A Kiss in Lavender

by Laura Florand

  We, he realized he’d said, not you.

  “Well, exactly,” Raoul said. “We really couldn’t. I don’t want to be that person. Damien doesn’t want to be that person. Even Uncle Louis doesn’t want us to be that. But doing right by all our small farmers is hard enough in peace time, and harder still when a region gets destabilized. That’s when they most need us to be the good guy, though, and stick by them. Keep those supply chains open.”

  It sounded almost exactly like what Lucien had been doing for the past fifteen years, except at the orders of the president, in response to requests for aid from their allies and former colonies.

  “We could use someone with expert knowledge in how to form a security team or deal with other armed forces, including mercenaries,” Raoul said. The last time Lucien had seen Raoul before returning home was when Raoul had been shot by a rebel warlord in Central Africa, where Lucien had also been deployed. Years ago now. “Plus, right now I’m covering Africa, Asia, and South America. I wouldn’t mind splitting that responsibility with someone I can trust. Someone I know will get the job done right. Then maybe both of us could spend more time home than traveling.”

  Lucien glanced at Elena again. There was something oddly intimate about the idea of helping maintain supply chains with small farmers who produced for the family company, rather than for former colonies and allies of his country, even if it did demand similar skills. It seemed more personal. But what other job in the world could be as important and compelling as the responsibility he had for his men?

  “I’m a captain, Raoul. I have a whole company that depends on me, and a regiment that depends on the company. I can’t just abandon all that.” But thank you for asking. Matt, with his talk of trust, had offered Lucien’s children a place in this family. Raoul was trying to make sure he also knew he had a place in this family right now. The offer was surprisingly tempting, for a man who had his purpose in life all set.

  “You always were one to take all the responsibility on your shoulders,” Raoul said. “Hell, you even took all the blame on yourself for the fact that your Y chromosome didn’t come from the man everyone thought.”

  Lucien rubbed the back of his neck, quelling a strong urge to protest I was only nineteen. He guessed he did still think everything was ultimately on him. Maybe it was all due to being one of the oldest, responsible like Raoul for every bit of trouble the younger kids got into, but delegating blame to others was still not his strong suit. It made him think his grandfather would be ashamed of him. “That’s what it means to be captain,” was all he said. “You take it on your shoulders. Your own screw-ups and everyone else’s.”

  And he owed one hell of a lot to his grandparents, his Tante Colette, his cousins, and, hell, a few foul-mouthed sergeants, that when the Legion push came to Legion shove, a messed-up nineteen-year-old had realized that despite the ruins of his life he still had pretty strong shoulders.

  Raoul said nothing for a moment. His amber eyes rested on Allegra, then flicked over the fields to their grandfather and Tristan and Matt. “It’s one of the hardest things in the world to do, isn’t it?” Raoul said. “To change from taking on everything everyone else needs you to take on, and to start insisting on what you need yourself.”

  ***

  Elena gave Lucien a skeptical look under the floppy brim of her hat. He sure did look solid. It was all those damn muscles. It was very problematic to believe you could count on a guy just because he had muscles.

  And seemed steady, strong, weathered to a fine toughness, self-controlled, fundamentally calm, and carefully gentle.

  Plus had eyes that warmed whenever she approached him.

  And it was really hard not to approach him when he was sitting on the tailgate, with a pile of rose-stuffed burlap bags behind him, his shirt off, showing a tanned, hard torso.

  “You’re hot already?” she said. It was a balmy late spring morning, and their work was hardly onerous—picking roses, and for the guys, periodically hauling a filled burlap bag to a truck and tossing it in.

  “A bee got up my shirt,” he said regretfully, shaking his shirt out. A crumpled insect fell to the ground. “Poor thing stung me before I could get her free.”

  “You’re sorry for the bee?”

  “She’s dead.” A bee couldn’t survive stinging someone. “And I’m fine.” Blue-gray eyes held hers just a moment. “Can’t blame a little bee for not knowing she could trust me not to hurt her, I guess. Maybe she’s heard legionnaires are rough, tough, dangerous brutes. Could that be?”

