All for You (Paris Nights #1)(20)

She touched the card. And then she knew she really shouldn’t, but … she peeked at the back again. That stubborn, determined handwriting, and the little heart over the I in her name just like she always did for him, as if he’d noticed that, and, and … I would wait more than five years for you.

Her eyes filled again.

Blast it! She scrubbed at them, but not before two people spotted her and shook their heads. She knew she shouldn’t have risked looking at those words again.

She glanced at the clock. It was nearly five. On normal days—not, obviously, the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s or the week before Easter or the whole month of December—she left at five, having started at eight. Of course, her afternoon had been about as unproductive as it was conceivable to be, and she wouldn’t normally leave without a heck of a lot more done, or else she’d have to come in at five in the morning tomorrow. And Dom got kind of grouchy when people came in too early unnecessarily—he liked having the kitchens to himself for a couple of hours. These days, he was torn, because he apparently also liked lingering in bed later than he ever had before he shared that bed with Jaime.


It must be nice, Célie thought wistfully, to like sharing a bed with someone so much you didn’t want to leave it.

“I need to go,” she told Dom abruptly, washing her hands. Dom came to fill the doorway of the ganache room and gave the quantity of work she had done that day an ironic look. “I’ll come in early tomorrow,” Célie said. That was a little meek. She stuck her chin up. “To make up for all those all-nighters I pull at Christmas.”

Dom pretended to look grumpy, but his dark water eyes gleamed touché. “He still out there?” Dom checked the window. His hands closed automatically into fists. “Célie—”

“It’s fine. Dom—I’m not worried. It’s Joss, okay?” He often used to show up just a few minutes before she was due to get off, to lounge against the wall of the building opposite her bakery. It had made her heart sing, every time, when she saw him out there waiting for her. “You guys just don’t understand because I overreacted.”

“If you’re trying to protect Dom—an effort I deeply appreciate—can I just mention that I could put a Corey security detail on you if you need it,” Jaime said, coming into the room.

Dom stared at his fiancée. “I think you must have me mistaken for someone else.”

Jaime smiled at him and shook her head, laying her hand on his arm. Dom sighed, looking down at it, and then covered her smaller hand with his.

“I need to go,” Célie said again. She went into the bathroom to change into her street clothes—jeans and a short-sleeved knit shirt, because it wasn’t as if she had been expecting to have to look hot on her way home from work—and grabbed her leather jacket and hibiscus-printed helmet. She hesitated, and then swooped back into the ganache room to fill a little metal box with chocolates. “Shut up,” she told Dom.

He hadn’t said anything, of course, busy rapping his knuckles against the nearest marble counter and looking from her to Jaime to the casement window.

“It will be fine,” Célie said. “Damn it, men are such idiots.” She stomped down the stairs.

Outside, she hesitated, glancing between her moped up the street on her left and Joss, leaning against a wall in the opposite direction. But she couldn’t resist the pull of that muscled body, those hazel-green eyes.

She turned toward him, and he straightened from the wall as soon as she did, coming toward her. He moved differently than he had five years ago. He’d always been strong, fit, someone who made her feel safe, but now he had this hardness to him, as if he could cut a path through stone and steel just by walking toward it.

Or through bullets. Her stomach knotted even to think about it. She’d read about the Foreign Legion when he first disappeared into it—about the training he would be going through, about the brutal dog-eat-dog world of it, about the situations they were sent to handle in the world—and she would crawl between her own bed and the wall to hide, like she had when she was a little girl and her mom brought home a doubtful boyfriend. She’d clutch her arms around herself there, fighting in desperate anguish the knowledge of all he must be going through.

He stopped in front of her, taking her helmet for her but keeping his other hand at his side, his eyes sweeping over her face as if he was touching every part of it. Her skin burned from the look, and she flexed her hand around the box of chocolates so she wouldn’t drop it on the ground and just fling her arms around him. You’re home, you’re home, you’re home.

“You’ve still got chocolate on you.” That sand-rasped quality to his deep voice now made her want to go up on tiptoe and kiss his throat, to slide silk over it so he remembered what softness felt like.

“I’m a chocolatier,” she growled. “It’s a hazard of the trade. Like mud and blood for a Legionnaire, only … much nicer.”

His face closed, and she wondered abruptly if she had just said something terrible. Like … maybe that was a really stupid, flip thing to say to someone who might actually have seen a lot of blood in the past five years.

She thrust out her chin, somewhere between defiance and apology. “What I mean is, you might be tougher, but I taste better.”