A Kiss in Lavender

by Laura Florand

  “I’ve spent the last fifteen years focused on my needs. The Legion’s needs. My men’s needs. Now, I’m going to go after my wants.”

  She stared at him, her hand clutching such a mess of wishes—dog tags and ring and lionheart, all of them tangled together.

  He touched her nose. “That’s you. My want. You look as if that’s still not clear to you.”

  Elena covered her face. Dog tags, ring, and heart pressed against her cheek.

  “You’re not the only one who can remake herself to have love,” Lucien said. “I can do it, too.”

  Her eyebrows flexed in profound confusion. She parted her fingers enough to stare at him.

  “Raoul wants me to help take on the overseas security of Rosier SA.” A slight shrug of those broad shoulders that very clearly belied how much that offer meant to him. “It might be something I would be good at.”

  “Of course you would be good at it,” Elena said, so confused now she was starting to panic. Too much was at stake for her not to understand a word he was saying. “You’d be good at anything. But—”

  He kissed her, swift and short. “You’re such a sweetheart.”

  “No, I’m not,” she said, baffled. “It’s just true.”

  He hugged her into him and kissed the top of her head, then eased his hold so he could see her face again. “I know how to do that, work with people all over the world. Keep supply lines open even in difficult situations. I could get to know all those small farmers Rosier SA relies on, and maybe help teach them that we’re not just some modern day manifestation of colonialism, like the Legion is. That we won’t cut and run and leave them with no funds the instant their situation gets tricky, that we’re on their side.”

  Yeah. He probably really would be good at that. Elena sat blinking at him, wondering how in the world she had gotten such an incredible man interested in her.

  “It would be a relief to have control of the situations I got us into, after fifteen years of being sent wherever the government chose, whether or not I thought the government was right.”

  “A relief?” Elena challenged. Was that how he was going to spin such a wrenching new uprooting? “You love your men.”

  “Yes,” he said very simply. “That part’s going to be very hard.”

  And her heart tightened into such a knot of fear.

  “But I love you, too, Elena. I love my cousins. I love the rose harvest, and I’d love to be here for the jasmine harvest, too. I would love to see my nephews and nieces born. Hell, Elena, maybe I’m ready to have some of my own kids, too, if you are.”

  “You can do that on base.”

  “Elena. I can be happy on base. But you can’t. And I can be happy here, too, if I choose to. If you’re with me, happier. That’s why we’re talking about this.”

  She couldn’t understand what was happening. He made it almost seem, if she held her breath just one minute more, that her dreams could come true.

  “I would lose a world, but I would gain a whole new one. I like to travel, and you might like to travel with me when it’s feasible, which you wouldn’t be able to do when I was deployed. Think of the exhibits you could make from the ideas you got learning more about fragrance production and history in other countries. And at the same time I could be in Grasse most of the time. I will miss my men and my life in the Legion like hell. But I missed this life like hell. Elena, it’s not on you to change. It’s on me. I’m the one who created this dichotomy in my life when I was nineteen years old.”

  She bit the knuckles that closed so tightly still around the dog tags, ring, and lionheart.

  He smoothed her hands off her face to frame it with his hands instead, holding her eyes. “Out of all the ways I can be torn between choices now, you feel like the center that I need to protect no matter what.”

  This makes no sense, Elena thought. That she would be the center. That she would be the heart of something, what he wanted to keep even if everything else fell apart.

  That was never, ever true. She clutched the tangle of dog tags, ring, and heart, the enormity of what he was willing to do for her overwhelming her.

  Lucien pulled her snugly into his arms. “So if we name her Tinuviel, can we call her Tintin for short? Because that would be kind of awesome.”

  “I don’t understand,” Elena said helplessly.

  He was so gentle. “I know you don’t. I know you thought I’d ditch you as soon as it got hard. I know you never expected me to change my life for you, even though I threw my ordered life into a tailspin for you within a few hours of meeting you in Italy. I know that in ten years, twenty years, when we hit some kind of rough patch or even just have a bad fight, some part of you will still be ready for me to ditch you. But I won’t, Elena. I’ll see those rough patches through, I’ll make up with you after fights. I’ll still love you, bella.” He took the wedding ring and fit it over her pinky, chain and all. “I am here and here I’ll stay.”

  Elena started to cry in earnest, pressing her face into his throat. “I fell a little bit in love with you when I was thirteen years old, and I didn’t even know you. I just knew you were willing to fight for me when no one else was.”

  “That’s a good first lesson.” Lucien kissed her head. “Let’s build from there.”

  She touched her lionheart. That, if it got one more chip, might shatter. But you can’t be a lionheart if you’re afraid of breaking yourself.

  Maybe Niccolò was a lionheart. Escaping out of Italy without even a pair of gloves to his name and starting over. Maybe Laurianne was. Safely widowed and independent, but willing to risk vulnerability again.

  You’re a lionheart not because you know you’ll win but because you try even if you might lose.

  Her grandmother had tried. Her mother had tried, was still trying, over and over, to beat that addiction, no matter how often she had failed. No matter how much the guilt and shame must weigh on her.

