All for You (15 page)

“Nice color,” she said randomly of the soft sea green with its hint of gray. “It brings out your eyes.”

“I went shopping.” He, too, seemed to have difficulty focusing on his own words, thrown out randomly. And Joss was almost never random. Thus the even greater shock when he ran off to join the Foreign Legion. “It’s the first time I’ve been able to choose my own clothes in five years, beyond choosing whether to wear camouflage shorts and a muscle shirt or camouflage pants and a T-shirt in my downtime.”

Célie instantly planned a secret shopping spree in her head. Hey, if
she’d
spent five years stuck in uniforms and camouflage, she’d
love
it if someone came home with sacks of brand-new clothes for her to try on.

“And I opened a bank account, got a phone. All the paperwork things.”

“You got your nationality back?” Yet another layer to why she’d been so pissed at him about the Foreign Legion. Couldn’t he have just joined the
regular army
or something? Sure, it wasn’t as dramatic and glorious, but … to give up
everything about himself
, his nationality, his name. Her.

It was as if he didn’t have any hint of the true value of who he was at all, to give it all up to the Foreign Damn Legion. Or of the value of who she was, to give her up. Which she’d kind of accepted as his right, to not value her, but it had hurt her terribly just the same.

And she’d been
livid
about him giving himself up. Who
he
was.

He nodded.

“What were you, while you were in?”

“Monaco.” He shrugged. “Marc Lenoir. Castel is what we call one of the regimental training bases, at Castelnaudary, so it avoided confusion.”

“Did you change it back after the first year, when you were allowed?”

He shook his head.

She frowned at him. He hadn’t wanted to be Joss?

He spoke slowly. “It seemed easier to just stick with Marc than try to make everyone change what they called me. And it … kind of protected Joss from them. Kept him safe … for you.”

She stared up at him, her eyebrows drawing together as she processed that. “So … after getting out of the Foreign Legion, do you need therapy now?”

He smiled slightly and shook his head.

A sudden thought startled her: in five years, had she been the first person to call him by his real name? By who he used to be? “Is it weird? Changing back to Joss?”

“Not when you say it,” he answered simply.

And while she was still hugging that to her and thinking it over, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a little paper bag and handed it to her without a word.

She opened it to find a necklace, nothing expensive, just a little red hibiscus, hung on a simple chain.

Her heart brightened. “Thank you.”

He shrugged, disconcertingly awkward for a man who exuded so much power and confidence in every situation but dealing with her. “It’s just a little—I just wanted to—” He stopped.

“You were just thinking of me,” Célie supplied, stroking the delicate petals, ridiculously pleased, far more pleased than if it had been a calculated and expensive diamond. Diamonds were insistent and demanding, even burdensome, like an investment against some return. This … this was pure sweet. That sweetness of a quiet thought.
I was going about my day, and I saw this, and it made me happy to bring it to you.

Joss shrugged again.

“Thank you,” she murmured, and went up on tiptoe to kiss him again. At the last second, she pressed the kiss against his chin, to avoid starting more public displays of affection in full view of her colleagues.

He rubbed the spot on his chin, watching her as she dropped back onto her heels. He was still so hard to read. Harder even, than back before he left. She reached behind her neck to fasten the necklace, and his big hands took over from hers, fastening it for her far more slowly than she would have managed. The graze of his hands against her nape sent shivers down her spine.

His callused fingers trailed down the chain to touch the little hibiscus with his thumb. “Perfect,” he said, of that cheerful, sweet flower against her consciously sexy, leather-pants-and-silk outfit. “It looks just like you.”

“Do you know, sometimes back then I would get my hopes up about you,” she whispered to him. “We got along so well, and you were there so much for me, that I’d start to tell myself,
Hey, maybe … just maybe … he
likes
me.
And then I’d see you again and try to flirt with you and you’d keep me at a distance and I’d realize,
No, no, he must just be a nice guy. Or need a friend.
”

“I liked you. And I was trying to be a nice guy. And your friendship was the most valuable thing I had in that damn place.”

