All for You (Paris Nights #1)(10)

She’d forgotten to be angry or cry. She had a little curve to her mouth, utterly smug and trying not to show it.

He smiled at her in pure pride at what she’d managed.

She blinked, and her arms flinched around herself in a protective hug.

So he looked back at the chocolates, his smile fading. He was clearly supposed to taste one. He almost didn’t want to, and he didn’t even know why. This was going so badly, and—parting his lips left his insides vulnerable.

But he swallowed and carefully eased the edge of one thankfully clean thumbnail under the edge of a chocolate and worked it free from the others. Merde, the thing was no bigger than the pad of his thumb.

He looked at Célie again. Her gaze flicked eagerly between the chocolate and his face.

So he slipped it between his lips.

Sensation burst through him, this exquisite, hungry sensation of chocolate melting on his tongue, soft and rich and with some flavor to it he couldn’t begin to identify.

“Wow,” he said, and reached for another.

She smiled, for the very first time since he’d seen her. A real Célie smile, full of triumphant pleasure, her eyes sparkling.

The second one tasted different. Coffee? It melted, too, on his tongue, and the third was mint.

“Wow,” he said again, and tried to take his time on the fourth one, to really look at it, how perfect it was, this tiny exquisiteness. How did she do that?

One of her eyebrows went up, a little scar in it from where she must have tried a piercing while he was gone. Smiling, she watched him eat the fourth, and then the fifth. By the time he finished the box, both her eyebrows were up in this blend of amusement and bemusement. “People, ah, usually savor these over a few days.”

“Oh.” He looked back down at the empty box. The square of metal was barely bigger than his hand. “Chocolate usually melts. In the desert.” Which he wasn’t in anymore. “I didn’t want to waste them.”

She shook her head. He couldn’t decipher her expression.

“Why do they put off eating them, exactly?”

“Money, mostly. That’s about forty euros worth of chocolate, so unless someone is rich, it’s a luxury.”

Forty euros. It was probably a good thing he stuck mostly with supermarket chocolate bars. He’d be spending hundreds a day otherwise.

“Plus, they are works of art,” she told him, with her chin up in the air again.

Damn, she was cute. This sudden, fresh wave of her cuteness washed through him again, after five years of fading memories.

“Yes,” he said. “I can see that.” Can I kiss you? Just right now? He’d fought five years to be the man who deserved to kiss that mouth, and maybe he’d been assuming she’d recognize his right immediately.

Again, his gaze downward let him skim his own body. As far as he could tell, strength and competence and confidence pretty much radiated off his every cell these days. His personal radius felt about ten times bigger than anyone else he crossed paths with in the street. He tried to be polite and not pushy, but people shifted out of his way on the sidewalk before he could even start to shift out of theirs. “Walk?” he asked again, low.

She hesitated and then shrugged defiantly and turned to head up the sidewalk toward République. She had a brisk Paris stride, and he kept his much longer one slow, not in a rush to get to a café to meet with friends but in steady determination to get through terrain or his day.


It didn’t take them long to reach the great Place de la République, empty of protestors today, people hurrying across it and a few families lingering at the fountains. Célie headed toward the canal, a nice, quiet place to walk. He only knew where they were because he’d had to look up her work address on a map of Paris and always liked to scout out the terrain before he stepped into new territory. Paris had not been his stomping grounds, in the old days.

The canal was pretty, though. Even prettier than in films, because now it felt like a real place. Shaded by plane trees, arched with bridges, filled with this quiet, dark water that rippled only when someone tossed a stone into it.

He glanced down at Célie and caught her in the act of sneaking a glance up at him. She quickly looked away.

“How’s your brother?” he asked, for something to say.

“Oh, is that why you’re here?” she demanded truculently. “You’re looking for him?”

He cut her an astonished glance. Their whole cité and every gang in it had known that the only reason he kept putting up with her brother was that she came with him. If he had beaten the crap out of Ludo the way he’d wanted to when her brother started getting into drug trafficking and trying to drag Joss and Célie after him, he’d never have gotten a chance to see Ludo’s sister again.

And he’d needed Ludo’s sister. Seeing Célie nearly every day had made him feel like he had a—a teddy bear or something he could take to bed with him at night. Something that made him feel warm and secure and happy against darkness. He’d even tried as hard as he could not to fantasize about her too explicitly, because it had seemed wrong. Tender fantasies, more, where he tried not to let his mind go below her shoulders, and then tried not to let his mind go below her waist, and then the clothes above the waist had slowly faded away, and now, now … well, in the past five years, he’d long since lost all barriers to the fantasies. They’d gotten hotter and deeper, and she’d given more and more of herself, more and more willingly, every time. They’d kept their sweetness, though.