All for You

by Laura Florand

  He rolled her under him on the grass, claiming her mouth again. Mmm, yes, the hot and the sweet of that … “Célie. I love everything you make. But God, I’d take this any day.”

  Célie twisted her face away, about driving him crazy. “Take what?”

  “You.” He sought her mouth again. “Just like this.”

  “Just me,” Célie said against his lips. Damn, she liked to chatter at inopportune moments sometimes. He parted her lips with his, tasting her gently with his tongue. And she yielded, falling into the kiss. But as soon as he lifted his head for a breath, she got her next word in edgewise: “No accomplishments, just me. You think I’m amazing just like this.”

  “Yeah.” He pressed his hands in the grass to keep from doing things in public he’d get arrested for. “Hell, yeah.” He sought her mouth again.

  She locked her hands against his chest to hold him back, making his teeth snap together in frustration. “Joss. If you’re really so sex-starved that you still haven’t figured out what I’m saying, maybe we should work some of that starvation out so your brain can turn on again.”

  “Oh, that sounds like a really, really good idea to me,” he said, just before his peripheral vision caught feet striding toward them.

  He was on his feet between Célie and the man approaching, faster than a blink. The park guardian stopped in his tracks, rocking back on his heels.

  Joss eased his stance, calming himself down. There aren’t that many real threats here, you idiot. Just…easy, okay? He tried to change his expression and posture into something that wouldn’t scare the park guardian even more, keeping his hands loose by his sides. “Yes?”

  “There … there are children present,” the guardian said stiffly.

  Oh, for God’s sake. Because he’d been kissing his girlfriend in the grass? Like he was the first man to ever do that in a Paris park. Joss reached down and caught Célie’s hand, pulling her to her feet. “You’re right,” he told the other man evenly. “We’ll take it indoors.”

  It was all he could do to lead her straight past their new apartment to her own little one and not spoil the surprise. But he managed it. He had to save that for her, until it was the best it could be.

  Chapter 21

  I wish you hadn’t … Célie stroked the thought down over biceps and sinewy forearm. You never should have … She traced her thumb over the strength of a wrist, over the hairs on the back of Joss’s hand and the scars across his knuckles that he hadn’t had before. If only you had … She caressed her fingers against the toughness of his palm, drawing her fingertips up the length of his, lingering on the calluses and the lines of the underside of his knuckles.

  He shivered and grabbed at her pillow with his other arm, tightening his hold on it as his eyes closed.

  I’m so mad at you for going. Her hand teased through the curls of hair on his chest, pressed into the hard muscle of his shoulders.

  But you are gorgeous.

  Her warrior returned, who had done it all for her.

  You are amazing.

  The way his head tilted back at her touch, his throat exposed to her, the only vulnerable spot on that hard, unyielding body.

  No. That wasn’t right. It might be the only vulnerable spot to anyone else, but every single place on that ruthless body seemed to be vulnerable to her. The tough skin at his elbow, from crouching in low cover or dragging himself through it on his forearms. He drew a rough rush of breath, when she stroked him there. The stubborn chin that had a small scar on it now, from sparring practice maybe, or a fall during training, or shrapnel. He licked his lips and bit into the lower one, when she stroked her fingers over that chin.

  Why did you do it? Expose yourself to shrapnel, to explosives and bullets. You idiot. Why? You don’t have to be this amazing for me. I loved you just the way you were.

  Those words that she had to learn how to swallow and release from her heart unspoken. Because he had said it clearly to her: He had done something amazing, incredible, impossible, and she, instead of understanding and admiring, kept tearing it down.

  And she couldn’t do that to him. She had to care for him for who he really was and what he’d chosen to do. Even if he thought he was doing it all for her when really, in great part, he had been doing it to fulfill a need in himself, she had to respect and understand that, too.

  Such a profoundly incomprehensible need in him. She’d hero-worshiped him so much, and he’d gone off on an impossible quest to make her worship him even more? Without even quite understanding that the quest deprived her for five years of the hero himself?

