C
HAPTER
25
“Y
ou know, to keep her,” Pierre said, “you might at least have to believe it’s possible to keep her.”
Wonderful. In the five years since he had last seen him regularly, his therapist had turned into Peter Pan. Just believe you can fly and add some pixie dust.
A whimsical thought flashed through his brain, an image of pixie dust freckles spilled like gold flecks across pale skin.
“How long have you known her?”
“Three weeks.” It wasn’t entirely a lie. You could learn a lot about a woman, watching the way she absorbed your chocolate. “We’ve been going out for one,” he admitted, after a moment, since there wasn’t any point forcing himself through this therapy session if he wasn’t going to tell the truth about at least some things. It was like going to the gym and lifting an empty bar.
“And you want to change your life for her?”
He had started changing the instant he saw her. He tried to maintain a neutral expression.
“That’s . . . sweet,” Pierre said, half-charmed and mostly wary, the way any intelligent psychologist would be.
It wasn’t sweet, it was completely selfish. It was the way to get what he wanted.
Pierre sighed. “I really wish I could meet her to know whether I’m giving you good advice. It would be terrible if she was just us—”
He broke off but not before Dom caught the idea.
Just using you.
“She is,” he said firmly. “We’ve got that figured out. It turns out I really like it, being used the way she does it.” He just didn’t want his use to wear out. On the other hand, it seemed a terrible thing, to wish a woman would stay weak and in need of his strength so he could keep her. Why else did he
have
so much strength, though, if it wasn’t so he could cover her with it, too? Surely it could go to some better purpose than just protecting himself? “She thinks I’m wonderful,” he admitted finally, trying to say it as offhandedly as he could. He wasn’t going to put the whole
sun
business out there where someone else could mock it. It was too fragile and too precious. His breathing was short enough as it was.
Pierre’s gaze was so gentle it pissed him off immediately. He did
not
need the man’s compassion. Maybe his smelling salts, if he fainted from his attempts to talk about this thing with Jaime, but
not
his pity. “And you’re afraid she’ll learn the truth and leave you?”
Dom shook his head, ignoring the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. It had been about ten years since he had had to ignore sick feelings in his stomach quite so diligently, but he still had the way of it. “That’s what I’m paying you for, Pierre. So you can teach me how to be perfect in these deep relationships you were always pushing before. You had better know something about them, considering how adamant you were I needed one.”
“Do you think you’re so sure she’ll leave because your mother did?” Pierre suggested.
Dom barely avoided growling at him. “I told you. I don’t want to be analyzed. I just want techniques.”
“Techniques for making her think you’re perfect, entirely secure.”
Dom gave him an approving nod. Finally they were getting somewhere.
Pierre raised those
putain de sourcils
of his. “Let me see if I understand. Your real purpose in coming here is to learn how to pretend you are absolutely perfect—”
“Not pretend,” Dom said hurriedly. He had always thought his father must have pretended. Why else had his mother ended up with him?
“Is to learn how to
be
absolutely perfect, the ideal man for a long-term relationship.”
Dom smiled. “Exactly.”
Pierre folded
his
arms and shook his head firmly. “It’s hopeless. You’ll have a much better chance if you’ll be your real self.”
Being himself was ridiculous advice, but pretending to be perfect was working pretty well for him. Despite his own therapist’s refusal to help. If only he could get over the guilt at selling her fool’s gold instead of the real thing.
Even he could be perfect on the first of May, with Jaime beside him. It was a soft day, balmy and gentle, with clouds that hinted at rain but never quite delivered. The fresh lemon scent of lilies-of-the-valley was everywhere, as vendors wandered the streets or stationed themselves at prominent corners with buckets full of them, culled from the woods outside of Paris. Florists sold more formally acquired bunches of the
muguets,
in pots or bouquets, the little white bells dangling sweetly everywhere they looked.
