All for You

by Laura Florand

  “They’re, like, this big.” Dom brought his hand to a couple of centimeters below his shoulder. “And yet they want to go and trust a man just the way he is. That’s so stupid.”

  Joss gave that some thought. “Not with me it isn’t,” he realized slowly. “Célie can trust me.”

  The moment of détente was broken. Dom’s jaw set. “You seem very sure of that.”

  Joss nodded.

  “You already hurt her once,” Dom said grimly. “You’re so sure you won’t do it again?”

  Joss hesitated. “I wouldn’t do it on purpose. But … doesn’t life hurt sometimes?” He’d gone through a shit-hell of pain in the Legion. And … Jaime Corey had talked about retirement and taking care of his family, and didn’t creating a family hurt the hell out of the woman creating it, for example? His mind shied away from thoughts of childbirth, though, before he could break out in a cold sweat.

  Dom’s expression grew more menacing. “What hurts are you planning to inflict on her?”

  Joss put a hand to his stomach. “Look, can we not keep harping on the childbirth thing right now? I’m only twenty-six!”

  Dom blinked. And then that menacing expression disappeared before the flash of a grin, quickly contained. “You, ah … got something on your mind?”

  Joss rubbed his abs. “No,” he said firmly. “I don’t. This is all very premature. Célie’s only twenty-three.”

  Dom’s grin escaped again, and he firmly bit it back in favor of a menacing glare. “I meant did you plan to dump her and break her heart again?”

  “I didn’t mean to do it the first time,” Joss said between his teeth. “I thought—it was just a teenage crush! I didn’t know she…” … would keep existing when I wasn’t there, and that I would make such a hole in that existence. “I was stupid, okay?”

  “How smart are you now?”

  “Now,” Joss said flatly, “I’m the man I need to be. To be worth her.”

  Dom stared at him. “What, you think your job is done? At twenty-six? That you don’t have any growing left to do, to be as big as she needs?”

  Joss hesitated.

  “If you’re not going to dump her, you’re asking her to commit her fucking life to you! And you don’t think that will require you to get any better, ever? Or maybe even day by day?”

  Joss stared at him. He rubbed the buzzed hair at the back of his head, trying to think. “I—”

  “Grow the fuck up!” Dom said.

  Grow up? After all the things he’d done to become a man?

  Joss’s teeth bared. It took a lot to push him to rage. In the first months of Legion training, they tried to push every button a man could possibly have, and that man had to learn how not to break for it. But this attack on his potential worthiness of Célie surged rage all through him. “I know I’ll always have to work to be the best for her! I like always striving to be my best.”

  Dom scowled at him, but that scowl slowly eased. “You might have to do something else for her besides strive to be your best,” he said slowly, as if he was trying to digest his own words even as he produced them. “You might have to adapt to what she needs from you. Which might be something different.”

  Joss drew back in visceral rejection. “Something less than my best?”

  “Something … different,” Dom said slowly. He looked down at that ring on his finger, eyebrows drawn together.

  Joss frowned, disturbed in ways he couldn’t explain. As if parts of him he’d thought he’d made solid were melting under a sneak attack of rain.

  “Talk to her,” Dom said. “See what she says she needs from you.” He rubbed the ring on his finger.

  Oh, crap. Talk to her. What if she said what she needed wasn’t what Joss knew how to give?

  “You ever had sex with Célie?” Joss challenged abruptly.

  “What?” Dom jerked back, his expression crunching as if Joss had asked if he’d eaten worms. “No. She works for me, merde. What the hell?”

  “You wanted to, though, didn’t you?”

  Dom shook his head. “Trust me, I didn’t go out with women like her before I met Jaime. She’s more like a … I don’t know … a kid sister? A really impudent kid sister.” He looked grumpy. “A brat of a kid sister.”

  Joss’s fists tightened. “I was her big brother. Not you.”