  Yet he’d done it. And he’d come back to lay all that incredible, brutal quest for glory at her feet.

  “I love you,” she whispered and bit the rest of it back. I always have. You never should have …

  Breathed that away, turning it into a caress of those so hard-earned muscles.

  “Célie.” He shivered, his eyes opening to stare at her in the late afternoon light filtering through her windows, his face half shadowed by the pillow he clutched. “What are you doing? I can’t …”

  “You’re beautiful,” she said, and his face crinkled in incredulous confusion.

  She caressed her fingers down his body, over the bone of his hip, to the muscled thigh.

  “This is too much,” he whispered, squeezing the pillow almost anxiously. “I can’t handle the way you’re … touching me, Célie.” But he didn’t stop her. He didn’t grab her hand or roll them over on the mattress so he could take over. He swallowed and shoved the pillow over his face a second, his body lifting toward her touch.

  “You’re incredible.” She kneaded her fingers into his thigh.

  He pulled the pillow aside enough to show his face again. “I’m not incredible. I’m just—”

  She put her fingers over his mouth. “You shut up. I get to be the judge of how incredible you are. You clearly have no freaking clue.”

  Where did it come from, this will to drive oneself past all limits, to never believe you were good enough unless you were the absolute best any human being could ever be? She knew it very well. Dom had it, too, after all—the man who had driven himself to be the best chocolatier in Paris, and who, whenever he showed up on some random list written by an idiot with no proper understanding of chocolate as only the second best or the third best in the whole entire world, ripped the paper and went to the gym to box to the point of exhaustion or threw himself on his motorcycle to cut through traffic in suicidal aggressiveness. (Although he’d calmed down about the motorcycle business now that he had Jaime, as if the desire to keep his happiness had trumped his aggressive recklessness.)

  She even had it, the little pastry apprentice from the banlieue who had come to work for the rising star chocolatier in Paris and made herself into his right-hand woman, someone who could produce that best of the best of the best. When she saw their chocolates appear as only second or third best in the world instead of the best, she drew faces of the guilty journalists on craft sticks and gave them yarn hair and suspended them over her chocolate as if she was going to drown them in it—and then left them there, just shy of actually tasting that chocolate, like Tantalus. Okay, fine, she’d only done that once, in great ceremony in the middle of the laboratoire for a particularly idiotic critic who had put them all the way down at number six, but it had made even Dom laugh.

  Célie Clément did not do second best.

  Striving for the best was kind of her way of being worthy of herself. And of Joss.

  Too proud to be small, Joss. Too proud to give her a cheap diamond ring.

  And I was too proud to be just a little baker en banlieue if you were going to be a glorious Legionnaire.

  His dad had been a decent dad when Joss was little, based on the things Joss used to let slip in their easy conversations as teenagers. Then he had gone rapidly downhill after he lost his job when Joss was twelve, descending into alcohol, no longer there for his son. Had that been part of what pushed Joss? His mom wa
s a bitter woman, blaming her husband, blaming her son, blaming even Célie after Joss left, claiming it must have been her fault.

  Was that part of why he’d never given Célie a chance to have a say? He’d been afraid she would try to reduce him, just like his mother did?

  Was a refusal to be his father part of what drove him?

  Was it nature or nurture, really, that kind of drive? Or both? All these circumstances and choices that had fused Joss into the hardened, determined warrior who was now shivering under her hand.

  He stuffed the pillow back over his face.

  “Hey.” She pulled it off. “Don’t make me throw this one out of the window, too. It’s the last one. Your chest might make a great pillow in fantasies, but in real life, it’s actually pretty hard to punch into just that right shape under my ear.” She smiled at him.

  “Célie. I just—I need the pillow.” He reached for it again.