Dom had bought Jaime several bouquets already, after surviving having his heart broken into tiny pieces by the bouquet that she had snuck into the bathroom while he was showering. No one ever, in his whole life, had given him a little bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley on May 1 to wish him fortune and happiness.
“Ça porte bonheur, oui?”
she had asked shyly.
And it did bring happiness. Oh, it did.
It was amazing how much sweeter the
muguets
on every street corner smelled when someone had given some to you, too. It made his whole heart feel lighter, soaring almost like that
Victoire de Samothrace,
to have her beside him, wishing him happiness. He kept yielding to the impulse to buy just one more simple cluster of the flowers for her, until after the third one he realized the impracticality of trying to bury her in happiness right there in the street. It made for a lot of flowers to carry on a stroll.
So she laughed up at him, her eyes sparkling, and gave one of the bouquets to an old woman sitting quiet and still on a bench, watching the world move by, and another to a scowling teenager who looked considerably startled, her mouth relaxing. One she kept for herself. Dominique resolved to buy her as many as he could carry on the way back to her apartment that afternoon and fill the entire place with them.
They ended up on the end of the Île de la Cité, Notre-Dame’s island, descending from the centuries-old Pont Neuf to the lower quay, where tourists gathered to climb onto the
Vedettes
boats that would bear them up and down the Seine. Dom and Jaime headed up the paving stones of the quay to the tip of the island, far away from the milling flock of boaters, sitting with their backs to the stone wall of the garden that rose just behind them. Other couples sat at intervals along the quay, rivals for one of this city’s most romantic spots.
Dom sat with one leg drawn up, greasy-headed sparrows and pigeons coming up to inspect them, hoping for food. He twitched one toe and waved the bouquet he had ended up carrying to discourage them, but like him, they weren’t that easy to discourage.
Jaime was playing with his other hand. Her weight resting against his side, she used both her hands to do it, pressing palm against palm, linking and unlinking fingers, using her other hand to stroke over the back of his, to trace his scarred knuckles as if they were some fascinating formation, to draw her fingertips down the length of one of his thick, blunt fingers, taking her time, lingering and rubbing over the calluses.
He slid a wary glance at her but couldn’t see much more than the top of her head. She seemed utterly absorbed in her task, a little dreamy at it, no purpose to her explorations but pleasure.
His heart didn’t know whether to bask in the treatment or curl into a nervous ball. Surely at some point, some shadow of reality would cast itself over even her dreamy golden state, and she would think about what his hands meant.
She tried to close her hands entirely over his, which was completely futile. Even if he closed his hand into a fist, she wouldn’t be able to encase it in both of hers, and he didn’t want her to see his hand fisted. He stared down at her slim, freckled hand, the way her fingertips ended at his middle knuckle, the sight of his darker skin with the little nicks and scars visible all around hers like an ugly spot no slender, beautiful work of art could ever hide.
“I love your hands,” she murmured.
For a moment, he froze. Then, contrarily, he felt as if his entire being was dependent for support on some ice structure that was suddenly melting. “You
what
?”
She flushed a little, the part of her face he could see. Her hands tightened on his, as if someone had tried to wrench it away from her. “You—have no idea. I just . . . I really love them.” Her flush darkened a vulnerable crimson. Her hands caressed a little over his and tightened again, as if she couldn’t help it.
He stared at their hands together, tried and completely failed to see his as something she could love. “
How
much of those witches’ potions did you drink?”
“What?”
“La Maison des Sorcières. You said you drank some of Magalie’s chocolate before you met me?”
He tried not to believe Magalie and her aunts could do actual magic, but he couldn’t figure out any other explanation. It was like one of those Shakespeare plays he had read in translation last winter, the one where the Fairy Queen was drugged to fall in love with a rude laborer with the head of an ass.
He hated thinking of himself as the ass-headed laborer after he had beaten his way to the top and defied anyone to take him on any other terms than as the best, but . . . she did that to him. The fact that she held in her hands the ability to render him extraordinary or render him nothing was the most terrifying thing about her.
