Not boyfriend. Not friend.
Her … Joss.
On the street below, when the couple came into her range of vision, Dom had his hands shoved in his pockets, every line of his body hard. She could tell that the two of them were arguing as they walked, that Dom was seriously pissed off and Jaime was standing her ground, fighting back, her gestures growing increasingly exasperated. Célie’s gut knotted. They were, like, the magic couple. They made her believe happy endings were possible. She didn’t want her problems to hurt the magic couple.
Dom’s steps slowed as they reached the end of the block. He turned toward Jaime. Jaime lifted her hand to cup his cheek.
Dom’s eyes closed a moment, and he angled his head to kiss Jaime’s wrist.
Oh, for God’s sake.
Célie grabbed some more chocolate to break up, brooding over how easy those two found it to make up when her own anger and betrayal and pain lodged deep in her where she couldn’t let it go.
***
“This one’s a really dark chocolate,” Célie said. “Bitter.”
In Joss’s big hands, that bitterness looked fragile and insignificant, all too ready to melt at his heat. He treated it with respect, though, studying the nine chocolates in their little metal box, the adamant rippling pattern stamped on their surfaces instead of any color or stylized motif. “Can I eat them? Or am I supposed to take my time, let them last?”
He hadn’t come inside the shop that day, nor spent his day waiting for her outside it, but when she left it, he was leaning against a nearby wall. Shades of when she was eighteen, when he often showed up a few minutes before she got off and waited for her. His shoulders were straighter now, almost no ability to slouch in his stance, his face sterner even in repose. But he still picked the same position—not directly across from the door but a little up the street to the right, where her gaze went to him automatically. He still straightened immediately, exactly as he once had, and came toward her without any pretense that he had been there for any reason other than her.
They stood now in the Parc de Belleville, Célie’s favorite park in Paris. Close to her little apartment, it was built on a hill in the old immigrants’ quarter of Paris where a little patch of a vineyard could still be found and children played in waterfalls built into the slope, and a view of Paris spread out below it, as if the city belonged to her. It was rare for tourists to find their way to it. No, this park was for Parisians, a spatial feast for children and parents and all the people from the quarter who sought this park for the same reasons she did. Peace. Play. Dreaming.
Trees lined the gravel path. A woman sat on a bench some way up it, reading. Shadows and sunlight dappled them.
“I don’t know,” Célie said uneasily, her gaze going from those dark chocolates in his callused palm up the muscled arm to the mouth that would close around them, in which they would melt. At twenty-six, he had lines already at the corners of his eyes from squinting into the sun and sand, and his lips had a firmness to them from being so long pressed into a stern line. Her lips and her eyes didn’t have any of that. Full, wide lips, generally laughing eyes. Even despite the pain he’d left in her middle when he left her.
He’d counted on her resilience. And, well … she’d had resilience. She had, in fact, bounced up, blossomed without him, lived a life she still wanted to hug to her for how vivid and delicious it was.
“I can try one now?” Joss eased it out of the box with a blunt-tipped finger.
“That’s … that’s kind of the point,” Célie said. To let him eat that bitter darkness up.
Was that, in fact, her point?
She stared at his fingers bringing her helpless chocolate to his lips. Stern lips that softened for it, eyes that brightened at the rush of flavor in his mouth, the subtle shifting of his facial muscles that indicated how he savored it. Heat climbed up her back, making everything in its path shiver.
“In … in milk chocolate, you can get away with lesser quality,” she said. “The sweetness will offset the cheap. That’s why candy bars are mostly sugar. But the darker it gets, the more the chocolate has to be the best, the ganache the most melt-in-your-mouth smooth and perfect.”
Joss’s eyes focused on her mouth and stayed there. Her lips started to burn, this soft, buzzing burning that made her want to lick them, made her want to swallow. “Do you like it?” he asked. “This dark.”
She nodded slowly. “I have to savor it. I … need to.”