  I should give my mother her own lionheart, Elena realized suddenly. Her mother, who still floated lost at sea, as if the family destroyed in the Holocaust had been her mother and grandmother’s Lusitania, the survivors left grasping for debris in the middle of the ocean after that ship was blown from the waters.

  She clutched that ring and those dog tags and her lionheart hard, and lifted her head to kiss Lucien. “I’ll fight for you, too,” she promised fiercely. “Even if I have to fight myself. I will.”

  “I know you will, bella.” He lay his hand over hers against her breastbone. “You’re a lionheart.”

  And after that it felt easy. There on the slope of lavender high under the night stars. Easy and quiet and perfect, as if, in the space their two bodies made, everything was just right. They were home.

  Chapter 29

  The sun rose pink and gold over the fields, while all the world was hungover, except for two old, old people watching the world begin anew.

  Jean-Jacques Rosier and Colette Delatour stood just far enough apart their shoulders didn’t accidentally brush in any way that suggested they needed each other to lean on. Even compressed with age, he stood tall. Even compressed with age, she stood only a half head shorter.

  “So you got him home,” Jean-Jacques said with satisfaction.

  “To think it was the little Lyon girl who got him to stay.”

  For a moment, both were quiet, caught in memories of another little Lyon girl, curled up in roses.

  “To think it was one of my grandsons who brought her home, too,” Jean-Jacques said quietly.

  Colette nodded slowly. It had been hard to take those terrified, somber little kids away from all they knew to strangers. Cruelly hard to know that the only other choice for them was to die.

  “We did the right thing, then,” Jean-Jacques said.

  Colette looked at him, and then they both looked out over the fields again. Facing the same way, as they always had, but still to this day sometimes it was hard to face each other. Kids these days thought it had been easy back then to do the rig
ht thing, as if right and wrong were two loaves of bread you could buy yourself in the bakery, one clearly burned and the other warm and inviting. They didn’t know about the othering, how certain people had been presented over and over as not really human so not worth another human’s sacrifice. They didn’t know about the overwhelming feelings of helplessness into which most people had sunk, as if there was nothing they could possibly do to fight. Kids these days looked back, seventy years later, and saw all the right choices and all the wrong choices as clear as day and couldn’t understand how anyone, anyone, could ever make that wrong choice.

  A sense of right and wrong had been strong in Colette and Jean-Jacques, too. It had fueled them, infuriated them, given them strength. But they knew it hadn’t been simple. They’d saved people. But they’d killed people, too. Sometimes with their own hands, but those weren’t the worst. The worst were the people who had died because Colette and Jacky had made the wrong decisions. The villagers they hadn’t even known who got shot in a reprisal for their actions, early on when they were reckless kids and didn’t realize there would be reprisals on people other than themselves. The friends who had died because they followed Colette and Jean-Jacques Rosier into battle against overwhelming evil. When you inspired people to act…the cost of their actions stayed on your soul forever.

  Other lives had been lost, other people had never had kids, because they had saved Elena Lyon’s grandmother. Élise Dubois’s death had devastated her own little son, so that he, too, never recovered. Making the choice to fight for what was right had never been simple. Never once been easy.

  “We tried,” Colette said. “If you’re not willing to give up your life to save a child’s life, then you’ve lost your soul. I always thought the devil was too pathetic a piece of shit for me to lose my soul to him without trying.” And sometimes it was nice to be around Jacky, who knew exactly how foul her mouth could get, back in the old days, and didn’t look at her as her nephews did sometimes when she cursed, in that affectionate, indulgent way that made her feel as if she was an old lady.

  She’d never been a lady, and she couldn’t get too old yet. Somebody had to hang on to this world and make sure it didn’t let itself get that screwed up again. At least they’d taught the boys all the skills they could about how to fight, how to resist, if it ever came to that a second time.

  Jean-Jacques nodded, and the two gazed at the pink and green fields. Once, on the limestone cliffs that rose white there at the end of the valley, Jean-Jacques Rosier had carved a message for the Nazis, a rallying call for his own people to hold their ground against the enemy. I am here and here I’ll stay.

  That’s right, Colette thought now, to the world. We are.

  In the distance, a tall, straight man and a small, red-headed woman came out of the big mas and stood looking at the fields. The man put his arm around the woman and drew her against his chest.

  Colette felt a sigh ease through her muscles, a sense of peace with the knowledge that the sun they were watching rise was setting for someone else in the world even now. “It’s good to have them all home,” she said softly. Every one. From the little girl in the roses, to lost Léo’s children, to her war-exiled nephew. All back where they belonged.

  “All of them?” Jacky said, his eyebrows drawing together. He picked a rose, gazing at it in his wrinkled hand. Did he ever think about what it had been like when she was nine and he was three, running through these roses, when their hands had been little and innocent? His baby hands and his hands now belonged to the same person, at least that was what DNA would say. One of the reasons Colette didn’t put much faith in things like DNA.

  Jacky turned his head to look at her. “Tell me about this lawyer of yours. Antoine Vallier.”