  She dropped it on the floor. “No, you don’t.” She framed his face in her hands as if he was a fragile chocolate she had to touch just right and lowered her head toward his. “You’re just fine, Joss,” she whispered between his lips and let her own close gently over his and then slide away, stroking him with her lips, lingering at the corners of his, exploring the bow of his upper lip, the way she could make that firm line relax and yield to her. “You’re just about perfect.”

  “‘About’?” he asked, like a man ready to jump down and do a few more push-ups right then to fix any possible flaw.

  “Well, you’ve got this.” She caressed her fingertips over that square jaw and followed with her mouth, lingering over the tiny scar. “That’s not perfect. It’s too stubborn. So stubborn you’ll let it get hurt, rather than give up or give in.”

  “Célie.” The corners of his lips trembled in such a vulnerable start to a smile. “You—”

  “And this.” She brought his big hand to her lips and turned it over to kiss all along the thick calluses at the base of his fingers. “Look at this hand. You’ve been getting it into trouble. You need cocoa butter.”

  He shook his head. “I need the calluses. Soft skin just gets ripped to shreds when you want to do anything.”

  “Oh.” She considered her own hands, kept soft by constant exposure to cocoa butter. She’d taken to weight training when Joss had shown her as a teenager how to get started—taken to it at first because of the erotic sweetness of having him adjust her arms or hover ready to catch a weight—and she was extremely proud of herself to be able to do a pull-up, these days, but she wore gloves for that and hadn’t a single callus to her name. “So soft hands aren’t perfect?” She ran her palm slowly down his arm.

  He shivered. “They’re perfect. Célie—”

  “Are they both perfect?” she asked in pretend surprise. “Yours and mine? But they’re so different.” She drew his hand over her own arm, rubbing his calluses against her skin, and a shiver chased through her, too, her eyes closing into the pleasure of it. “Oh, yeah. I think, after all, yours are definitely perfect.”

  “You like them?” He caressed her bare back, rubbing those calluses up her sensitive skin to her bra strap.

  She arched into the touch, erotic delight spreading out from it all through her body. “Yes.”

  He smiled a little, watching her, playing with the textures he could bring to her back, stroking his callused fingertips up her spine and down, then walking them out in little pressures that made her muscles flinch and her back arch and relax again into the pleasure.

  “Remember when I was teaching you how to lift weights?” he asked suddenly. Sometimes Joss picked thoughts straight out of her brain, she swore. “God, that killed me. Your little muscles straining, and the sheen of sweat on your skin, and me just barely touching you to adjust your form and not ever being able to touch you for real. The way you would strain so hard to get strong.”

  “You wouldn’t go dancing with me back then. So I had to do something physical around you.”

  “I’ll do anything physical you want with you now.” He rolled them over, bracing himself above her on the bed.

  Such a glorious body to have braced above hers. But that wasn’t what hit her the most. It was this purity in his eyes, this truth and fidelity through everything he had been and seen. “I love you,” she whispered suddenly. “Not … not like a brother.”

  He drew a sharp breath. In the slanting late light through her windows, his eyes were gorgeous.

  “You’re amazing. And”—her voice dropped very soft, and shy—“you’re my hero.”

  That brilliance in his eyes, as if she’d crowned him king after an impossible quest.

  “You always have been. And you still are. Even more.” Her hands ran over his arms. “If you asked me to, I would wait more than five years for you. I would be proud to.”

  “Célie,” he breathed, luminous in that light that turned all his hard, sun-darkened body to gold.

  “But don’t leave me again.” She wrapped her arms around him abruptly. “Don’t take me up on that. Promise not to.”

  “I won’t leave you,” he said, low and final.

  The promise vibrated through her, as if a seal had been stamped down on her, of ownership, of home.

  “Célie,” he said suddenly, combing his fingers through the tufts of her hair. “You know I love you, don’t you? You figured that out?”

  “I—I—” It was too beautiful to believe or even think about straight on, and she almost couldn’t say it. “You seem to.”

  “I seem to.” He shook his head. “You’re a hard woman to convince.”