  “Well, that would make you pretty fucking incestuous, wouldn’t it? You’re not her big brother when you can’t even look at her without thinking about sex. When you’ve got it so bad you think every other man must obsess the same way. I’ll give you credit for trying to do the honorable thing by her, though.” An odd expression crossed Dom’s face. “Honor … and fidelity,” he said thoughtfully.

  Honneur, fidélité. Just the reference to the Legion motto tightened Joss’s belly, as if he’d heard a call to arms.

  “Well, hell,” Dom said slowly. “You really are a damn knight, aren’t you? That’s why you went into the Legion. It spoke to everything you were.”

  Everything he wanted to be, Joss would have said, rather than what he already was back then, but before he could argue, the doors on the other side of the street slid open, and Célie ran straight toward them without even glancing for traffic.

  Joss jerked spasmodically toward her, his heart slamming, and then caught himself. Fuck, he needed to get over that reaction.

  He found Dom giving him an odd look, as he took a deep breath and shoved the flowers behind his back before she spotted them. “No snipers here,” Dom said quietly. “She’s been safe.”

  Right. Safe with Dominique Richard. He struggled with it, his fist clenching on the roses behind his back. But … she really was happy. Safe. He really did owe that to the fact that Dom Richard had been a good guy. To the fact that when Joss, at twenty-one, had been clueless as to the effects his actions might have on Célie, at least one other man in the world had been decent and honorable, too.

  “Thanks,” he said suddenly, low. “Thanks for that.”

  Dom took his own long breath, releasing it slowly out. “So you’ll help keep my wife safe for me, too, then, is that it?”

  “Yeah,” Joss said quietly. “I will.”

  The two men faced each other.

  “Although that thing about calling her your wife will work better if you actually marry her,” Joss couldn’t resist adding as he lifted his hand.

  “Stop!” Célie yelled, throwing herself toward the space between them, just as their hands met. She bounced against the solid clasp of their hands. “Don’t—fight.” She grabbed both their arms, her words fumbling as she looked down at their steady grip. She looked back up, confused. “Are you two fighting?”

  “Just working some things out.” Joss loosed Dom’s hand.

  Dom raised his eyebrow at Célie. “What were you going to do to stop us if we were? Stamp your foot?”

  Célie stuck her tongue out at him. “Take a picture and send it to Jaime.”

  Dom’s eyes narrowed. “Somebody wants to lose her day off tomorrow, doesn’t she?”

  “Somebody wants me to form a union and organize a strike.”

  Dom sighed and gazed heavenward a moment, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like, “Why me?”

  Célie grinned, and he rolled his eyes and stomped back toward the shop, grumbling.

  ***

  Célie turned toward Joss, her grin fading slowly before solemnity. She stared up at him, again stuck in that choice—between kisses on each cheek, as if he was still the big brother-friend who looked after her, and a kiss on the lips, and all that meant.

  “Célie,” he said quietly, and her name shivered through her. He had a way of saying it as if it encapsulated her whole existence and reaffirmed it.

  Which was why life hurt so much when that affirmation disappeared and you had to remember how to affirm yourself.

  “Joss,” she said defiantly. She’d like to see his name from her lips have as much power over him.

  Oh, wait. Wasn’t she t
he first person to say it in five years? The person he had sought out to be the first to say it? Maybe it did have power over him.

  “What was that all about?” she demanded. “You and Dom?”

  He shook his head and shrugged a little. “Just working a few things out,” he repeated. Joss’s communication skills drove her completely nuts sometimes.

  Like that evening when he had kissed her good-bye very slowly on each cheek, four times instead of two, and then stood a long time looking down at her, and lifted his hand to cup her cheek, and tugged her hair. And she’d thought that expression in his eyes meant he was falling for her, waking up to the idea of her as something more than a friend, and she’d gone to sleep hugging herself in hopeful excitement. And the next morning, she found out it was instead his way of saying, Good-bye, I’m off to join the Foreign Legion.

