All for You (Paris Nights #1)(31)

“I wanted to get to know him better.”

“You had coffee with a dangerous stranger who’s acting like a damn stalker?” Dom’s growl vibrated so down deep and low that the hairs on Célie’s nape stood on end.

“He’s just very intently goal-focused and used to having to pursue those goals through an incredible number of obstacles. I think I might try to hire him to consult with us on security issues.”

Dom’s lips pressed together in visible anger. He started to speak, stopped himself with an effort, and abruptly reached for the buttons on his chef’s jacket. “Let’s go for a walk.”

Jaime’s eyebrows went up a little as she took in his expression, but she went with him without question, not forcing any imminent issue in front of his employees.

“Although I do sympathize,” she added on her way out to Célie, who was still standing stock-still, trying to figure out what she thought about Jaime inviting Joss for coffee. “I mean, I like your Joss, but I’d be pissed at him in your shoes, too.”

Célie hurried to the casement window, watching, her stomach knotting anxiously. The last thing she wanted was for the world’s mushiest couple to get in a fight over her—her—her—

Not boyfriend. Not friend.

Her … Joss.

On the street below, when the couple came into her range of vision, Dom had his hands shoved in his pockets, every line of his body hard. She could tell that the two of them were arguing as they walked, that Dom was seriously pissed off and Jaime was standing her ground, fighting back, her gestures growing increasingly exasperated. Célie’s gut knotted. They were, like, the magic couple. They made her believe happy endings were possible. She didn’t want her problems to hurt the magic couple.

Dom’s steps slowed as they reached the end of the block. He turned toward Jaime. Jaime lifted her hand to cup his cheek.

Dom’s eyes closed a moment, and he angled his head to kiss Jaime’s wrist.

Oh, for God’s sake.

Célie grabbed some more chocolate to break up, brooding over how easy those two found it to make up when her own anger and betrayal and pain lodged deep in her where she couldn’t let it go.

***

“This one’s a really dark chocolate,” Célie said. “Bitter.”

In Joss’s big hands, that bitterness looked fragile and insignificant, all too ready to melt at his heat. He treated it with respect, though, studying the nine chocolates in their little metal box, the adamant rippling pattern stamped on their surfaces instead of any color or stylized motif. “Can I eat them? Or am I supposed to take my time, let them last?”

He hadn’t come inside the shop that day, nor spent his day waiting for her outside it, but when she left it, he was leaning against a nearby wall. Shades of when she was eighteen, when he often showed up a few minutes before she got off and waited for her. His shoulders were straighter now, almost no ability to slouch in his stance, his face sterner even in repose. But he still picked the same position—not directly across from the door but a little up the street to the right, where her gaze went to him automatically. He still straightened immediately, exactly as he once had, and came toward her without any pretense that he had been there for any reason other than her.


They stood now in the Parc de Belleville, Célie’s favorite park in Paris. Close to her little apartment, it was built on a hill in the old immigrants’ quarter of Paris where a little patch of a vineyard could still be found and children played in waterfalls built into the slope, and a view of Paris spread out below it, as if the city belonged to her. It was rare for tourists to find their way to it. No, this park was for Parisians, a spatial feast for children and parents and all the people from the quarter who sought this park for the same reasons she did. Peace. Play. Dreaming.

Trees lined the gravel path. A woman sat on a bench some way up it, reading. Shadows and sunlight dappled them.

“I don’t know,” Célie said uneasily, her gaze going from those dark chocolates in his callused palm up the muscled arm to the mouth that would close around them, in which they would melt. At twenty-six, he had lines already at the corners of his eyes from squinting into the sun and sand, and his lips had a firmness to them from being so long pressed into a stern line. Her lips and her eyes didn’t have any of that. Full, wide lips, generally laughing eyes. Even despite the pain he’d left in her middle when he left her.

He’d counted on her resilience. And, well … she’d had resilience. She had, in fact, bounced up, blossomed without him, lived a life she still wanted to hug to her for how vivid and delicious it was.

“I can try one now?” Joss eased it out of the box with a blunt-tipped finger.

“That’s … that’s kind of the point,” Célie said. To let him eat that bitter darkness up.

Was that, in fact, her point?

She stared at his fingers bringing her helpless chocolate to his lips. Stern lips that softened for it, eyes that brightened at the rush of flavor in his mouth, the subtle shifting of his facial muscles that indicated how he savored it. Heat climbed up her back, making everything in its path shiver.

“In … in milk chocolate, you can get away with lesser quality,” she said. “The sweetness will offset the cheap. That’s why candy bars are mostly sugar. But the darker it gets, the more the chocolate has to be the best, the ganache the most melt-in-your-mouth smooth and perfect.”