  Stay with me. Include me. That convinces me. But she had to take what he offered. She ran her hand over the muscles of his arms, one manifestation of all his efforts.

  “Célie. I think you’re my heroine.”

  It sounded beautiful, at first, and yet she hesitated. “Like … the heroine tied to the train tracks? Who needs saving? The princess in a tower?”

  He ran his thumb over her cheekbone in a delicate stroke of callus. “Like Wonder Woman. The woman I look up to. The woman I think is amazing. I can be what’s-his-name, the Air Force pilot.”

  Her nose crinkled against the sting in it. “Really?”

  He looked up to her?

  “All that life and courage in you, Célie. That way you stick your chin up and challenge the world and tease it. The way you … sparkle. You’re like the Eiffel Tower. You don’t even notice all the rain and the cold and the gray skies, you just sparkle away and refuse to let them put you out.”

  Her fingers stroked their way to his shoulder, kneading it like a cat might a very hard pillow. “You know, when it’s cold and rainy in Paris,” she murmured, feeling silly and shy again, “it’s just exactly perfect weather for curling up with someone. And, and … maybe making him hot chocolate.”

  His face broke into the most brilliant grin. “God, I love you.” He rolled them over so that she was on top of him. “Hell, you make me actually wish it was winter.” He ran his hands up her arms. “Maybe with a fireplace.” A little gleam in his eyes that she couldn’t interpret. “I bet you’d like that.”

  Hard to find an apartment with a fireplace these days. She shrugged funnily. “S … summer’s nice, too. You can go skating along the Seine. Stay out late. Maybe … maybe go somewhere on vacation in August and explore a whole new world together.”

  “I bet the whole year is nice,” he said softly. “I bet every day of the year, with you in it, would be beautiful.”

  Oh. She wanted to hug herself, to hug the words to her, but their bodies were so close she could only hug him.

  He stroked her hair. “Célie. I don’t ‘seem to’ love you. I really do. I would do anything for you.”

  As long as that “anything” demanded he grow bigger, meet hard challenges, and didn’t demand he shrink, she thought, with sudden insight. He had a compulsive need to be better, never lesser.

  But that was okay. As long as he included her, as long as he trusted h
er, she could be that person, who had a big enough heart to let him grow as big as he needed and still fit in it.

  “I would, too.” She pushed herself up to hold his eyes. “Do anything for you. Except ask you to be less than you are.”

  His face broke into that rare, brilliant smile. “I knew there was a reason I loved you.”

  “Only one?” She tried to put her chin up. But sometimes she wondered how there could even be that many. She was so quick-tempered, and she flew off the handle. She knew he was amazing, but somehow she beat her head against him anyway, wishing he would be a little less amazing in exchange for letting her in.

  His face softened, his eyes so true. “Célie. There are so many reasons I love you. As many sparkles as there are on that Eiffel Tower. But that one, that you won’t ask me to be less for you … that one’s like the whole iron frame that holds those sparkling lights up.”

  Yeah. It did kind of feel as if she was trying to grow as strong as the iron of the Eiffel Tower, in order to be strong enough to honor the best that he could be. She took a deep breath, stretching herself, trying to get her heart used to being that big and strong.

  It felt kind of … natural, actually. As if that was what her heart had always wanted to be.

  “You’re sure it’s not just sex starvation?” She tried to make her voice sound teasing, but a part of her still worried about that.

  He grinned, his eyes lighting. “I don’t know.” He checked her clock. “We’d better test it. Let’s see if I still love you in … oh, about an hour.”

  Chapter 22

  Célie was so happy she couldn’t get over it. She felt like walking around with her arms wrapped around her own body in a hug instead of working. Whenever she tried to concentrate on her chocolate, she ended up rocking on her toes, dreamy, and would blink awake at some teasing comment from the rest of the team to discover she’d been drawing hearts in chocolate again.

  Then she would try to get back to work and instead find herself rising on tiptoe to see if she could spot Joss in the street below.