It kind of looked like more fun, working with them, than working on the apartment by himself.
He missed the physicality of his life, and he missed the camaraderie, too. Strong men, working hard together, taking risks together. Missed knowing that three words A moi, Legion! would bring every Legionnaire in earshot running to join in his fight.
“So your background checks out,” Jaime said.
Joss raised his eyebrows a little. “The Legion gave you information on me?” What minister of France had they held hostage and tortured?
Jaime smiled faintly. “Hardly. But we were able to confirm that you were actually in it, as you said, and not in prison for the past five years.”
Fair enough. Joss waited.
“I’m reticent toward private military companies,” Jaime said.
Well, hell. Yeah. Who wouldn’t be?
“But given the scale of our operations, and the detriment to Corey when local wars affect the cacao supply, we’re under some pressure to employ at least some forces to protect our farmers. I resisted that in the past, but riding around on a moped trying to do good didn’t work out that well for me.”
Joss’s eyebrows went up a little. He studied the slender, freckled woman across from him. “You rode around on a moped trying to create world peace or something?”
Jaime opened a hand wryly.
“Hell. That was stu—” He caught himself. Maybe she already knew that was stupid.
“At any rate, at this point we accept that we probably need to work with at least some private security forces,” Jaime said.
“No,” Joss said.
She paused. From the look on her face, people must not say no to her job offers all that often.
“I’m not interested in being a mercenary. Sorry. I’d rather have stayed in the Legion.”
Jaime shook her head. “I wouldn’t do that to Célie. I told you I was a friend of hers.”
He was not entirely sure how female friendships worked. His past five years’ experience was exclusively male—male solidarity, male enmity. He hadn’t been the type to go to any of the brothels that always sprang up around military bases, particularly Legion ones now that the Legion no longer provided a brothel itself. Plus, he’d promised himself to Célie even if she didn’t know it, so the only females he’d even chatted with in a friendly way had been the ones who worked the bars and cafés the Legionnaires frequented. Those women had seemed pretty isolated in a world of men, to him. Before that, Célie’s teenage friends had never impressed him that much—catty, mostly, and often trying to hit on him when Célie’s back was turned. But he’d liked Célie’s friends the night before.
And Jaime Corey seemed … kind of a good person for Célie to have at her back, actually.
“What I would like to have is an advisor,” Jaime said. “Someone who can accurately assess a military situation and what it means when a country sends in this regiment or that one, but also someone who can assess the PMCs and help me work with them. Have you ever heard women complain about how mechanics and car salesmen treat women much worse than they treat other men? Well, that’s nothing compared to how private military and security forces treat women. But they won’t lie to you, a Legionnaire. They’d respect you.”
“They should. Most of the ones I met couldn’t survive a day in the Legion.”
“Well, we can’t hire the Legion,” Jaime said wryly.
Joss gave her a dark, ironic glance. He’d had a cynical streak about politics even before he spent the past five years surrounded by profoundly cynical men—cynicism being that protective armor for, or perhaps the disillusioned flip side of, the crazy romanticism that would lead a man to join the Legion in the first place—and he had some pretty strong thoughts about how the billionaires in the world affected where he was deployed and what mud he was crawling through while they drank champagne or whatever the hell billionaires did while other men died for them.
“Well, it involves a lot of politics,” Jaime corrected herself dryly. “It’s hard to control. And it takes a really long time to get anything to happen. My dad always says getting what you want through the political system is like trying to thread a needle wearing boxing gloves. He says about the only good it does is that at least you’re got something useful on your hands when you get ready to smack someone in the head. In other words, it’s not really efficient or effective.”
“That must be terrible for you,” Joss said expressionlessly. “To have so much trouble perverting a democratic system to your ends.” Goddamn billionaires.
Jaime paused a second. Then smiled. “I can’t wait to introduce you to my father. Don’t worry, he loves taking the gloves off with someone who can actually fight him.”
Joss avoided rolling his eyes. That was one of the many things Legionnaire training came in handy for—control of expression.
“That.” Jaime pointed at him. “That’s what I need. Someone who can handle tough, strong men and not take any crap off them and make sure that we, Corey, and particularly me, my foundation, only use security forces that are doing the right thing.”
“What kind of work are you doing? Besides exploiting cocoa farmers?”
A little pause. Jaime smiled again. “You know how I don’t know nearly enough about the military to be hiring a company? You may not know nearly as much as you think about what we do, either.”
“I know,” Joss said. “I’ve never even tried caviar.”
Jaime laughed. “We’re working really hard to support and further the development of good, equitable, nonexploitative conditions on all cacao farms. Myself, I’m kind of an idealist, I guess, but my father, who claims to be a hardheaded pragmatist, will tell you it’s in our own best interests, the same way it’s in our interests to be moving heaven and earth to find a way to stop frosty pod rot. If you want a discussion with someone who can defend the capitalist system, you’re probably better off with a different Corey. But let’s just say we’d like not only our intentions but our actual actions to be good. A positive force in cocoa regions.”
