Joss gazed down at her. The sunset glimmered rose across his face. “Good,” he said finally. “I’m sorry that I hurt you, Célie, but I’m glad you ended up with all this”—a copy of her gesture, to include the whole Seine and all its palaces and bridges and Eiffel Tower, and then a slower, gentler shift of his hand up and down, to include her—“instead of just me.”
Oh.
Now what was she supposed to think or feel about that?
“I would have been happy with just you,” she muttered. Just. How could he even say that about his strength and kindness and steadiness, all those things he had shown her back then, in a world where everyone else’s strength always seemed to be primed to cause harm?
“In Tarterets?”
“It never crossed your mind that we could make something of ourselves together? Drive south, me hire on with a baker, you with a mechanic in some likely town, and we make just a … I don’t know … a stupid, happy life together?”
He stared at her.
Yeah. It obviously hadn’t occurred to him.
“I wanted to be bigger,” he said stubbornly.
“Yeah, well … forgive me for ever imagining you could become a bigger person with me there to help. I didn’t realize I would have kept you small.”
Fine. That choice would have kept him smaller than he was now, true. Some small-town mechanic, while she was a small-town baker.
She sure did love being the best chocolatier in Paris. Even if Dom did get all the credit.
Okay, fine, maybe Dom deserved a smidgen of the credit. But still …
“You wouldn’t have kept me small.” Joss was gaining that obdurate tone he got, when he had to keep forcing the same words out because he couldn’t find the perfect ones. “But I had to get bigger.”
“Congratulations.” Still in his hold, Célie brought both hands up so that she could bury her head in them instead of his shoulder. “You clearly succeeded in your goal.”
“It was my first step.” As always, Joss’s words were simple, his gaze direct. “You’re the goal.”
Chapter 10
Célie’s heart clenched when the door into her building swung shut with Joss on the other side of it. The darkness tightened her lungs as she set her foot on the first stair. Every breath grew more panicked, that she would never see him again, that closing that door on him had shut out his existence. She couldn’t do this, walking away from him, climbing and climbing up a dark stairwell by herself while she left him behind.
She had to, though. Because he had done the same thing to her, left her behind while he disappeared up a dark climb where she could not follow. And she couldn’t be the person left behind again.
She was as unable to let him back in as she was to send him away.
She smacked on the timed lights at every landing, but the one flight lit above her seemed like some wimpy candle against a grief or a fear, and the darkness pursued her from below, as the lights went out behind her with each flight she cleared.
In her apartment, at least, she could leave the lights on. Her home in expensive Paris was essentially a bed with a tiny amount of space on either side of it to move around. Joss couldn’t come up here. If he came up there, she would …
He would …
They would …
How did Joss make love? She had no idea. Urgent and hungry, pushing her down onto that bed as soon as they bumped into it for lack of other space to move?
Quietly, slow and easy, letting her lead?
Tantalizing, starting at that knuckle he had tasted and slowly drawing her finger into his mouth as he massaged her hand and let his palm rub down her wrist, calluses over her skin as he worked his way into greater and greater intimacies, not one of which she could deny?
Why did he have to have such a hot body? That wasn’t fair. All muscled and perfect and stubborn and those beautiful eyes focused on her, as if he’d hike two hundred kilometers for her with a fifty-kilo pack on his back any day of the year. You’re the goal.
She wanted to smack him when he said that. She wasn’t any damn freaking goal, she was a person. She’d rather they have been walking hand in hand toward any goals.
She’d rather have come home, the first time she succeeded in making a perfect chocolate for Dom, and crawled onto their bed in their tiny apartment because it was the only space they had, to show it off to Joss excitedly and watch him eat it. Maybe even bring it to his lips with her own fingers, because he hadn’t yet had time to wash the grease off his hands from working on some car.
That was what she would have rather.
They would have been happy.
He couldn’t take back all those nights she’d had to curl up between her bed and the wall, in those black hours when she went into panic attacks over what he might be going through.
It had been bad enough when she thought he just didn’t care about her that way.
But to have done it for her? To have liked her and still left her that way?
It made her want to rip him to shreds.
Only, she was afraid if she touched him, she might just rip his clothes off instead. That when her fingers tried to sink into his actual body, they would end up doing something else.
She washed her face in lieu of being able to clean up her mind and went to the window, hugging herself, looking out at all the other lights that used to console her a little during those black moments. She was alone, but she wasn’t. Millions of other people were out there being alone, too.
Or finding someone.
But Joss had never been part of those millions. Always before, Joss had been somewhere off with the Foreign Legion, and even thinking about him had made her brain shy away from all the imagined nightmares of who might be shooting at him or what he might be doing.
She leaned on her little window railing, like a princess whose Prince Charming never did remember to stop by and serenade her, and blinked at what she saw below.
What in the world was Joss doing now?
***
Joss punched his jacket into a comfortable shape under his head and settled back on the bench, gazing up at the light in Célie’s window. Six floors up. He’d picked it out by the timing of when the light went on, after she left him at the door, and confirmed it by the shape of her silhouette.