  Heat touched Elena’s cheeks. She turned away to open the first aid kit sitting on the front seat of the truck, ignored the EpiPens that he clearly didn’t need, and pulled out the lavender oil. She rubbed it on the red swelling on his lower back. “That better?”

  He smiled at her. “Sure.” Reaching back, he looped his arm around her and pulled her around to between his legs. He kissed her, long and slow, as if no one in the world was watching, and then held her against that warm, hard chest. “Think that was what scared her? Legion reputation?”

  “We’re talking about a bee, here. She got stuck somewhere and reacted on instinct. Pretty sure she would have done the same to me if she was stuck in my shirt, and my dangerous reputation has not reached the bee world, I promise you.”

  “Ah. Her hive must not have heard about your slaying glances.” He stroked her hair back from her face, with that tenderness that she just soaked up like a bottomless pit.

  “You smell of roses already,” she murmured. His hands were coated in the oils.

  He took her hand and brought it to his nose. “You, too.” He kissed her knuckles.

  He made her so damn happy.

  “And a little bit of lavender.” He kissed the fingertip that had rubbed the lavender oil over his sting. “I’d never hear the end of it if my men saw me getting pampered for a bee sting, but I have to say I like it.”

  Her cheeks warmed further. She wrinkled her nose against it. “Are you afraid I’ll embarrass you when I come see you on base?”

  He laughed out loud, his chest vibrating under her hand. “Are you kidding me? They’re going to be so damn jealous. Maybe jealous of you, too, some of them—worried you’ll distract my attention from them.”

  Was his job so all-consuming that any personal life was considered competition for it? She loved her job, and she often worked on research in the evenings or read the kind of books that rounded out her knowledge of some aspect of perfumery or Grasse. But she could also turn off all that, ignore email until the next day, just relax in front of the TV. He probably never really got to turn off completely unless he was on leave, did he?

  Worry stirred deep. If she took up more of people’s attention and time than they could spare, they usually got rid of her. Kind of like a puppy who peed on the rug. The relief and pride at no longer being a desperate puppy was one of the things she had loved about adulthood, and she was pretty determined not to go back to the insecurity of her childhood. That time when she needed a space in someone else’s life.

  “Could I do that?” she said. “Distract your attention from your men?”

  Lucien’s expression grew thoughtful. “I guess you could,” he said, on a note of discovery.

  Hmm. She rested her hand on his chest and wondered what it was like to not have a belly full of doubts and insecurities, gnawing at you while you pretended to the world and yourself that they weren’t there.

  It must feel wonderful.

  ***

  A few rows away, Tristan stood with Raoul and Matt and their grandfather, watching the interplay between Lucien and Elena. A solid line, although he already missed Damien, away on his honeymoon. Lucien belonged in this line, too. Belonged here in these fields. Tristan had no doubt of it.

  “Much smoother removal of his T-shirt there,” he drawled. “Matt, are you taking notes? Maybe we could get a video and you could watch it and practice at home.”

  “Will you shut up?” Matt’s trouble with
his T-shirts during his first encounters with Layla was still a subject of great hilarity to everyone but Matt himself.

  “You’re right, I guess Layla has proved she likes that awkward bear thing,” Tristan allowed. “No accounting for taste. So probably best not to get too smooth.”

  Matt made a growling noise.

  “Not that there’s much chance of that,” Raoul said, his face straight.

  Matt folded his arms and visibly tried to pretend his cousins were just annoying insects he was perfectly capable of ignoring.

  Tristan grinned and focused on Lucien and Elena again. Lucien’s head was angled, Elena standing between his legs, Lucien brushing her knuckles against his cheek. Tristan’s humor faded into something more serious. Regret.

  “I thought he had come home, when he showed up at the wedding,” Tristan said. “But he’s really just visiting. Like you, Raoul, when you would come home for Christmas or a big board meeting once a year.”