  He lifted a hand and rubbed a firm thumb over her cheek, then up over her eyebrow. His thumb left a path of heat over her skin and woke all the other heat trails he had left on her body the night before, until she felt as if an infrared camera would pick out the pattern of his hands on her. He brought his thumb to his mouth and slowly sucked it, his eyes holding hers. Her brain melted. “What’s the flavor of that chocolate, Célie? The chocolate that gets stuck on your skin?”

  “It’s—it’s probably—it—that is, it might be—” What had she been working on today?

  He bent his head and brought his lips to just under the curve of her jaw, parting them to suck gently and thoroughly.

  Her lips fumbled and stopped working. Her head fell back.

  He smiled, rubbing the moist spot on her throat with his thumb as he lifted his head. “I think it tastes a little bit like you. Hot. Spicy. Sweet.”

  She stared up at him, blind to everything but the green in his eyes and the lingering sensation of his lips sucking her skin.

  His thumb trailed over her chin. “You know how I’m always the quiet one, and you’re always the one who talks? You don’t know how much I like flipping that around, just by doing this.”

  She swallowed, and his palm rode gently against the motion of her throat.

  “I brought you something.” He pulled his hand out from behind his back to show the sweetest, most beautiful bouquet of roses—soft pink and variegated red and white, carefully arranged by one of the many expert florists who filled the Paris streets. “You can have it if you give me a kiss, like my girlfriend. Remember how we’re dating?”

  Every single other bouquet Célie had ever held in her hands, she had bought for herself, on the way home from work. She reached for it, forgetting the kiss, and found herself blocked by the box of chocolates she held. “I brought you something, too.” She lifted it to him.

  “In that case, maybe I’m the one who owes you a kiss.” He bent his head again, and she parted her lips for him, so utterly, terrifyingly happy at the heat of his, at the reality of this fantasy, that she felt lost in it.

  He got lost, too, his arm sliding around her, the bouquet pressing against her back as he deepened the kiss, until a wolf whistle sounded from one of the casement windows above. Joss lifted his head and raised an eyebrow in the direction of the window, and Célie twisted around to try the extra-mean-Foreign Legion look on Amand.

  Amand laughed and blew her a kiss. Then his expression grew just a tad more careful, and he withdrew.

  Célie twisted back toward Joss, gazing at him suspiciously. “Don’t threaten my friends.”

  “What?” Joss asked, surprised. “I only looked at him.”

  She narrowed her eyes and tried to give him that Legionnaire look.

  “God, you’re cute.” He pressed the bouquet into her hand, taking the chocolate box. “Let’s trade.”

  So Célie found herself gazing down at the sweetest, most beautiful, most romantic bouquet, and her lips trembled again.

  “Do you like them? There were so many beautiful ones I had a hard time making up my mind. All those flowers,” Joss said, rather wonderingly.

  She stroked the flowers, thinking of Joss without chocolates, without softness, for five years. “Not so many flowers in the Foreign Legion?”

  He shook his head.

  “Tell me about it.” She took his hand as they walked toward her moped. Dom’s big black motorbike was parked beside it, and somebody had parked another aggressive, built-for-speed motorcycle on the other side, but her little moped was refusing to be intimidated.

  “Not sure what to tell. It was … challenging. And interesting. And sometimes hideously boring.” He fell silent. “Tough a few times, too,” he finally allowed.

  She waited, but by the time they got to her moped, it was pretty obvious he wasn’t going to elaborate.

  “Joss!”

  He shrugged.

  “Where were you posted?”

  “Afghanistan, quite a bit. Mali.” He shrugged again.

  She stood by her moped, waiting.

  He ate a chocolate, his lips softening around the flavor.

  “Joss!”

  “Ah, this is where you got that chocolate on your skin.” His gaze moved over her face and lingered on her lips. “There’s a kick to it.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “You never, ever talk to me.”

  He studied her that way he always had when he wasn’t going to let her get away with any melodramatic bullshit. “Never, Célie?”

  See? And right there, she remembered all the times they’d talked, all the times she’d bounced around him while he sat on a wall listening to her and occasionally sharing something quiet and true about his own thoughts. “Not about anything important!” she said defiantly.

