All for You (Paris Nights #1)(25)

She was as unable to let him back in as she was to send him away.

She smacked on the timed lights at every landing, but the one flight lit above her seemed like some wimpy candle against a grief or a fear, and the darkness pursued her from below, as the lights went out behind her with each flight she cleared.

In her apartment, at least, she could leave the lights on. Her home in expensive Paris was essentially a bed with a tiny amount of space on either side of it to move around. Joss couldn’t come up here. If he came up there, she would …

He would …

They would …

How did Joss make love? She had no idea. Urgent and hungry, pushing her down onto that bed as soon as they bumped into it for lack of other space to move?

Quietly, slow and easy, letting her lead?

Tantalizing, starting at that knuckle he had tasted and slowly drawing her finger into his mouth as he massaged her hand and let his palm rub down her wrist, calluses over her skin as he worked his way into greater and greater intimacies, not one of which she could deny?

Why did he have to have such a hot body? That wasn’t fair. All muscled and perfect and stubborn and those beautiful eyes focused on her, as if he’d hike two hundred kilometers for her with a fifty-kilo pack on his back any day of the year. You’re the goal.

She wanted to smack him when he said that. She wasn’t any damn freaking goal, she was a person. She’d rather they have been walking hand in hand toward any goals.

She’d rather have come home, the first time she succeeded in making a perfect chocolate for Dom, and crawled onto their bed in their tiny apartment because it was the only space they had, to show it off to Joss excitedly and watch him eat it. Maybe even bring it to his lips with her own fingers, because he hadn’t yet had time to wash the grease off his hands from working on some car.

That was what she would have rather.

They would have been happy.

He couldn’t take back all those nights she’d had to curl up between her bed and the wall, in those black hours when she went into panic attacks over what he might be going through.

It had been bad enough when she thought he just didn’t care about her that way.

But to have done it for her? To have liked her and still left her that way?

It made her want to rip him to shreds.

Only, she was afraid if she touched him, she might just rip his clothes off instead. That when her fingers tried to sink into his actual body, they would end up doing something else.

She washed her face in lieu of being able to clean up her mind and went to the window, hugging herself, looking out at all the other lights that used to console her a little during those black moments. She was alone, but she wasn’t. Millions of other people were out there being alone, too.


Or finding someone.

But Joss had never been part of those millions. Always before, Joss had been somewhere off with the Foreign Legion, and even thinking about him had made her brain shy away from all the imagined nightmares of who might be shooting at him or what he might be doing.

She leaned on her little window railing, like a princess whose Prince Charming never did remember to stop by and serenade her, and blinked at what she saw below.

What in the world was Joss doing now?

***

Joss punched his jacket into a comfortable shape under his head and settled back on the bench, gazing up at the light in Célie’s window. Six floors up. He’d picked it out by the timing of when the light went on, after she left him at the door, and confirmed it by the shape of her silhouette.

It would be easy to climb the face of that building. Really easy. Just his own body weight to carry, and there were balconies and ledges every floor and even some grimacing old stone faces for handholds. It would feel like strolling in the park, to climb the face of that building.

So climbing up the stairs inside with her would have felt like … floating. Magically rising above the earth just by the wish of it.

Maybe she knew that. Maybe she didn’t think he deserved anything that easy.

She’d worked hard, too, after all. He pulled out his little metal box and gazed at the three chocolates he had saved for later. His thumbnail traced carefully around the edge of the one with delicate green twining across it, the mint one. She must have worked her butt off, to get this good.

Célie. He smiled. She’d never been afraid of work, or at least not work per se. She’d been afraid of ending up in a mind-numbing job in a factory, but that was why she’d focused hard on her pastry apprenticeship, because it made her happy and proud. Some people would consider pastry work mind-numbing, too, but not Célie. His mind flashed to all those memories of her face when she ran out of her bakery with a box full of something she was so proud to offer him.

Célie. With her burgundy braid and her bright eyes, always so happy and vibrant and bouncy. Sometimes she’d twitch that saucy butt at him on purpose and stick her tongue out at some excuse she’d found to tease him, when she met him leaving his work or he met her leaving hers, and his fingers would itch and he’d shove his hands in his pockets, to save her butt from them.

To make sure that first he became the man she’d really dreamed he would be. Her hero.

He clasped his hands behind his head to get comfortable, gazing in some awe at the wide open sky, the lights sparkling in windows on the buildings rising around him—people changing, eating, arguing, gazing out the windows at the night. He supposed he should go to a hotel until he found an apartment, but he hated to waste money on something stupid like that. He had plans for that money.