It would be easy to climb the face of that building. Really easy. Just his own body weight to carry, and there were balconies and ledges every floor and even some grimacing old stone faces for handholds. It would feel like strolling in the park, to climb the face of that building.
So climbing up the stairs inside with her would have felt like … floating. Magically rising above the earth just by the wish of it.
Maybe she knew that. Maybe she didn’t think he deserved anything that easy.
She’d worked hard, too, after all. He pulled out his little metal box and gazed at the three chocolates he had saved for later. His thumbnail traced carefully around the edge of the one with delicate green twining across it, the mint one. She must have worked her butt off, to get this good.
Célie. He smiled. She’d never been afraid of work, or at least not work per se. She’d been afraid of ending up in a mind-numbing job in a factory, but that was why she’d focused hard on her pastry apprenticeship, because it made her happy and proud. Some people would consider pastry work mind-numbing, too, but not Célie. His mind flashed to all those memories of her face when she ran out of her bakery with a box full of something she was so proud to offer him.
Célie. With her burgundy braid and her bright eyes, always so happy and vibrant and bouncy. Sometimes she’d twitch that saucy butt at him on purpose and stick her tongue out at some excuse she’d found to tease him, when she met him leaving his work or he met her leaving hers, and his fingers would itch and he’d shove his hands in his pockets, to save her butt from them.
To make sure that first he became the man she’d really dreamed he would be. Her hero.
He clasped his hands behind his head to get
comfortable, gazing in some awe at the wide open sky, the lights sparkling in windows on the buildings rising around him—people changing, eating, arguing, gazing out the windows at the night. He supposed he should go to a hotel until he found an apartment, but he hated to waste money on something stupid like that. He had plans for that money.
Besides, it had been a year since his last leave. And right now, being outside like this, under the non-starry sky of bright Paris, with people of both sexes all around just living their lives, no real menace to him anywhere, instead of in barracks surrounded by the solidarity and snores and problematic temperaments of other fighting men or outside where he had to keep an eye out for snipers or someone smiling coming up to him with a basket of flowers that hid a bomb … it felt so free, it was almost like flying. He didn’t even know if he’d be able to sleep. He might want to pace Paris, see it with all its lights and cynicism and the profound romantic innocence of its sleep.
He turned his head toward Célie’s window again, wondering what she looked like when she slept. Romantic? Innocent? Cynical? Cute. He was pretty sure about the cute part.
He couldn’t see her moving in her apartment anymore. A sigh of wistful arousal ran through him at the thought of her, either in the shower or already tucking herself into her pillow.
“Joss.”
His head twisted at her voice coming from across the street. What was she doing back down here and not in bed? Oh, hey, had she missed him? Maybe even … started thinking about inviting him up?
She crossed the street determinedly as he stood and stopped in front of him, her hands on her hips. “What are you doing?” she demanded.
He looked from her to his jacket in a pillow position on the bench, not quite grasping the question when the answer seemed pretty obvious. “Nothing much,” he admitted. “Just going to take a break for a while.” He’d been up a lot longer than twenty hours at a stretch before. Sleep deprivation to push a man past his breaking point was a key component of Legion training, a well-founded component it turned out later, given what they had to deal with in actual combat situations. But that sleep deprivation was also how a man learned to catch sleep when he could, too.
“Are you sleeping on that bench? Joss—don’t you have anywhere to stay?”
“I hadn’t gotten around to it. I just got into town this morning, and … I’ve been busy.” Besides, originally, he hadn’t intended to stay. He’d thought he’d sweep Célie off to some place like Tahiti, and they’d spend the rest of their lives in some dreamy paradise. Now … well, she seemed happy here.
“Do you want to help me find a place?” he asked hopefully. That way, even if she tried to be noncommittal, he’d know exactly how much or little she liked his options. He could read Célie like an open book.
Actually better. He could focus on her longer, without the sense of her swimming away from him. She … rested his eyes. His brain. Made him feel as if everything was clear now, beautifully so, as if all that energy and tough-hearted optimism in her washed the world around her clean and made it sparkle.
Every time he thought of her insane little chocolates, that so-easily-melted, delicate perfection held out to the world with all her heart, it made him smile. Maybe the smile didn’t show, because he’d spent the last five years in situations where you didn’t want to give anyone a weapon against you, but it curled up there, deep in his middle. God, I want to kiss you.
“Joss.” She put both hands to her head. He loved it when she did that, the way it showed off her whole body—energy and curves and gracefully determined muscle—in some dramatic chiding. He liked being the focus of her chiding. He got off on it a little bit, to tell the truth. “People already want to arrest you as a crazy stalker.”
He stopped smiling. “Damn it, now I can’t even sleep on a bench? Merde, Célie. It’s a nice night.” Nice night to be alive, nice night to be out of the Legion, nice night to gaze up at an apartment window and contemplate his goal and how he was going to get to it. He sure as hell had spent nights in far worse conditions contemplating his goal and how he was going to reach it and, ideally, survive.