  Hazel eyes just held hers, stubborn and green and gold. “None of those things were important to you?”

  Darn it! Joss always did that to her. Won arguments just by highlighting the truth and putting her on the spot with it. “You didn’t tell me you were thinking about joining the Foreign Legion!”

  “Nobody ever tells his family and friends he’s going to join the Foreign Legion. Too damn independent-minded and proud, I guess. Plus, you can’t do something like that, if you give someone you care about the chance to talk you out of it.”

  “You think I could have talked you out of it?” Célie immediately fantasized a time machine, just jumping into it and catching Joss before he stepped onto the train south and …

  “You would have cried. I always wanted to hit someone when you cried.”

  She gaped at him. “Oh, so it’s fine if you’re making me cry by myself behind my bed but not if you have to see it?”

  His gaze lowered.

  She knuckled her forehead. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know I have to let that go.” She rested her hand on his chest, taking a deep breath.

  He covered her hand with his. “I didn’t … imagine any of that, when I was thinking about it. I imagined me coming home covered in glory, that kind of thing. I guess you’re right that despite how well I thought I knew you, I never really imagined what it was like for you at all.”

  Her lips twisted, this rueful blend of pain and a genuine desire to forgive.

  His fingers tightened gently over hers. “And you imagined what it was like for me all the time, didn’t you?”

  She shrugged, her mouth turning down.

  He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her palm.

  Oh.

  Oh.

  The incredible sweetness of that.

  “But I don’t really know what it was like,” she whispered. “I can see a little bit of it.” Her fingers traced lightly over his biceps, the muscles of his forearms, his ridged abs. He’d always been in great shape, always determined to be one of the strongest guys in their cité, but he was so much harder now, with this mean leanness to all that muscled strength, as if he hadn’t always gotten enough food to support all the effort his body was making.

  Her fingers drifted back up to graze against the hardness of his face, the way his lips defaulted to this firm, you-can’t-read-me l
ine whenever he wasn’t actively smiling at her. “But I don’t really know. Was it brutal?”

  “Sometimes.”

  She gazed up at him.

  He gazed back, somewhere between stubborn and helpless. “Célie. I don’t even know where to start.”

  “Start with the diamond ring. Start with when you didn’t buy that and walked away. What happened next?”

  He was silent another moment. “Right here? Or can we go somewhere more comfortable?”

  “A park? The Seine?”

  A tiny pause. “Sure.”

  Her face flamed as she thought about what other option he must have been considering—her apartment that was all bed. He lifted a thumb and stroked the blush gently, maybe a tiny touch of color in his cheeks, too.

  He pulled her keys out of his pocket and held them up by a single key, around which he wrapped her fingers when he handed them to her. She started to put it in the ignition of her moped, and it didn’t fit.

  She looked down at it, puzzled. That didn’t look like one of her keys. She looked back up at Joss, who was smiling.

  “I got you a present.”

  She stopped smiling. A present that involved a key?

  “You know how you always wanted to drive my motorcycle, but I wouldn’t let you, because you were too young?”

  “You wouldn’t even let me ride behind you, most of the time.”

  “That was for an entirely different reason. It kind of got to me, having you squeeze up behind me and wrap your arms around me to hold on.”

  So he’d only let her ride with him if it was either that or ride behind Ludo or another of his friends. He’d never wanted her to ride behind any of them. Ludo was reckless as hell.

  “Well.” Joss patted the seat of the aggressive-looking motorcycle parked beside her moped. “I wanted to make up for that.”

  Good lord, that bike was for her? She stared at the beautiful machine, all muscle and dark attitude. Part of her leapt in excitement, as if she was some teenager whose parents had given her a car. But she hadn’t had that kind of parents—she hadn’t had a dad at all—and part of her thought, But he’s not my parent.

  And … and I bought that moped for myself. With my own money, from my own achievements, to create my own independence.