All for You (Paris Nights #1)(43)

She couldn’t relax. Her stomach tightened, and her heart started to beat too hard. It was too romantic. It was too dependent on him. Bad enough taking him to the ?le de la Cité just toward sunset, bad enough taking him to her favorite park, but the Seine at night …

It just slapped its romance down and slayed you with it.

Utter obliteration of a woman’s heart and strength and sense.

As they passed the islands and continued toward the Louvre, the groups hanging out drumming or drinking beers or playing some card game thinned out and quieted. Joss didn’t really lose his alertness, but some of the tension in him seemed to quiet. His breathing slowed and deepened.

Her hand tightened on his. “Joss. Why didn’t you tell me?”

His eyebrows knit, and he gazed down the length of the Seine as if trying to interpret a particularly cryptic crystal ball. “I … couldn’t. I had to do it first, before I could brag about it. If I told you I was going to do it, and then failed and didn’t … what would that make me? To you?”

She was silent a second, adjusting to his subject of conversation. “A … young man who had lots of dreams and realized some of them were crazy? After talking them over with the girl he claims he liked?”

He frowned. “I need to teach you to have higher standards for men.”

That annoyed her so much. She scowled, and her hand flexed for freedom, but he firmed his hold, not wanting to let go. “I meant why didn’t you tell me just now? That it was hard on you, being in a crowd like that?”

“I did,” Joss said, confused.

“I had to drag it out of you! After we’d already been there an hour! Why didn’t you just tell me, when you saw what it was like?”

His jaw hardened in that obdurate way. “First of all, I didn’t realize immediately. And then I thought I’d manage to get over it. There was no sense ruining your evening from my…” He paused, his lips curling as he tried to force a word out: “Failure.” From his expression, he was trying to swallow something disgusting and shameful, even to say it.

Célie was silent a moment. “You know what I do with my failures?”

He looked at her, his expression gone very neutral again.

“The chocolates that don’t come out perfect enough, because we get a batch a tad wrong? I send them home with any of the team who wants to share them with their family. Sometimes, we make little packets of two each that we keep under the counter, and whenever any kid looks wistful because his mom tells him the chocolates are too expensive, we slip one to him. Or if there’s a big batch, we give them to schools in some of the poorer areas. We share them with the soup kitchens or with homeless people on the street. And they make everyone happy. Everyone appreciates it very much. Because we still gave them something that was a hundred times better than anything else they could have had.”

Joss’s lips tightened. God, his jaw was stubborn. “Merci. If I ever want to treat you like a homeless person who should be grateful for whatever you can get, I’ll let you know.”

“Sometimes,” Célie muttered, “I would like to beat my head against your chest as if it was a damn brick wall.”

He shrugged, not letting go of her hand. “Okay.”

Which just made the urge more intense somehow. “You don’t listen to me, Joss.”

He gave her a puzzled glance. “I’m listening to you right now, Célie.”

“You don’t let me affect you. You just dismiss what I say and do your own thing.”

Damn it all.

They passed a couple sitting on a bench together, the young man’s arm around the young woman, his hand on her chin, coaxing her face up to his, and Célie wanted to yell at the other woman: Are you out of your mind to be out here on a night like this? Run! Run the other way! A man could do anything to your heart, if you hand it to him on the Seine at night.

Women were so reckless. They didn’t stand up for their own hearts at all. It made Célie want to grab them and thump her head against theirs to try to knock some sense from her brain to theirs. Just woman up, darn it. Quit expecting everyone else to take care of you instead of doing it yourself.

But here Célie’s own hand was, held by the very man who had hurt her heart the most in her life. Danger was everywhere—in the glow of the bridges against the dark water, in the sparkle of the Eiffel Tower there in the distance, in the locks of lovers weighing down the Pont des Arts and in their keys lurking below the gold-gilded black surface of the water, clogging the river. Stubborn, self-entitled lovers, convinced it was more important to declare their love to the world through a lock on a bridge than to protect a world heritage.


Also oblivious lovers—blind to the fact that regularly, the city removed the grids on the bridge and replaced them with new ones, tossing all those old locks for scrap.

Every brain cell Célie had kept noting the danger to her, the irony of reality.

And yet she couldn’t quite get herself to flex her hand free.

Because his strong, callused hand felt as if hers had found the safe place it had always longed for.

As if she could lower her guard and let him take that guard duty up.

She set her jaw, turning her head away a little. So much bullshit, her heart could come up with. It had done it before, where he was concerned.