Her smile softened in a trembling way. “Yours was my most valuable thing, too,” she said, and just managed not to add the thought that immediately sprang to mind:
Which was why it hurt so much when you took it away from me and left me with nothing but myself.

But then, of course, she had had to learn how to value herself much more than she might ever have done, had he stayed. Possibly the same way he had had to learn his own value, through and through, to handle the Foreign Legion.

A long, slow sigh moved through his body. “I should have written.” He touched her face. “Found a pay phone and called. Gone to the cybercafé and sent an email.”

She nodded.

“I’m sorry, Célie. I did do it all for you, but I may have done it in a very self-absorbed way.”

“Well …” Célie hesitated. “You
were
only twenty-one. And clearly clueless.”

“I’m very, very proud of you.” He ran his hand down her back to rest on her butt, in possessive approval. “Of who you became.”

She beamed, her eyes stinging. “Me, too. I’m so proud of you, too.” God, she was proud. Every passerby whose gaze lingered on him made more pride swell inside her. But that was a superficial pride, smugness because he was so hot. Deep down, this hot, powerful, passionate pride burned in her center, at the man he had always been and the man he had become.

“When I look at you, bouncing out of that shop, I think, ‘That’s my Célie.’”

Really? She hugged herself, even though it bumped her arms against his chest and even though she wasn’t supposed to want to belong to anyone else. She was too independent. She whispered, “Can I think, ‘That’s my Joss’?”

His smile lit his face for just a moment, this brilliant flash of light. And then it was gone, disappearing under some serious, intense emotion. His hands closed over her shoulders, thumbs rubbing her collarbone, eyes fixed on hers. “Yes.”

Too much emotion swelled up in her, too many things that were too complicated: so much joy it was terrifying.
You left me, and I don’t even know you anymore. And I would still, if I saw you watching me with that steady gaze from the other side of a street full of hot coals, walk barefoot across them just for the chance that you would hold me.

Hell, I’d do it just for the chance that you might
smile
at me and say, “That’s my Célie.”

“I brought you something.” She reached into her messenger bag for the box of chocolates.

Because when he saw her bouncing out of the shop, when he thought,
That’s my Célie
, she wanted his mouth to automatically start softening in anticipation, his lips to part, his tongue to …

She swallowed.

He smiled, opening the box. “Just three bitter dark this time?” he asked softly, at the array of patterns in the rows to either side of that center dark row.

“The others are just different ones I thought you might like.” She pointed. “This basil one, that was Dom’s idea. I thought he was crazy. Especially when our first test batches came out tasting terrible. But he insisted, and we kept trying it, making the flavor more elusive, until we got … well, try it.”

Joss tried it, but his expression stayed disappointingly closed, unmelted. “I like your flavors better.”

“He’s Dominique Richard, Joss.”

“I like your flavors better.”

“I made that ganache that’s melting in your mouth right this second! Just because it was his idea doesn’t mean I didn’t do any of the work involved!”

“Fine.” His jaw set a little as he forced himself to concede. “Then I guess I like it very much.”

She put her hands on her hips. “Men are idiots.”

His lips quirked up. “I see your sexism hasn’t improved.”

And she laughed. It was funny how much she had always loved teasing and being teased by Joss. It just charged her up. Made her tickle everywhere inside. “This one, we came up with this little hint of spices the first year we opened, for Christmas, and the demand for it and our other flavors caught us all only halfway prepared for it. We’d work through the night—I remember us taking turns catching an hour’s sleep on that divan in the salon—and Dom would go grab everyone breakfast and—”

Joss tried it as she talked, his face relaxing as he gazed down at her. And then he did something he had never done, when he picked her up from her work back in the old days. He
took her hand
as he turned them down the sidewalk, strolling together as she told all the chocolates’ stories.

