All for You (Paris Nights #1)(12)

Those happy, kissable, supple lips twisted unhappily and she looked away over the water. Over her head, he checked all their surroundings again. Still no trouble except the one he was in.

“Sorry,” she said, low and rough. “I don’t have the right to be so mad. I just, you know … never mind.”

He waited.

She shrugged, bitterly. “I know I was just Ludo’s stupid kid sister who insisted on trailing around after you guys. I just, you know—I hero-worshiped you, I guess.” She kicked the bottom of the bridge barrier.

Hero-worshiped him? His heart crinkled funnily, this embarrassed, puzzled, awkwardly crushed pleasure, like a butterfly squeezing out of a cocoon. How could she have hero-worshiped him back then? He’d gone away to learn how to be her hero.

To come back and rescue her, build a new life for her.

Around her stretched the beautiful Canal St. Martin, the buildings and old streetlamps and shady trees of this part of Paris. A vision flashed through him of her gorgeous salon de chocolat, of the luminous kitchens to which she had fled when she ran away from him. She seemed to have a pretty nice life already.

One she had built herself.

Without him.

“I don’t remember treating you as a stupid kid,” he said.

She looked up at him, brown eyes solemn and searching.

“As Ludo’s sister, yes, granted. Since you were his sister. Still are, I guess.” He’d kind of been done with Ludo well before Ludo finally got arrested. Maybe his desire to not be Ludo had helped fuel his enlistment in the Foreign Legion, too.

“Last I checked,” she said dryly.

He sought words, filtering out swearing, trying to find a way he could say what he wanted to say. It was hard to tell someone something when you weren’t sure you wanted her to know. “I’m not really Ludo’s friend anymore.” You’re nobody’s little sister now.


Fuck, that sounded alone and friendless, put like that. Unprotected. What he really wanted to say was: I came back for you. Nothing to do with Ludo at all.

“Yeah, well, you’re not really my friend anymore either, are you?” Célie said.

Shock. This white-noise, buzzing, strange thing mind and body did when the hurt was too much to bear.

“If you ever were.” She shrugged, flippant and dark.

Fuck.

His heart surely couldn’t take much more pain?

“You just put up with me, I guess.” Another shrug. He wanted to lay his arm over her shoulders and forcibly block them from shrugging.

“Célie, please stop now.” I changed my mind about you talking.

Célie glanced up at him, her lips parting to say something else, to strike again, and then her gaze caught on his face and slid over it, then slid over it again. Her expression shifted. “I just meant—”

He shook his head and held up a hand to stop her, focusing on the water. His body felt suddenly utterly heavy and tired, a tired that went deep down into the soul, that wasn’t a physical tired—it was hard to physically tire a man who had survived the paratroopers’ Corsica march—but heart-worn weariness. He wanted to slump down onto the bridge with his back against the barrier, slump like at the end of that march and close his eyes and sleep for days.

If he was ever her friend?

Meaning, he’d never been a good enough friend to her for her to know it. And he’d tried so f*cking hard.

He turned suddenly and sat down on the top step of the bridge. He shouldn’t do that. His big body now blocked most of the passage across the bridge. But he did it anyway. Bracing his arms on his thighs, he let his face drop into his hands. He had killed two people in a nighttime combat mission in the Uzbin Valley, no deaths on his conscience ever and then all of a sudden two, and he felt now as he had then—not during the kill-or-die adrenaline of the moment, but afterward, the night afterward, when the adrenaline was all gone and all that was left were thoughts. Images.

God, he wanted to sleep. For years.

And then a small body shifted down on the step below his. Célie slipped her head between the bend of his arm and his torso, resting it against his leg. She wrapped one arm around his thigh, holding on to him as tightly as she could. And she started to cry again, these tremblings of her body, this slow soaking of his jeans. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” she whispered. “Damn you.”

Slowly, very slowly, he unfolded one of his arms and settled it gently around her back instead. Slowly, very slowly, his other arm abandoned support of his face and dropped to her hair. It prickled faintly, from the gel or whatever she must use to give it that tufted-fairy look. His fingers sank a little deeper, down to the back of her skull, where her hair softened, gentle against her head.

His hand looked so big there. His thumb cheated and snuck out to trace over the curve of her ear, down to the two piercings, that dramatic one and that more discreet little jewel. If he kept going, his thumb would trace the line of her jaw, down over her throat.

But he didn’t. He kept his hand on that quirky, attention-grabbing hair, on those earrings, all the ways Célie tried to assert more space in her world. Cheerful, sparkling, happy ways.

“Me, too,” he whispered. “I’m glad you’re okay, too.”





Chapter 5


La Ferme, Castelnaudary, four years and eleven months before