“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.”
“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.
“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.