Fine, he probably should shut up now with the sarcastic comments. At least they were trying. That whole thing about manipulating the political system to get the military to serve the billionaires of the world had really gotten his back up.
“So would you be interested?” Jaime said. “You’d be based in Paris, but the position would involve a fair amount of travel, particularly to West Africa right now, but also somewhat to South America. We also work in the Pacific, but shouldn’t need any military advising there. Your role might eventually develop to go beyond advising to making hiring decisions and solving any issue you see, but you won’t be acting as a security force yourself. Although this is a new position we’re creating, so you’d need to have the initiative and strength of character to form it into whatever would be the most effective.”
That last sentence might have clinched the deal. He liked the idea of having control over his role, after five years in the Legion, when a man had to shut his mouth and obey orders, however insane. He’d achieved the rank of sergeant in his quest to have more power over his choices. But the military meant there was always someone higher in command. Here, he would make calls. Guide what happened.
“For a starting salary, we were looking at …” Jaime said, and Joss went blank at the figure she named.
So that was why billionaires always got what they wanted. He’d be earning more in a month than he ever had in a whole year as a Legionnaire or a beginning mechanic in a poor suburb of Paris.
“Plus, bonuses and benefits, of course. Besides the benefits the French government requires we give here, there’s a great educational benefit—all tuition paid for your kids at any accredited university in the U.S.”
That was a weird benefit. He could pay for a complete education in France with only two weeks of the salary she had just named.
“And you’re vested after only a year in your stock options, and then we’ll contribute the equivalent of 13
.6 percent of your salary into your private retirement funds as long as you put in three percent, and you get to keep that, no matter when you leave.”
Joss stared at her. “I don’t, ah, have kids.” Good lord, retirement? He wanted to protest that he was only twenty-six, that he couldn’t think that far ahead yet—that part of his brain hadn’t turned on. And yet suddenly his own solidity struck him—that he’d become a man, someone who could raise kids, who could see them through to a successful adulthood and provide them an education, and … he’d been hit by some pretty hard blows in the past five years, but this one took a minute to absorb. Struck by himself, the sheer mass of who he was now.
He’d gone into the Legion to create a much greater worth out of himself.
Apparently that had been successful.
What in the world did a man do with that much money? Ten times what he’d ever earned before. Take Célie on a nice trip somewhere she’d been dreaming of going? What else?
A motorcycle. A really nice motorcycle. Something he could soup up and customize and … his palms itched with the desire to feel the hand grips.
“Remember, this is just a starting salary,” Jaime said. “But I could go ten percent higher.”
Joss didn’t blink. Damn, but that Legionnaire training in a neutral expression was coming in handy. Apparently she’d misread his blank face as being unimpressed by the salary offer.
“Another ten percent,” he said thoughtfully. “If you can push it to twenty, I think I might be tempted.”
Jaime gazed at him a moment. And smiled again. “You know, you’re going to do all right for yourself, Joss. And for your family.”
He didn’t have a family, he almost pointed out again. But he didn’t say it, because … it settled in him solid and centered, that he was the very opposite of a loser, now. He’d turned around his entire life and the lives of anyone in his care. He could even imagine how a loft bed would fit in that second room in the new apartment to maximize the kid’s play space. He could kind of even imagine what a kid might look like, with Célie’s brown eyes and vivid smile and …
Whoa. This was getting scary.
“Twenty it is,” Jaime said, and he kept his expression neutrally unimpressed, as if they were talking about the bare minimum a man like him could be expected to work for.
Jaime’s smile deepened. “I should have made you negotiate salary with my dad or my sister. They’re better at this game than I am.”
“It’s a game?” A man’s salary? His life? “I might find being involved with billionaires a little bit challenging sometimes.”
Jaime smiled wryly. “Don’t worry, I find it challenging, too.”
Chapter 20
“He’s got flowers,” Zoe hissed, poking Célie in the ribs. With her vintage black cat’s-eye glasses and her ruler-straight brown hair pulled back in a ruthlessly smooth bun, Zoe looked as if she should be shushing people in a library, not mocking her chef chocolatier. Either looks were very deceiving, or Célie’s and Amand’s irreverence had worn off on her far too quickly. “No, Célie, I swear.”
“He does,” Amand called from where he was stirring caramel. “I can see them from here.”
Célie abandoned the chocolate test batch she was tempering on the marble counter to peek through the window.
“See?” Zoe pointed. “He’s trying to hide them, but you can see a couple peek out by his hips.”
“I’ve got a good angle on them from here,” Amand called, his loud voice mercilessly exposing Célie’s private life to the whole laboratoire. Which, fine, might very well be payback for all the ways she had twitted Dom and Amand and everyone else about their dating lives, but still …
Okay, fine, she liked it. But it made her blush.
