All for You (Paris Nights #1)(23)

“You never thought about me, Célie?” he asked carefully.

Oh. She wrapped her arms around herself and the pain in her middle. Oh, yes, she had thought about him. Sometimes, when she had a bad day, particularly if that bad day included yet another dating disaster, she would curl up with the thought of him in her bed, as if he was still her old dream of happily ever after.

He had been thinking about her, too? Imagining all his own happily ever afters with her? She hugged her knees harder, a sweetness and a wistfulness calming her frustration, turning it into something more painful and more longing. “You were in Corsica?” she asked warily. “Isn’t that where the paratrooper regiment trains?”

He nodded, his hands still clasped behind his head.

Holy crap. She’d read about them, of course. She’d read obsessively about the Foreign Legion, the first six months he was gone. The Legion itself was already considered elite, albeit insane, but the 2e REP was the elite of that elite, one of the most elite combat regiments in the world, with the training to match.

And it hit her that he could not possibly be her same Joss anymore. That everything she knew about him was like knowing what cocoa beans were like before they got turned into chocolate. No. Nothing as soft and sweet as chocolate. Like knowing what fresh-mined iron ore was like before it got turned into a steel blade. She stared at him, wondering if his heart had changed, too.

He gazed back at her, his face hard to read but his eyes still that same steady hazel green. He did look hardened, everywhere hardened, even his eyes and the set of his chin. And yet …

There was this quiet to him, still. That same quiet strength that had made her crush on him so hard back when she was a teenager.

That made her shiver with hunger now, so that she had to rub her arms to disguise herself, as if the evening was bringing a chill.

“A porn star, hmm?” Joss’s voice was so neutrally musing, but a little curl snuck into the corners of his lips. He lounged there against the rock, with his hands behind his head, and his whole body in this lazy display of … of … something a woman could really easily jump on.

Heat chased the chill away from her skin. “That was not a compliment!”

“Oh, trust me. None taken.” But the curve of his mouth deepened.

“Only a man would think it was a compliment to be compared to a porn star!”

“No.” He shook his head. “But it’s a compliment to know you were thinking about sex.”

Oh. She gasped, both her fists clenching against it. If the Seine wasn’t such a disgustingly dirty river, she would dive right into it this second and maybe swim around to the opposite end of the island before she came back up for air. Then just sneak away and go hide between her bed and the wall, the way she did so many nights worrying about him.

God, he looked so freaking gorgeous, stretched out almost to the point of relaxation, there so close to her. He looked real. He looked as if her Joss had come back, only … not hers and completely different.

And her mouth watered to know what he tasted like.

He picked up her box of chocolates from the stones beside him. “If I eat these up again now, are you going to be mad at me?” He pried the metal lid off.

“Maybe you need dinner.” She watched the strong fingers ease free a small, perfect piece. He sure could consume a lot of chocolates.

The thought made her happy. She could make a lot of chocolates. She might be the only woman in Paris who could keep this guy filled up.

He shook his head and slipped the entire chocolate into his mouth in one bite. She stared at his mouth, as her whole day of work, everything she had accomplished in the past five years, just melted in a rush of flavors inside it. “It gives me something else to focus on,” he said. “I’m thinking about sex, too.”

Her lips parted. She squeezed herself so tightly her feet came off the stone, and she wobbled on the edge of the quay.

He lunged forward and grabbed her arm, pulling her back into steadiness before she’d even properly lost balance.


The sudden surge of power, just to capture her, made everything inside her go still. Waiting to be captured. His lashes lowered, as his gaze fixed on his hand, firm on her arm. Slowly, his grip softened, and his fingers spread, his hand rubbing gently back and forth once against her forearm. “You’re cold,” he said softly.

Yes. It was midsummer, and yet the hair rose all over her body at the need to bury herself in the closest source of warmth.

“Célie.” His voice dropped deep and low and sand-rasped. “I could warm you up.”

“I know,” she said between her teeth. It was her deepest, most persistent fantasy about him, the one she still, even just two nights before, had used to ease herself to sleep—that his big body was there, warming her up. The fantasy she found more soothing to cuddle into at night than any actual male body of any man she had ever dated.

She patted blindly for her leather jacket and pulled it back over her legs. I can take care of warming myself up. Since I had five years of knowing I, and only I, was ever going to take care of me.

“I want to go home,” she lied fiercely. The thought of leaving him on this quay, of separating herself from him by more than a meter, made her feel as if she was prying her own skin off.

His mouth twisted. “I can’t do that. Until my home decides to let me back in.”