“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 the 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 line 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.
When I had no one to count on but me.
“You got me a motorcycle?”
“Like it?” Joss looked so pleased with himself.
She rested her hand on the seat of her moped. She didn’t want to throw his gift back in his face. But, but … “I don’t have a license for a motorcycle.”
“I’ll pay for the courses. It’s part of the present.”
“I can afford the courses,” she said, a little indignant. She could afford a motorcycle, too, these days. It was just that she’d gotten attached to her little moped. It was cute, and it made her feel cheerful, and she’d always been able to count on it.
“It’s a present, Célie.” Joss reached out and caught her hand, bringing it to rest on that black leather seat. “I want to do it for you. I wasn’t there to help you as you set out, just as you said.”
Had she said that? She wasn’t sure that was quite what she had
meant
. Or it certainly wasn’t what she meant now, at twenty-three, grown-up and independent. “I was trying to say something about mutual help, Joss. Doing things together.”
Like … shopping for a motorcycle. Or deciding on the purchase of one.
Of course, they
weren’t
married or even living together and had barely started dating. As when he had left to join the Legion without talking to her about it, it wasn’t as if he
owed
her any input into his decisions.
No matter how much they affected her?
“Not just me clinging to you,” she said.
“So you won’t be clinging on behind me.” Joss pushed her hand, still holding the keys, toward the ignition. “You’ll be driving yourself.”
Right. It was a really nice present. Generous, special. Big. Kind of a guy thing to do, really—to give her a beautiful muscle machine, convinced that was the best present any human on the planet could ever want. And she always had liked motorcycles, as he knew.
“Didn’t
you
need a motorcycle?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I can’t drive two at once. I wanted to get you one first.”