Of course, in those cases, sometimes he had to kill his goal, which was another of the contrasts that was so nice here.
She jerked her hands down from her head and folded her arms across her chest, a look he didn’t like on her at all. It closed her off. “And that’s a load of bullshit,” she said stiffly.
Oh, really? He clasped his left wrist behind his back in parade rest. “What is?” he asked coolly.
“That you did it all for me. First of all, if you did it all for me, I’ll kill you. And second, you damn well did not. You must have just started some fantasy thing about me to get you through.”
One thing a man learned fast in the first four months training in the Legion was when to keep his mouth shut, no matter what someone said or even yelled in his face. Just because somebody said something completely idiotic and insulting didn’t mean you had to react to it. Plus, she’d put him in the typical drill sergeant lose-lose situation there—damned no matter what point he argued.
“Just like some—some calendar pin-up girl or something,” Célie muttered.
Joss grinned before he could catch himself, a sneak escape out through his neutral expression, at the idea of Célie as a pin-up girl. “You’d make a rather unique Playboy bunny.”
Her hands dropped to her hips. There you go. He liked that position, too. Much more open than the arms folded one, and, yes, yes, getting in trouble with her did give him a hot erotic charge. Made him want to just … mess with her. Get her more riled up until they were wrestling on a big bed and he was proving to her exactly how much she liked the kind of trouble he could get into. He’d never done it in real life, but always in his fantasies, that was a familiar tussle, one they got into a lot.
But Célie was scowling. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He imagined that scowling position naked, perhaps with some skimpy erotic lace covering certain bits. His grin snuck back out. “You’d definitely be different than their norm.”
Hurt flashed across her face before she covered it with a deepened scowl. “Well, now you’ve dashed all my hopes of building a career out of exposing myself so that perverts can jerk off fantasizing about me.”
Pervert seemed a little harsh there. What else was he supposed to do, find a brothel?
“I always kind of liked the idea of you being unique to me,” he said apologetically.
She stared at him.
He tapped his temple. “My, ah, pin-up girl in here. No one else gets to see.”
Her lips parted. She licked them, and then pressed them abruptly together, stiffening her stance. “I’m going to hit you now.”
He laughed. Damn, she was cute. All those fantasies had gotten so faded and worn-out over time, and her real-life presence recharged them hard. As if they’d been hit by lightning and most definitely needed some kind of surge protector to keep from shorting out his whole system. “Okay. Am I allowed to duck and block, grab my attacker and subdue her, or do you want me to just stand still?”
Grabbing his attacker and locking her in right up close to his chest while she wiggled …
Her hands went back to her head again instead, and she gripped her skull as if to keep it on. “Joss, I can’t put you up in my apartment. It’s basically just a bed with walls.”
Oh, wow, hell. Definitely needed a surge protector there.
“I mean, you can barely squeeze around in it, without falling on the bed.”
Holy shit. His brain fried. His breaths started to come in long and deep, as his whole body went hot and hard.
“You have to go to a hotel.”
He frowned, and his hand tightened around his wrist behind his back. Damn it, she just didn’t get it, did she? How much easier it was for him to be a little uncomfortable than to get far away from her again. He’d already screwed up once by committing to five years away from her. “I think I’m more used to
roughing it than you realize. I was enjoying being outside. It’s a nice night. It’s Paris. I suppose you’re used to it being Paris.”
She nodded uncertainly, her arms back across her chest. She just couldn’t stop moving, could she? He’d always loved that contrast with himself, with the way he knew how to be still. And wait for her. “Joss—can you not afford a hotel?” she asked cautiously. “You know I’d help you out, if you needed it, right?”
Right, because that was the whole point of joining the Foreign Legion—coming back to sponge off an old semi-friend’s little sister, helpless to take care of himself. “I’m fine, Célie. I’ve actually got enough for—well, it depends where you want to live, but a nice house in some places or a down payment here.” He nodded at the expensive Paris streets.
She gasped, one hand flying to her lips as she stared at him.
Now what should he not have said? Shit, the Legion lessons were right—a man was really better off, in all circumstances, just keeping his mouth shut.
“A—a house?” she whispered. “For you and me?”
“Not a house here. It’s the Legion, not a millionaire’s club. Here it would have to be an apartment.”
Her head bent. She looked as if she might be on the verge of tears again. He wanted to touch her, but it was night in a romantic city just below her apartment that was all bed, and his body was already so freaking charged up. He tightened his hold on his wrist, struggling to ride out the urge.
“Joss…I know letters aren’t your thing,” she said low, desperate … and angry, too. She lifted her head. “But five years saving up for a house together and you couldn’t have written? Found a phone once in a while and called? Come see me on leave?”
“That wouldn’t really have been fair to you. To ask you to wait for me.” Plus, he hadn’t proved he deserved her yet. Lots of men failed out of the Foreign Legion. And it made his stomach jittery to even think about how much it would have cost him to come see her on leave and then turn around and say good-bye again.
All for You Page 8
