All for You (Paris Nights #1)(16)

She would have loved so much to cuddle with Joss back then.

Actually—she snuck a sideways glance at that big, hard, confident body—she would probably still love to … she cut her thoughts off.

“What did you do?” Joss asked. “When she said that?”

“I cried. And I ripped up the postcard I was writing to you. And I ripped up your photos.” And boy had she regretted that one. “And I took a train into Paris, and I knocked on Dominique Richard’s door and told him I would work my butt off, if he would only hire me. That I’d work for almost nothing, if it was enough to be able to afford the rent on a nine-meter apartment in Paris itself and not the banlieue, that I’d live off chocolate and water if I had to.”

Joss’s hands curled into big fists. He glanced down at them and thrust them in his pockets. “And what did he do?”

“He said he’d better pay me enough that I wasn’t forced to sneak all his chocolate for meals. That it would turn out cheaper for him in the long run.”

Joss’s hands shoved against his pockets. “So he was your hero. He saved you.”

Célie considered that a moment. “Well, I mean … I kind of thought I saved myself.”

The expressions on Joss’s face were so complicated and impossible to read. Not helped by the fact that he tried to keep all of them contained.

“I mean, that took some guts, the little nobody from the banlieue, to insist that one of the rising star chocolatiers hire me. And then to work my butt off making sure I deserved it, that I helped make us the best.”

After a moment, he nodded, and his face softened. “You always did dream really big, Célie.”

Well … she supposed so. Dreaming of running off with Joss in some vague life of bliss and security had probably been dreaming really big.

Her chin lifted. A smaller dream, nevertheless, than the ones she had turned out to be capable of accomplishing, once she put her heart into them instead of into him. “So who else are you looking up?”

Joss had the blankest expression. Finally he shoved both hands across his face. “I hadn’t really thought about looking up anyone else.” And, while she was still trying to digest that, “You cried?”

She tried for a flippant shrug. “A girl can change a lot in five years.”

Too late, she remembered that she’d pretty much spent the last half hour crying, ever since she’d first seen him.

Joss lifted an eyebrow but courteously refrained from pointing her tears out to her. He was silent until they reached the base of the next footbridge over the canal. “Célie.” Abruptly he grabbed her by the hips, lifted her off the ground, and pivoted to set her three steps up on the bridge, so that her eyes were on level with his. The easy strength of the act rushed through her entire body. “I came back for you.”

Her breath stopped, and it hurt that way, all stopped up in her chest. It hurt so much she wanted to cough it out, straight into his face, to hack him back from her happy life and all the hurt he could do to it. “I haven’t been waiting for you, Joss.” She made her voice mean. She made it as mean as she could. “I’ve moved on.”

He shook his head. “I can understand now why you didn’t wait for me, Célie. But I’ve been waiting for you.”





Chapter 6


“Work things out?” Jaime asked with quiet sympathy that afternoon.

Célie grimaced and shrugged, whisking her chocolate into cream. Across the steel counters of the hot room in the laboratoire, where all the burners were, she felt more than saw Amand, their sandy-haired caramellier, exchange glances with Jaime.

It was weird how subdued her own subsidence had left the laboratoire. As if she was its electric current and the power had gone out. Only Dom and Jaime resisted that power outage, and Dom had a particularly bad-tempered edge to him today. Every once in a while, he would look at her and then walk to the window to glare out of it and make sure Joss didn’t stand below.

After each glare, Célie would find some excuse to sneak a look through a window and check for herself.

So far, no Joss.

Guillemette, from downstairs, slipped discreetly up to her. “Your, ah, friend just sat down at one of the tables. Should we serve him?” She tried to keep her voice low, but she underestimated Dom and Jaime’s current state of alertness.


“Is that bastard stalking you?” Dom pivoted, chisel in hand. “I’ll go take care of him.”

“Or we could call the cops for that,” Jaime intervened firmly.

A sharp, feral show of teeth in what was Dom’s idea of a grin. “No, I want to do it.”

“Dominique.” Jaime laid a freckled hand over his muscled forearm.

Seriously, the way she said his name was adorable.

Dom glanced down at her hand on his arm, one black eyebrow lifting. “Is that supposed to be your magic trick to get me to behave?”

Jaime smiled. “Is it working?”

Dom held up thumb and forefinger, about a centimeter apart. “Only a little bit.” But the energy of his body was shifting, as he turned more toward Jaime, as he focused on her. The aggressive gleam in his eyes was transforming to tenderness and a smile.

“Dominique.”

There she went again. Of course the man was going to go all mushy over someone who said his name like that.