  Raoul had done that for fourteen years. It had taken him a long time to truly come home.

  “You leave Lucien alone,” their grandfather said unexpectedly. “He’s coming back from a long, long way away. Might be he can’t ever make it all the way back. Might be the best we can do is have a bridge, that he can walk across whenever he needs to see us.”

  None of his grandsons said anything for a moment. Raoul himself had come back from a long way away, although not as far as Lucien. But of all of them, their grandfather had known people who came back from the farthest places. War. Exile. Concentration camps. Even collaboration with the enemy of humanity. Some of the men and women Jean-Jacques had known had never managed to come home again.

  “I told him about the trust.” Matt flexed muscled arms against his chest. He always folded them when he needed to protect his mushy heart.

  His grandfather gave him a disgruntled look. Pépé believed, fundamentally, that the valley was more secure in one pair of hands. His pair of hands, ideally, but since he knew he couldn’t live forever, Matt was his trusted successor.

  Matt, conversely, understood how painful it was for his other cousins to love this valley and know it would never be theirs or their children’s, and he wanted to find a way to protect it that included them all. It wasn’t the first time Matt had butted heads against his grandfather by any means, but Tristan had to admit—maybe passing ninety had given his grandfather a sense of mortality or something, because he actually sometimes acquiesced to his heir’s insistence.

  “I couldn’t really tell if he cared,” Matt said uneasily.

  “He cared,” Tristan said. Honestly, sometimes. His cousins could be so dumb about people, it was a wonder any of them had survived long enough for Tristan to grow up and start making them see sense.

  “Yeah,” Raoul said. “He cared.”

  Matt glanced at his older cousin. Did Matt even get that both Tristan and Raoul were telling them they cared, too? Because he could be as obtuse as a big, wounded bear sometimes.

  But Matt relaxed somewhat, looking back across the field at Lucien and Elena. As the cousin who had been raised to be their future family patriarch, he worried a lot about whether he was doing the right thing by them. Their grandfather’s shoes were big shoes to fill.

  Lucien, propped on the tailgate of the truck, burlap bags piled behind him, was entirely focused on Elena, the absorbed tenderness in his expression so naked that it should have been embarrassing. Except, to tell the truth, they had grown to like that kind of thing. They’d seen it on Raoul’s face with Allegra, on Matt’s with Layla, on Damien’s with Jess, and, hell, Tristan supposed they had seen it on his, too, with Malorie, and so far, it had always meant a lot of happiness was growing.

  “He certainly is taken with her, isn’t he?” Jean-Jacques Rosier said, with satisfaction. Their grandfather had always had a soft spot for Elena Lyon. Tristan guessed that every time Elena smiled, it sparkled on his grandfather’s heart like another medal, more valuable than any gold medal he had ever received: You did a good thing.

  Matt made a grumpy noise. “He’s coming back to see her, not us, you know that, right?”

  Their grandfather gave that little moue of his. “Never underestimate the ability of a woman to get a man to do a hard, right thing.”

  None of them said anything for a moment that was as quiet and soft and wistful as a falling rose petal. All of them had loved their grandmother very much. And they missed her still.

  “She’s really taken with him, too, isn’t she?” Raoul said. “So that should work out all right.”

  Tristan said nothing. He could barely remember Elena from school. She had been a year behind him, and he had been focused on his older cousins and, in his own grade, on a certain Malorie Monsard. Plus…Elena had tried to hide herself. In the few images he could call up of her, she was, every single time, hunched, her hair in her eyes, no make-up even when other girls were experimenting with make-up, glasses when every other girl was getting contacts. He had paid little attention at the time, but from his older and wiser perspective he suspected she had had a pretty unhappy adolescence, and perhaps an unhappy childhood, too.

  “She’s changed a lot,” he said cautiously. “From when we were in school.”

  More than pretty, she was quite beautiful, in fact. Cheerful. Confident. Assertive when she needed to be. Emotionally generous—her face lit up for other people’s happiness.

