All for You (Paris Nights #1)(24)

That made her feel like an apartment broken into and wide open, a flimsy sheet over the door, no possible way to shut him out and keep herself safe. “Joss—”

“Here.” He pulled her very carefully into his arms, lifting her easily and settling her between his legs, as he leaned back against the wall of the quay. “Does this help?”

She bent her head, defeated, into this, her very favorite fantasy. His warm body. His hold. “You left me with nothing,” she whispered. “For five years. Nothing but me.”

His arms tightened gently on her. “That wasn’t leaving you with nothing. That was leaving you with everything.”

Yes, clearly. She’d made herself from that point. Everything she’d become had come from inside her, and her everything was a good everything. It was a proud, happy everything.

“I thought leaving you with only me was leaving you with nothing.” That deep steady voice, coming from inside his chest under her ear, rasping over her head. “Back then.”

He had been her everything. The only reason she didn’t already have a concrete plan for getting out of that cité the day she turned eighteen. The person who made it bearable, on whom she could put all her focus. The dream she rode with out of there.

“I could bite you,” she said. Nothing. Him!

“You can do anything you want to me. I’m sorry that I hurt you, and I can take pretty much any punishment.”

Her eyes filled again, and her head collapsed back against his chest in defeat, her hand rising to stroke right where she had been so tempted to bite. I’m sorry. Why did you have to go join the goddamn Legion?

Oh, God, the heat and scent of his body. In real. She hadn’t even known he smelled like that—this rough, sweet, piquant scent of him, as if he’d absorbed all the odors of the pine and wild-herb-clad hills of Corsica and baked in them. Which, God, he probably had—crawling through brush, doing those two hundred-kilometer, four-day marches in full gear in the hot sun. And that was just the training. That was before he must have been sent to Afghanistan to march right into explosives or an ambush of bullets while he was doing them.

“You were never nothing,” she said flatly. “You made it worth getting out of bed every morning and braving the damn walk past those gangs of *s, just knowing I’d get to see you. You were everything to me back then, Joss.” She lifted her chin, sat away from the warmth of his body. “But these days—I’ve got all this.” She gestured to the whole beautiful stretch of Paris in the setting sun and back to herself, finishing with a flick of her hand up and down her body. She had herself, too.

Joss gazed down at her. The sunset glimmered rose across his face. “Good,” he said finally. “I’m sorry that I hurt you, Célie, but I’m glad you ended up with all this”—a copy of her gesture, to include the whole Seine and all its palaces and bridges and Eiffel Tower, and then a slower, gentler shift of his hand up and down, to include her—“instead of just me.”

Oh.

Now what was she supposed to think or feel about that?

“I would have been happy with just you,” she muttered. Just. How could he even say that about his strength and kindness and steadiness, all those things he had shown her back then, in a world where everyone else’s strength always seemed to be primed to cause harm?


“In Tarterets?”

“It never crossed your mind that we could make something of ourselves together? Drive south, me hire on with a baker, you with a mechanic in some likely town, and we make just a … I don’t know … a stupid, happy life together?”

He stared at her.

Yeah. It obviously hadn’t occurred to him.

“I wanted to be bigger,” he said stubbornly.

“Yeah, well … forgive me for ever imagining you could become a bigger person with me there to help. I didn’t realize I would have kept you small.”

Fine. That choice would have kept him smaller than he was now, true. Some small-town mechanic, while she was a small-town baker.

She sure did love being the best chocolatier in Paris. Even if Dom did get all the credit.

Okay, fine, maybe Dom deserved a smidgen of the credit. But still …

“You wouldn’t have kept me small.” Joss was gaining that obdurate tone he got, when he had to keep forcing the same words out because he couldn’t find the perfect ones. “But I had to get bigger.”

“Congratulations.” Still in his hold, Célie brought both hands up so that she could bury her head in them instead of his shoulder. “You clearly succeeded in your goal.”

“It was my first step.” As always, Joss’s words were simple, his gaze direct. “You’re the goal.”





Chapter 10


Célie’s heart clenched when the door into her building swung shut with Joss on the other side of it. The darkness tightened her lungs as she set her foot on the first stair. Every breath grew more panicked, that she would never see him again, that closing that door on him had shut out his existence. She couldn’t do this, walking away from him, climbing and climbing up a dark stairwell by herself while she left him behind.

She had to, though. Because he had done the same thing to her, left her behind while he disappeared up a dark climb where she could not follow. And she couldn’t be the person left behind again.