“I like it, too.” His rough voice was like being grazed with quiet. As if quiet had rubbed its five o’clock shadow all over her skin. “It’s as if you made it just for me.”
Well … yeah.
“If I eat it all up, will you be mad?” He touched the edge of another square hungrily. Shadows and light played over his face from the shift of leaves above them and the angle of the afternoon sun across Paris.
“I—I don’t know,” Célie said, mesmerized by his mouth, by the thought of more bitter-dark chocolate melting so easily. “I—I didn’t expect for you to make it all disappear this fast.”
“Maybe just one more.” Her skin prickled with the texture of that quiet voice. He loosened the chocolate from the box and brought it to his lips. “Or maybe two,” he murmured as the chocolate disappeared. An expression of concentrated pleasure suffused his face, his eyes closing.
In that instant his eyelids protected her, Célie stole a lick of her lips. When his eyes opened, she was somehow closer to him. Able to see all the flecks of hazel and green in his eyes, locking with hers. The afternoon sun kissed one side of his face. She followed that kissing light with her eyes, helplessly, wanting to press her lips to the corner of his, there where the sun touched.
“I need to warn you about something,” he said.
She waited, while children laughed out of sight in the distance. He didn’t chatter much, Joss. He would answer her questions, but if he told her something gratuitously, it was always because he thought she needed to know.
“Before I left, I tried really hard to be your friend and your brother’s friend and not to touch you. I tried not to go after you. I succeeded.”
She scowled, reached for one of her chocolates, and ate it herself. The bitter darkness stung her tongue even as it melted.
“But you’re all grown up, and I’ve become someone closer to the man I wanted to be for you.”
“I’m going to hit you if you say that one more time,” Célie said between her teeth. And licked chocolate off her lips. It tasted bitter. And sweet.
“So it’s going to feel different to you. Because now I can try for you. And you don’t actually know what that’s like, when I try.”
She struggled to stay stiffened against him. But she felt like her own stupid chocolate, vainly struggling not to melt at the temperature of touch. “What’s it like?”
She’d better get him to tell her, because he might never get a chance to show her. The odds of him having to actually exert himself to get her seemed woefully low right then.
He searched for words like an alien trying to convey his world so that an Earthling could understand. “I don’t give up. I don’t let go when the going gets tough. I’m not very crushable by even the worst insults, and you could strip me naked and humiliate me and I’d still keep going even if I had to crawl through the mud to my goal. I can be patient, and I can be persistent, and I can endure, and if something hurts, it doesn’t stop me.” A slight, wry twist to his mouth. “I suppose you could get a SWAT team to bring me down, though. I’d eventually respond to enough bullets.”
She put her hands on her hips. “And that’s not the least bit creepy.”
That straight, serious gaze. “Is it? I may not have very good judgment anymore, about what average people think is acceptable effort.”
She rubbed her arms, which kept missing his warmth despite the summer and her leather jacket. “It would be nice to have a stop button on you, short of shooting you.”
A tiny, perplexed wrinkli
ng of those stubborn eyebrows, a search of her eyes. “You are the stop button, Célie. You can say no.”
She frowned, in a sudden surge of panic at that ability.
Energy ran through all the hard lines of his body. His focus honed in on her. He took a step closer. “Do you want to say it?”
She bit her lip, unable to look away from his eyes. She felt like a kitten, begging him not to drown her. And utterly mute. If she tried to speak, she might only manage a whimper of a meow.
His hand lifted and touched her face. She gave a little gasp. The last time her cheek had felt the gentle, callused warmth of that hand had been in some teenage bout of furious tears over her brother, when Joss was trying to coax her out of it. “No, Célie?”
She swallowed.
He shifted in, this unhurried, gentle motion, easing her back against a tree, leaning over her, closing her in. “Not one little ‘stop’?” His hand slid to cup her head, his other hand bracing against the tree above her.
She licked her lips, her breath coming in hard and deep. She had to grab enough oxygen before she went under.