She hugged herself, entirely baffled by how much happiness kept surging up in her. What did she do with it all? She’d always thought of herself as a happy person—well, a tough happy person who could wear black leather and cut aggressively through Paris traffic on the back of a … not-pink moped—but this happiness was so, so … bubbly. It was like being a bottle of champagne.
Dreams fizzed when they were coming true.
She turned back to her chocolate before she had to start the tempering all over. Joss would have to wait.
It drove her completely bonkers to wait. She paced, she bounced, she fidgeted. But Joss always stood patiently for her.
As if he would be there forever.
A very tricky, treacherous thing for him to do. She scowled at the ganache. But then she remembered his kiss good-bye that morning, and the scowl softened so as to be ready for more kissing. I would wait more than five years for you.
“I think they might be roses!” Amand called again across the whole damn laboratoire.
Heat trembled across her cheeks. No one in her whole life had ever brought her flowers. Certainly Joss hadn’t. It would totally have blown his cover as her big brother’s friend.
And roses?
He had brought her roses?
Across from her, Zoe gave her an amused-librarian look over her glasses and set a bowl of praliné on the scale. Célie looked down. In the chocolate Célie was supposed to be tempering, some idiot had written Joss and signed it with a graceful heart.
She sucked the chocolate off her guilty finger, flushing hot, and quickly scraped up the rest of the chocolate and finished the tempering. Good thing this chocolate was just for a small test batch and not for customers.
When she was ready to go, she hesitated over the selection of chocolates loose on the wire racks, unable to think which nine to choose for him. Not the bitter dark. Her fingertips flicked it away uneasily. There was the new idea she’d played with today, with just this hint of heat blushing through it so that the bite of it lingered on one’s tongue as the chocolate melted. She and Dom had had an argument about it—whether anyone wanted anything but the chocolate flavor to linger on his tongue.
Or there was this ridiculous soft, sweet one, that had made Dom roll his eyes and object to having it in his cases, this softest, sweetest chocolate that didn’t have a tough darkness in its entire chocolate being, an inexplicable experiment of hers that day …
She finally put them side by side, to trick the palate—keep it guessing, unable to figure out what was coming next.
But then, she added the ones she knew already to be his favorites—the mint and the coffee and the plain dark, but not the extra bitter dark. She left that one on the wire rack.
“Uh-oh,” Zoe said.
“Oh, no,” Amand said.
“Where’s Jaime?” Zoe asked.
Célie lunged back to the window. Dom was crossing the street. Joss straightened away from the wall at his approach, his hands loose and easy, his body ready for action. “Oh, crap,” Célie said. And Jaime wasn’t here. “Damn it, that can’t be good.”
She spun to run out of the laboratoire.
***
Joss felt a kick of hungry pleasure when he saw Dom Richard crossing the street to him, big and dark. That eagerness for aggressive action was immediately followed by resignation.
It was going to be up to him not to fight that bastard, wasn’t it? To use the control and discipline and self-confidence he had developed in five years in one of the most elite regiments in the world to just refuse the fight.
Too many things on the line—Célie’s job, his own new position and all it meant for them.
Damn. Sometimes it seemed as if a man had to spend his whole damn life exercising self-control over his aggressive urges.
The big, black-haired man stopped with a couple of meters still between them, clearly feeling that same frustrated buck of his aggressive tendencies against his own self-control. “You took a job with my wife?”
Joss’s fingertips curled restlessly into his palms. This damn bastard had taken his place as Célie’s hero. “If you want a woman to be your wife, I’m pretty sure you have to marry her. Little tip I learned from Célie last night.”
; Dom glared at him.
Joss smiled. “If you have the nerve.”
Dom’s eyes narrowed. “You are criticizing me for not having the nerve to go after the woman I want?”
Joss’s smile pressed out. “You know, I’m getting pretty damn sick of having five years in the Foreign Legion dismissed as lack of nerve. I went after the woman I want. It just took me a while to get up to the standard I wanted for her.”
The aggression eased unexpectedly out of Dom’s stance. “They don’t really get that, do they?” Dom glanced at the ring on his left hand. Joss couldn’t quite figure that ring out. It looked like a wedding ring to him, but the two were only engaged? “That we might want to make sure we’re worth them, before we ask for them.”
Joss winced at the thought of trying to articulate that again to Célie and about what her reaction would be if he did. “God, it pisses them off,” he muttered, heartfelt.
For a second, the two men exchanged a glance of complete understanding. That glance didn’t feel so weird to Joss, after five years with tough men who fought each other when their great and incompatible prides clashed, but who fought side by side more often, and then went and played rugby to let off steam. But he had the impression that Dom found that moment of male understanding far more difficult to process.
Joss had known men like that, too, though. Men who had good reasons for never trusting other men near them, and who, when they came into the Legion, had to overcome their hostility toward other powerful males in order to form a unit.
“Women are funny,” Dom said uneasily. “They don’t really make that much sense.”
Joss kept his lips sealed. No one was trapping him into saying anything sexist that Célie might later be pissed off about. No way.
All for You Page 19