  ***

  A breeze stirred through the cypress and over weathered white-gray tombstones. The late June afternoon was hot and vibrating with cicadas, and the view gave out over the blue promise of the sea.

  Elena set a bouquet of lavender before a small, simple stone with its Star of David. “Maman says she never liked the smell of roses,” she murmured to Lucien. He rested a heavy, warm hand on her shoulder.

  She draped the chain of a necklace over the headstone, adjusting the heart pendant—deep rich red glass, bought in Venice on a trip with Lucien. She had one for her mother, too. Three generations, fighting to heal. Having a lionheart doesn’t mean you always win. Just that you try as long as you can.

  Her own mother, struggling out of the terrible downward spiral she was caught in, to at least give her daughter a lionheart, to try to help her be brave.

  And it had helped. She had been brave. Brave enough to live her life, to become someone she liked being. Brave enough to hang a ring on that same chain, the ring that represented everything that Lucien was, offered to her. Brave enough to try to learn to have faith in him. You are here and here you’ll stay.

  She stood and rested her hand on the curve of the headstone, gazing out at the sea. Grief and quiet and a kind of rest. She stroked the tombstone the way Lucien always stroked her hair, and Lucien slipped his arm around her waist.

  They stood like that for a while, watching the sea, the hint of lavender bringing freshness to the heat and pines.

  “I know this is pre-mature,” Elena said, “but can we have a lot of kids? Four or five. And raise them to be happy.”

  Lucien tightened his arm around her. “It’s not pre-mature. And I’d like that. After a hundred twenty-six rambunctious teenagers, five sounds just about right.” That intimate, warm crinkling of his eyes just for her. “Easy.”

  She snorted and touched his flat belly. That he would get to keep flat. “Feel free to carry a couple of them if you think it’s so easy.”

  He covered her hand with his. “Story of our life, I guess. Loving you is always going to be just a bit easier for me than it is for you.”

  She looked up at him, so straight and sure and ready for anything, even her. Those blue eyes, and that steady calm, and the warmth that permeated all that toughness. “I’m not scared of hard things. Just scared of the people who don’t do them.”

  Direct gaze. A straightforward promise. I’ll do them.

  As he’d proven. She wrapped both arms around him. “You make me believe in happiness,” she told him softly. “That I can keep.”

  He curved his hand against her cheek in that tender, callused gesture that made her feel so loved. “Exactly.”

  She tightened her arms around his waist. “I love you,” she said fiercely. “Whether or not it’s easy.”

  He bent his head to hers, and held her close, and the cicadas sang all around them. A song of hope. You’ve been alone until me. But now I’m here.

  ***

  FIN

  ***

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  My next book will be Elias’s story in the Paris Nights series. Keep reading for an excerpt from the most recent book in that series, Trust Me.

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  Other Books by Laura Florand

  Paris Nights Series

  All for You

  Chase Me

  Trust Me

  Amour et Chocolat Series

  All’s Fair in Love and Chocolate, a novella in Kiss the Bride

  The Chocolate Thief

  The Chocolate Kiss

  The Chocolate Rose (also a prequel to La Vie en Roses series)

  The Chocolate Touch

  The Chocolate Heart

  The Chocolate Temptation

  Sun-Kissed (also a sequel to Snow-Kissed)

  Shadowed Heart (a sequel to The Chocolate Heart)

  La Vie en Roses Series

  Turning Up the Heat (a nove
lla prequel)

  The Chocolate Rose (also part of the Amour et Chocolat series)

  A Rose in Winter, a novella in No Place Like Home

  Once Upon a Rose

  A Wish Upon Jasmine

  A Crown of Bitter Orange

  A Kiss in Lavender

  Snow Queen Duology

  Snow-Kissed (a novella)

  Sun-Kissed (also part of the Amour et Chocolat series)

  Memoir

  Blame It on Paris

  Trust Me, Excerpt

  Lina was fighting a dragon.

  You’d think a dragon would know better than to mess with an international heroine who could take terrorists out with a bucket of liquid nitrogen, but no.

  The damn thing was smirking at her.

  She revved her chainsaw. You sure you want to take that tone with me, lizard? Ice shards flew as she took her saw to the curve of its neck, the cold in the room trying to overwhelm her body heat even through her gloves and hoodie.

  Why the hell she had wanted to learn to ice sculpt, she did not know. It had seemed like a fun new challenge when she first took her motorbike out to Brittany to talk a famous sculptor there into teaching her his tricks—after all, she got to wield a chainsaw—but then hell had exploded in the Au-dessus kitchens, and now she was still on the hook for next month's contest and likely to humiliate herself by coming in last place, at the rate she was going.

  Of course she’d probably be excused for giving up, in the circumstances. Backing down.

  Letting the bad guys win.

  She narrowed her eyes at the smirking dragon and revved her chainsaw menacingly—

  And a big figure moved in the doorway of the freezer.

  She swung violently, the chainsaw slicing straight through the dragon’s neck. Ice shattered on the floor around her boots.

  Size, danger, violence, freckles, and all her adrenaline shooting into her bloodstream ready to fight him—