“Not one little ‘no’?” His head bent closer to hers, this hot, strange hunger flaring in his eyes, as if all that steady hazel had been hiding a wild creature.
She tried again to speak and could only swallow. His lips were so close …
“Maybe a hand raised”—his leg shifted so that now a thigh framed her, too—“to push me back?”
Her fingers flexed into her palms, in this hot, still panic that any move she made might be the wrong one, might tell him no.
And she was supposed to be telling him no. She was supposed to be saying stop. Stop, go away, leave me alone … her insides whirled in fear that he might hear the attempted thought, might do it.
He’d left her alone before, after all, without her even asking.
His palm ran down her arm, a strong rub of warmth, until he reached her hand. He lifted it and set it against his shoulder. “I’m right here.” His breath brushed her lips, every line in his body taut with barely restrained energy. “If you need to shove me away.”
And then he kissed her—this sweet, firm closing of his lips over hers, this rushing, thorough heat as he lost control almost instantly, his kiss deepening, his hands gripping the tree hard on either side of her head, his body pressing into hers. Arousal and heat, hard strength, this intense, starving hunger.
She’d dreamed of kissing Joss so many times, and it wasn’t like any of them. It wasn’t dreamy. It was so damn physical and hot and real. The bark pressed against her head, and his hard body surged into hers, so obviously wanting more, and she couldn’t stop kissing him back. She just couldn’t stop.
She kept climbing into him, trying to eat him up, trying to make him hers, take him inside her where he could never get away from her again. Kissing and kissing, seeking the texture and hunger of his mouth, his tongue, the strength of those shoulders as she dug her hands into them, as she dragged her fingers down to squeeze his arm muscles, too, as she slid her hands around to climb up the hard, broad muscles of his back.
“Hell.” He shoved away from her and staggered to the next tree over, pressing a hand against it and hanging his weight against that arm. A flush ran over his cheekbones, his lips damp and full as if somebody had just tried to eat him up.
She held herself back against her own tree, trembling with the need to go after him, to not let this stop, and weak with the fear that she had already drowned in him. That she wouldn’t find her way back to herself.
“Holy shit.” Joss pressed his forehead against his tree so hard that the muscles in his neck stood out. “You’re going to have to shove me really hard, if you kiss me that way. That’s almost too much for me to handle. I shouldn’t have—hell, I shouldn’t have tried this in public.”
Thank God it had been in public. If he’d kissed her like that in her apartment, they’d be … right this second, they’d be … She covered her face, pressing the heels of her palms into her forehead to drive in sense. “I told you I couldn’t let you come up to my apartment.”
He turned his head against the tree to look at her. One of his arms looped around the tree and tightened, holding himself there. “That was for you? Merde, Célie, I thought … I thought it was for me. Because you could guess how hard it is for me to hold back and didn’t want to torment me. Or maybe didn’t trust me.”
Torment him. Her thighs squeezed along with all those inner muscles right above them. “For both of us, I guess. Mostly, um … me.”
“Oh, hell, sweetheart. Célie.” He turned back to her.
She backed away, holding up her hands, eating his body hungrily with her eyes over the barrier. She wanted him so badly that hunger made tears well out of her eyes, and she didn’t realize until she was sobbing. Oh, God, not again with the crying. When was she going to get this all out? She covered her face, but the tears kept coming, until she had to sit down on the nearest bench. “I can’t do this, Joss. I can’t do it. It hurt so much when you left.”
A big body dropped down in front of her. She dragged her hands far enough from her eyes to see him. That corded strength knelt beside her thigh, Joss taking her hands, his eyes intense. “I’m sorry, Célie.”
How could somebody whose whole body communicated lethal power apologize? To her?
“I know you are,” she whispered. “I just … can’t get over it this fast.” She gestured to the box of chocolates. And suddenly, bitterly, it burst out of her: “You don’t deserve me.”
