All for You (Paris Nights #1)(18)
Stupid men. She pulled out some of those trays. Arabica again, yes. He’d liked the touch of coffee. And mint, because he used to have a weakness for chocolate mint patties, and boy would her mint chocolates knock his socks off in comparison. And honey-hibiscus, because she had come up with it all by herself, experimenting, and she liked to think it tasted like she would, if anyone ever knew how to properly taste her.
Stupid, idiot men with their stupid, idiot excuses for making a woman cry her heart out for years. She slammed the little chocolates down on the plate around the éclair, a little circle of them, and then, remembering how fast he had eaten that box like a starving man, added a second one of each. Fine, a third.
She stomped back out of the room. “Here.” She thrust the plate at Thierry. “For that idiot.”
“Now you’re feeding him?” Dom demanded, outraged. “My chocolates?”
She put her hands on her hips. “My chocolates. And don’t you dare charge him. It’s on me.”
Dom made a feral noise between his teeth and pivoted back to his lion sculpture. At the first tap, the entire ear came off.
“Ha!” Célie said. “That will teach you to always want to use excessive force.”
Dom gave her a dirty look.
“You know, I think I’ll just do the rest of my work today from your office,” Jaime said. “It’s mostly calls and computer stuff, and God knows what trouble the two of you’d get into without me.”
Chapter 7
Joss played with the chocolates on his plate. He’d eaten that little box she gave him too fast, and now he was almost afraid to eat these. They’d be all gone, once they were eaten, and he wouldn’t be able to see it anymore—this visible proof that she cared about him. Still.
No matter how mad she was, she couldn’t let him sit here without food.
No, it was more than food. These were her special accomplishments. The things she was so proud of, what she had made of her life when he left to make something of his. She was feeding him, but she was giving him something much more precious and intimate and proud than a croque-monsieur.
He rubbed his thumb gently along the perfect smooth edge, circling the delicate design, a stylized red flower. He couldn’t shake the feeling that if he bit into that, he would be biting into Célie.
Damn, but he wanted to bite into Célie. Bite into that supple, saucy lower lip of hers, and bite into all those curves, that happy, athletic roundness of hers, vibrant with energy. As if it was her task in life to produce enough voltage to light a whole grim, bleak cité, all by herself.
Clean that chocolate off her, that had smeared her forehead and one cheek and spattered in her hair. That winged, asymmetric hair. Wasn’t that just like Célie. Trying for the tough look and ending up resembling an elf longing for fairy wings.
I think I’m tough enough for both of us and all the world now, Célie. You can relax about the toughness and just let all that natural happiness play.
He bit into the red-flowered chocolate slowly. A hint of … something. It reminded him of the scent of Célie’s hair. He couldn’t put his finger on why.
The waiter wouldn’t let him pay, when he asked for the bill. That made Joss smile a little and glance up at the section of glass wall visible at the top of those spiraling metal stairs. But he didn’t spot Célie, peeking down at him.
Damn.
“When does Célie get off?” he asked the waiter.
“I don’t think I should tell you that,” the waiter said.
Joss sighed. These people acted as if he wasn’t perfectly used to waiting all day in stillness if he needed to. Hell, he’d once had to wait three days, watching the entrance to a cave, with only a canteen of water and some rations to pass the time. “Fine. We’ll do it the boring way.”
He studied the line of people behind a velvet rope, all wishing they could get at his table so they could eat one of these éclairs themselves. He supposed he’d have to give up his position of comfort, too. “Can I have a piece of paper?”
“We’ve got this.” The waiter handed him a postcard-size bit of heavy white card stock. It was stamped with an aggressive silver DR and then, in a corner, the formal details of Dominique Richard, store address, website, telephone number, info@dominiquerichard … Joss scowled. Then he drew a line through that DR and wrote “Célie” instead and flipped it over.
The blankness on the other side froze his brain, as it always had. He just didn’t know what to write to her. He never had. He always, always had needed to be that thing he needed to write, to be that thing there, next to her, touching her. What the hell was there to say?
But maybe if he’d written back, after the first four months of training when he had the right to contact people again, she would have kept writing. She would have written, What the hell is this story Sophie is telling? and he would have managed to answer that one at least, so she’d know the truth, and then he would have had new little cards and maybe eventually even letters that kept coming all through his stint in the Legion, instead just those first dozen cards he kept on the shelf of his locker so he could take them out whenever he needed to touch them.
He took a deep breath and scrubbed his face. God, it was a good thing he’d chosen the mechanic track back in school, because he would totally have failed his bac. He’d known it, too. Known he didn’t have a chance in hell of sitting in front of a blank piece of paper with his whole future in jeopardy and filling it with anything that had any worth or made any sense.