Célie stared at her hand in his. Her breath got too short, and she had to fight to calm it. His hand was so solid and large around hers. Calluses rubbed against her skin, which was kept soft by all that cocoa butter.

It was what a boyfriend and girlfriend did, hold hands. It was what a man did when he wanted to tell the woman with him,
Our hands belong together. I like to touch you. I like to make sure you’re in reach. I like for everyone who sees us to know you’re with me.

It made her happy.

As if a dream had come true.

Which was disorienting because that dream was supposed to, long ago, have declared itself an impossible fantasy.

“Who. Is.
That?
”

Propped on one elbow on the edge of a picnic blanket spread across stone, Joss kept his expression neutral, not glancing toward Célie’s friend, a long-legged blonde who favored form-fitting leather and who apparently didn’t realize how well her voice carried. She and Célie were standing a little apart from the group of friends on the blankets, Célie having just finished dancing salsa with one of the many friends Joss was meeting tonight. She had a
lot
. Far more than she had had as a teenager. What, was she trying to give herself spares?

In case one of them up and left her? he realized soberly.

“Where did you find
him
?”

“Umm … an old friend,” Célie said. “From high school.”

Joss snuck a fast glance at her. She was blushing.

Hey. That blush spread through his belly and out through his body in a warm and tender pleasure. It was
amazing
how much he liked her blushing over him.

The blonde stared. “
That’s
one of your old friends? Why don’t my old friends ever grow up like that?”

Célie tried so hard not to look smug that Joss had to press his lips down against the upsurge of his own pride, swelling from deep inside him at her expression. Maybe he could handle this evening, after all.

It wouldn’t have been his choice, to hang out in a crowd of careless people among whom he couldn’t relax, but her evening out with friends had been planned before his return to her life, and she’d seemed eager to include him in it.

It was good to know Célie had friends, that they were friends with whom she had fun, that she’d been thriving without him. He’d told her the truth when he said he was glad to know that.

But it made him feel a little precarious. Like—if she could do so well for herself without him there, what exactly was his role in her happiness?

Did he get to have one?

He thought of the apartment and smiled at the image of her face lighting up as she looked at that view of her park.
That
would make her happier. She’d love it so much.

“So is there anything—?” The blonde let her question trail off into a wiggle of her finger between Célie and Joss. “Or—?” Another wiggle, this time toward herself, with a teasing lift of her eyebrows. The blonde woman looked as if she could have been a Bond girl, with those high cheekbones and that tough leather, looks that apparently made her pretty confident about flirting with men.

Célie stiffened, glaring at her friend. “He’s
with me
.”

A grin escaped Joss, and he quickly suppressed it, rubbing his fist against the picnic blanket.
You tell her, Célie. Fight for me. I’m with you.

With Célie. He took a deep breath, trying to get used to being with her. Her world was so alien to him now.

Happiness spilled across the quay around them in careless abandon. People laughed and talked and danced as if happiness was some basic human right and not some miracle conjunction of space and time. Lights from the opposite bank of the Seine stretched across the darkening water toward them, as if those lights desperately wanted to reach the dancers and shake some sense into them. On the tip of the Île Saint-Louis halfway across the trembling water, a smaller, saner group of people gathered, the kind of people who said:
That looks fun, but let’s keep a safe distance. If trouble starts, I’d rather be on the other side of the water from it.

Masses of people were tempting targets.

Happy people, on the Seine, Notre-Dame glowing just down the river. You’d think a terrorist attack had never occurred on French soil, the way these people acted. That their government didn’t have men like him fighting extremist armies right this second, factions that had more than proven their willingness to strike wherever it hurt the most, as well as their belief that no one in Western Europe was innocent, not civilians, not women, not children, and certainly not smugly happy people dancing on the edge of the Seine just beside one of the great symbols of European culture and achievement and in the heart of one of the most powerfully emblematic cities in the world.

Nobody was even controlling the damn perimeter, checking the bags of those who joined the laughing, happy crowd of dancers and observers.