She laughed a little, not taking him seriously. “Oh, no, it was well after I met you. I drank
your
chocolate before I met you. If you want to blame my feelings on a potion, I think that’s a far more likely culprit.”
He relaxed. Whatever else he might or might not manage, he could always make good chocolate. Forever.
So she rested against his side, cuddling his hand as if it were her special treasure, and he squinted at the light reflecting off the small waves made by a
pompiers
boat, feeling mushy, but trying to appear at least strong enough to scare off the pigeons. He might very well associate the scent of
muguets,
for the rest of his life, with pure, terrified happiness.
“What’s an abattoir like here?” she asked.
His hand jerked and spasmed so hard on hers that her knuckles ground in his grasp and she protested. His big, damned butcher’s hand. He let her go. “Who the hell told you about that?”
She hesitated.
“Sylvain,” he said bitterly. The stems of the
muguets
crushed in his fist. The damn gossiping kitchen teams. Of course someone on his who had found out about it would have let it slip to someone on Sylvain’s.
Bordel de cul,
Sylvain and her gossiping about him, talking over all the ugliest details Sylvain could find about his
life
—
“Is it a secret?” she asked, surprised.
He stiffened. “No.” His voice sounded harsh even to his own ears. He had known all his efforts to be gentle with her would eventually fail him. “Why should it be?”
And he had thought he could be perfect. Just for a minute there, he had thought he could be perfect.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly, pulling away from her resting place against him to watch his face carefully. Damn it, he didn’t want her watching him as if he was a wild animal that might bite. “I can’t think of any reason. Unless you just don’t like talking about it, in which case I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” he said shortly. Because he was a bastard with a short temper, she should try to soothe him? Like what, before he lashed out at her? “Don’t ever apologize to me.”
Her eyebrows drew together. She regarded him very straightly with those dusk-blue eyes of hers. “I’ll do what I want.”
A few of his muscles relaxed, the way they always did when she wouldn’t take his shit. He even smiled at her just a little.
“Why did your father send you there?” she asked. “Did he need the money? Did you have trouble in school?”
He had loved school. He had been a passionate reader and, in any case, would have done anything to make his teachers look at him with approval. He had done extremely well at school, despite his home life, until his mother left, and then . . . he supposed some part of him had hoped the teachers whose pet he had been would hear the cry for help. Instead they had shrugged, mentally dropping him down among the
nuls,
and turned their attention to a new pet, which . . . life lesson learned.
“You have the wrong information. My father didn’t send me to work there.
I
went. I got the job. He had to approve it”—to agree that his only son was a total waste and not worth more—“but I got it. And I did it damn well. It gave me a really good excuse to hack at things, at meat and blood and bone.”
She stared at him. He couldn’t stand the expression on her face.
“It didn’t hurt them,” he said quickly. “They were already dead. That’s why it was so perfect.”
“Perfect.”
He set his mouth grimly, all his muscles bunched as tight as they could, and that was pretty tight. He waited for her to pity him and tried to brace himself to bear it, not to fight her off like a raging, wounded bull.
She unfolded one of his hands again, pushing against the involuntary resistance of his tightened muscles. He forced them to yield. He always let her do whatever she wanted to him. She tucked her little fist inside his, and then folded his own around it, until his hand engulfed hers, all the freckles consumed by the big, scarred hand. All you could see was something big, and brutal, falsely softened by cocoa butter, but all the scars still there.
“That’s what I call perfect,” she said, and rested her head against his shoulder again. Under her cheek, his heart gave a big thump like a white wishing fish leaping out of the water. “You are the most amazing person I have ever met. I should probably be the one giving you the warning: I won’t leave
you.
I’m still figuring out how to be strong again, but I’ve made up my mind about one thing: if you’re not willing to leave me, I’m more than happy to return the favor.”