All for You (Paris Nights #1)(39)
Chapter 15
“Who. Is. That?”
Propped on one elbow on the edge of a picnic blanket spread across stone, Joss kept his expression neutral, not glancing toward Célie’s friend, a long-legged blonde who favored form-fitting leather and who apparently didn’t realize how well her voice carried. She and Célie were standing a little apart from the group of friends on the blankets, Célie having just finished dancing salsa with one of the many friends Joss was meeting tonight. She had a lot. Far more than she had had as a teenager. What, was she trying to give herself spares?
In case one of them up and left her? he realized soberly.
“Where did you find him?”
“Umm … an old friend,” Célie said. “From high school.”
Joss snuck a fast glance at her. She was blushing.
Hey. That blush spread through his belly and out through his body in a warm and tender pleasure. It was amazing how much he liked her blushing over him.
The blonde stared. “That’s one of your old friends? Why don’t my old friends ever grow up like that?”
Célie tried so hard not to look smug that Joss had to press his lips down against the upsurge of his own pride, swelling from deep inside him at her expression. Maybe he could handle this evening, after all.
It wouldn’t have been his choice, to hang out in a crowd of careless people among whom he couldn’t relax, but her evening out with friends had been planned before his return to her life, and she’d seemed eager to include him in it.
It was good to know Célie had friends, that they were friends with whom she had fun, that she’d been thriving without him. He’d told her the truth when he said he was glad to know that.
But it made him feel a little precarious. Like—if she could do so well for herself without him there, what exactly was his role in her happiness?
Did he get to have one?
He thought of the apartment and smiled at the image of her face lighting up as she looked at that view of her park. That would make her happier. She’d love it so much.
“So is there anything—?” The blonde let her question trail off into a wiggle of her finger between Célie and Joss. “Or—?” Another wiggle, this time toward herself, with a teasing lift of her eyebrows. The blonde woman looked as if she could have been a Bond girl, with those high cheekbones and that tough leather, looks that apparently made her pretty confident about flirting with men.
Célie stiffened, glaring at her friend. “He’s with me.”
A grin escaped Joss, and he quickly suppressed it, rubbing his fist against the picnic blanket. You tell her, Célie. Fight for me. I’m with you.
With Célie. He took a deep breath, trying to get used to being with her. Her world was so alien to him now.
Happiness spilled across the quay around them in careless abandon. People laughed and talked and danced as if happiness was some basic human right and not some miracle conjunction of space and time. Lights from the opposite bank of the Seine stretched across the darkening water toward them, as if those lights desperately wanted to reach the dancers and shake some sense into them. On the tip of the ?le Saint-Louis halfway across the trembling water, a smaller, saner group of people gathered, the kind of people who said: That looks fun, but let’s keep a safe distance. If trouble starts, I’d rather be on the other side of the water from it.
Masses of people were tempting targets.
Happy people, on the Seine, Notre-Dame glowing just down the river. You’d think a terrorist attack had never occurred on French soil, the way these people acted. That their government didn’t have men like him fighting extremist armies right this second, factions that had more than proven their willingness to strike wherever it hurt the most, as well as their belief that no one in Western Europe was innocent, not civilians, not women, not children, and certainly not smugly happy people dancing on the edge of the Seine just beside one of the great symbols of European culture and achievement and in the heart of one of the most powerfully emblematic cities in the world.
Nobody was even controlling the damn perimeter, checking the bags of those who joined the laughing, happy crowd of dancers and observers.
It was all Joss could do not to jump to his feet and start patrolling the area, and he missed the feel of a FAMAS under his hand like an itch of panic.
Anyone could be carrying a bomb, or a gun. That man in his young twenties approaching them right now, for example, with a backpack on his shoulder and a leather jacket still zipped despite the warm summer evening. Joss surged to his feet as the younger man reached toward his backpack—and caught himself as the greetings from Célie’s friends rang out.
Ah. Yes. The young man was pulling out baguettes and wine, kneeling on the edge of the picnic blanket now, unzipping his leather jacket which he’d almost certainly been wearing because he’d gotten here on a motorcycle or moped like Célie.
Joss took a deep breath.
“Who is he?” he heard someone else ask Célie. A girl with loose black curls and a bronze tone to her skin. “He looks like he’s CRS or something.”
Ouch, really? The national police force was less than popular among those of them who had grown up en banlieue. Also, these days, he liked the Gendarmes much better, after being in a couple of training courses at their facilities, and they and the Legion cooperated well together, but … well, no offense, but one Legionnaire could eat five CRS for breakfast and still be hungry.