  But Tristan didn’t trust that whole damn swan story. It seemed to him that a swan who had been raised as if it was an ugly duck, pecked at, persecuted, and ignored, must always have a grenade of old misery and rejection lodged deep inside it, ready to explode at the wrong trigger.

  Still. Although Tristan remembered Lucien as a half-formed, emotionally screwed-up teenager prone to melodramatic gestures, Lucien had clearly changed a lot, too. He was a captain who dealt with emotionally screwed-up teenagers prone to dramatic gestures as his life’s work and formed them into solid, focused, dangerous men.

  So he might know exactly how to deal with someone who had old wounds deep inside her.

  Yeah. Tristan’s inherent optimism flourished as he watched the two of them together, Elena laughing now, her fingers spread over Lucien’s bare shoulder. There was no reason to worry. It would probably work out just fine.

  ***

  Solidity was constructed of moments. A bridge across a great gorge took long, slow, steady months to build. And sometimes the rains came, and malaria broke out, and you dealt with setbacks. And still got it done.

  In some ways, Lucien was entirely in his element. He’d been building this skill set for fifteen years, and never had he been able to deploy it in a way that was quite so enticing and warm.

  He liked following Elena around the museum, for example, learning what she worked on and what she was most passionate about. He knew the museum pretty well—the Rosiers had been founders, long before he was born, and were still among the museum’s major donors—but of course most of the exhibits were new or had at least been modernized since he’d last been in it.

  He hadn’t been going out with a museum curator back then, either. Knowing this was her work made everything that went on behind the exhibits fascinating.

  In other ways, though, the experience was as alien as a half-remembered world. Civilians were so different. Even the briskest ones seemed boneless. So many smiles, such casual introductions, full of kisses on cheeks instead of salutes. It felt nostalgic. Weird. Sloppy.

  He found it oddly unsettling, as if he was walking on sand dunes instead of solid ground. He did know how to climb over sand dunes, but it took some adjustment every time.

  Raoul was wrong. Lucien couldn’t become a civilian again. He’d changed too much. It would drive him crazy being around such floppy people, and he’d try to boss them around, and they wouldn’t follow orders worth a damn.

  Nevertheless, he liked wandering around Grasse afterward, with Elena’s hand in his and all those relaxed and puppy-floppy citizens passing them with
out saluting. He liked having her drag him into the courtyard of La Maison de Monsard, excited to show him the fountain running again and the doors thrown open, and his cousin Tristan inside working with Malorie and their remodeling contractor.

  He liked lending his strength to the other end of a big table Tristan wanted to haul up from the Monsard storage and watching the way Elena’s face lit at the old perfume bottles on the shelves down in that storage, the way she paged through the binder on their provenance and talked excitedly to Malorie, gesturing.

  He liked being…part of the family. Part of this world again.

  “I assume Elena knows about Pierre Monsard,” Lucien said to Tristan, when the two of them were upstairs and out of earshot of the women. It would be hard for a historian who had specialized first in the fates of Jewish children in this area and then in perfume history not to know that Malorie’s great-grandfather had been tried for collaboration.

  “I’m sure she does,” Tristan said, a little crisp, a warning to Lucien not to bring this up where Malorie could hear.

  “Does Malorie know about Elena’s grandmother? Do you know?”

  “That she was the girl in the rose photo? Tante Colette told me. I don’t think anyone has mentioned it to Malorie, though.” Again, warning under Tristan’s normally easygoing tone. “They’re becoming friends. If Elena wanted to mention it and disturb that friendship, she would.”

  Lucien was the last person to want to inflict more pain out of the past on someone trying to make a good present. Pretty much the opposite of what the Legion was about, dwelling on the past. He respected Elena’s refusal to mention hers to someone who could be hurt by it. “She tries really hard to be a good person, doesn’t she?”

  “Malorie?”

  “Elena.”

  “Malorie, too,” Tristan said, firm.

  Tristan had always been a good kid. It was still disorienting to remember that he was now a good man.

  I have really good cousins, Lucien thought. I guess I always have.