Antoine, even if they had latched on to each other in the system.
He remained darker about it, the whole foster-child-no-family thing. He claimed she over-compensated by playing with other families as if she was building so many dollhouses, making sure each one had a complete and happy family in it, but even if there might be a grain of truth in that, she didn’t see what was so bad about it. The families she helped got to be happy and complete, and she got to feel good about helping make them so.
After the scene in the place, the priest had still been waiting for the church ceremony, and it had been heart-achingly sweet the way Damien insisted Lucien stand up there with the other cousins, even though he was in one of those military-green T-shirts he seemed to favor and everyone else was in a tux. Lucien had been struggling so hard with emotion, too. But that was the great thing about religious ceremonies. They really did give emotions a focus, a rhythm, a way of pacing themselves.
She loved weddings, and she tried not to ever admit to herself the knot of anxiety being in a crowded church caused in her stomach. It was just a tiny knot—a walnut-size knot. A knot of difference.
She had been far from the only person sitting with quiet attention rather than participating in things like Communion, given the very low percentage of people in this traditionally Catholic country who actually practiced or even believed. She didn’t believe herself, not in a God who listened to your prayers and would save you, anyway. But she of all people knew how important religious ceremonies were as a social bond, and though she tried to keep her instincts quiet and tell them people weren’t that way anymore, her instincts still lifted the hairs on the back of her neck to try to warn her about the dangers of being different.
It was the exact opposite of going to the synagogue in Cannes, where the luminous blue Star of David over the door promised her a kind of refuge, a place where she belonged. There were a lot of people like her who showed up for Yom Kippur and the high holidays who didn’t really believe—she just couldn’t believe, not after what had happened to her family—but who wanted that sense of who they were, of where they fit. Of a people.
She was still grateful to the foster care system for helping her make it to the March of the Living when she was in high school, because the state really did try to make sure that kids in state care could practice their religious identity. She still remembered the power of that walk, all of them in a sea of blue honoring the lost and joining together to keep on living. It had been a pivotal moment in her life and probably helped give her the strength, six months later when she was old enough to set off on her own, to start building a good life for herself.
A good life. A life full of flowers and sun, a life where she could help people, bring people home. In the church, surrounded by a difference that had destroyed every last family
member she had, she had focused on the people getting married instead. Focus on the good things, on hope, on what could lie ahead, not what lay behind—that was what she tried to do these days. Jess had looked so pretty and happy that Elena had been bursting with pride. I did this. See? I helped make a family.
But she’d still wanted to get away from people for a little, after. Somewhere she could be herself.
She smiled now in the shadow of the lavoir, thinking about Damien and Jess, savoring her role as a secret fairy godmother. Antoine would twit her about it, but hey…it was better than slipping off to sulk.
Which she totally wasn’t doing, unlike Antoine. She was just taking a little break to gloat. It could get a bit agoraphobic up there among the hundreds who had flocked to celebrate the first Rosier wedding in a generation. It could feel lonely on so many different levels.
Her hand traced down the chain at her neck to clasp the pendant. Smooth and solid, the rich red heart a small, reassuring pressure against her palm.
So quiet, the old lavoirs in these towns. Once they were places full of chatter, as women washed clothes together. But these days, the chatter was just beyond, in the place. Echoes of the conversations reached her.
Perfect. Humanity was there. She wasn’t isolated from it.
But she didn’t have to deal with it. All those tempting families that she wanted but that she didn’t quite believe in enough to have.
A tough, hard body, assessing eyes, the warm, careful roughness of calluses as he drew his thumb so gently down her arm, seducing her.
She closed her eyes and tightened her arms around herself and the goose bumps on her skin. She’d overestimated how warm this spring day would get, that was all. She should have put on another layer.
Nobody would miss her if she slipped away now, probably. She’d kind of snuck herself onto the guest list anyway, via Madame Delatour. She just wanted to see it, the lost family member she had found, Jess Bianchi, returned to the fold, everyone happy, everyone solid.
She’d wanted to dance all night at her wedding, too, but not if Antoine was going to ditch her. Not with Lucien Rosier there.
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