Not the her she had made without him, happy and energetic and most definitely independent, not needing any man. Because a woman couldn’t let herself count on any man. Not her father, whom she’d never even met, not her marijuana-smoking, dog-fighting cousins, not her older brother, and most definitely not her older brother’s sexy friend, who might run off and join the Foreign Legion without even warning her, as if she didn’t matter at all.
Joss’s body tightened, and his arm went out to press across the bench just beside her thigh, gripping the opposite edge. Anger flared through every line of his body, locking his lips into a tight line. The way he’d looked at Ludo when he first realized Ludo was dealing. “I did all this to deserve you, Célie.” His arm tightened on the bench, his voice dropping low and harsh. “Do you have any idea how much I did?”
Her eyes widened as she stared at him, and she wanted to pet those broad shoulders just in front of her, to pet down over those straining arms. That must have strained so much more than this, over and over and over. Up cliffs. In two hundred push-ups because some sergeant was pissed. Hauling himself on his belly through the mud in training. Training the whole purpose of which was to teach him to handle the next four years of his life, when any cliff he climbed or mud he dragged himself through would be for life or death.
“I’m sorry.” Her hands did reach out of their own volition and pet down over his biceps, tentatively, a thief stealing the texture of those muscled arms to carry away with her in her palms. “I didn’t mean that, exactly.”
“Then what did you mean?” This deep vibration of anger.
“I just—” She pushed a hand across her stupid streaming eyes. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I just—I really loved you, Joss. Just the way you were. You made me—happy. To know I might see you that day.”
“Célie.” His hand gripped the edge of the bench until she thought he’d break it on the metal. He pulled himself a taut five centimeters closer to her. “Do you think I didn’t know you had a crush on me?”
She gave a little gasp.
“Of course I did. It’s not like you had a lot of other options for halfway decent guys there. But you deserved better.”
She stared straight into his face, only a forearm’s length from hers, his eyes blazing.
He thrust himself back and to his feet. “So I got that for you.” He gestured to himself, a slashing, angry indication of his body. “Better.”
Célie stuffed her arm into her mout
h—still clad in the heavy-duty protective leather that she wore for riding on her moped—and buried her primal scream as deep in her throat as she could.
The woman reading a few benches down, who had ignored their sexed-up clinching as the normal backdrop to an evening in a Paris park, now looked around, frowning.
Célie pulled her self-imposed leather gag out of her mouth and made a little motion with her hand to indicate the woman didn’t need to worry. Then she tried taking deep breaths. She even closed her thumb and forefinger together into those circles she saw eccentric tourists do sometimes when meditating in the more tourist-central Paris parks. The circles didn’t help.
“I know I was just a stupid kid.” She folded her arms, as if that could protect her wounded middle. “And … weak. I know I was acting like a five-year-old who can’t handle her nightmares. But I used to hide between my wall and the bed almost every night, because the panic attacks were so bad, after you left.”
His eyes widened, and then his eyebrows drew together. “What were you afraid of?” His anger honed in on this new focus. “Who was threatening you?”
She shook her head. “I wasn’t afraid for me. Although,” she couldn’t help adding, “if anyone had threatened me, you put yourself out of range to be able to help for five years.”
His face blanked again. This hard blankness of a man who’d learned blank from a merciless military.
She pushed her hands across her face, trying to clear away the wetness. “I was afraid for you.” And, in a whisper, “God, I was so afraid.”
He stepped forward and just wrapped her up, pulling her up and in for a strong, firm hug against his body. She could still feel the hardness of anger in him, but he didn’t let it leak into the pressure of his hug. Or maybe his body was just always that hard now, anger or not. “You don’t have to be afraid anymore.” His voice vibrated under her ear against his chest. “I’m here now. I’ve got you. I’m sorry, Célie.”
She tilted her head back. “I taught myself how to be brave. I conquered those nightmares myself. I don’t need you anymore.”
All for You Page 10
