All for You (Paris Nights #1)(51)
Joss rubbed his thumb over the battered edge of the folded postcard in his wallet. Most of those cheerful postcards Célie had sent him the first six months he kept safe above his bunk, but he’d had to carry one with him. He’d chosen this one: We miss you here, but I know you can do it! You can do anything. Bisous. Célie. With a heart over the I in her name.
Uniforms mixed with all the scantily clad tourists in the bar around him. Back from Opération Serval and a successful nighttime drop over Timbuktu, the 2e REP was pretty full of itself. Back, covered in glory, by blue seas, where women wore bikinis, and no one was shooting at them.
Oh, yeah, those bikinis. Even in the bar, some of the women had only put on skirts with their bikini tops. They’d come to Calvi for one reason, those women, and the bar was full of exactly what they wanted: Legionnaires.
Joss pressed down harder on the edge of his postcard.
“That one’s for you.” Jefe shoved him in the ribs with his elbow. “She can’t take her eyes off you.”
Joss flicked a glance at the pretty blonde in a tight white skirt and lace-edged cami. No. That lace was the edge of her bra peeking over. Hell. “I’ve got a girl,” he said flatly. Even if she’d stopped sending him postcards a year ago. He still had her. He did.
Jefe snorted. “Trust me, she’s found some other guy by now. Come on. I’ll take the redhead.”
Joss’s glance flicked to the redhead, and his heart stopped. Curves and athleticism, perky nose, braid down her back … she turned her head.
He flattened. Not Célie. Of course not. What would she be doing in Corsica? Chasing him?
Ruthlessly, he crushed down that wish. First, he proved himself, that he could, indeed, do anything.
Then he got to go after his next goal, Célie. One goal at a time. Like a horse with blinders on, one of his instructors had told them during the six weeks in the green hell of jungle warfare training. Keep focused on your one objective. Nothing else counts. Certainly not how much it hurts.
But when morale was at its lowest, when a man was exhausted and bloodied and almost beaten, he always needed a thought, a dream, to save him. And Célie—she was such a bright, glowing dream. She shone through everything.
As long as he didn’t, himself, tarnish her.
“I’ve got a girl,” Joss said again.
The other men lounging at the table groaned. “Not that again.” They all agreed with Jefe on this one. From Noah, with that geeky face of his and angular body that made him look like a surprisingly tanned hacker until he started moving, to Michael, whose altar boy eyes made him look as if he’d accidentally woken up in the wrong story, to Victor, the Ukrainian with whom Joss butted heads constantly—all of them thought he was crazy.
Beside him, Victor snorted. Victor had saved his life more than once, and Joss had saved his, but he still had a hard time not hitting the Ukrainian most days. “That girl you never go see on leave?”
“Fuck you.” No sense wasting syllables on it’s none of your business when two would do. Not with Victor.
Victor laughed. “The real question is who’s f*cking her?”
Joss shoved his chair back and shot to his feet. But before he could start a fight, their adjudant, Valdez, was there, gripping Joss’s shoulder, making a calm-down-boy gesture of his hand toward Victor. Valdez tended to treat them all like cute and poorly behaved puppies—an attitude that worked surprisingly well on a band of ferocious wolves—and tonight was his send-off. Fifteen years and now he was done. He’d even told them his real name out there in the world, so they could look him up: Delesvaux. He’d promised to cook them meals that would make them cry, if they came to see him. Joss believed it. The man always cooked them a Christmas dinner that really had made some of the men cry.
A shift in the atmosphere, and Captain Fontaine was suddenly there. He’d been sitting at the bar, fending off or encouraging a pretty brunette—hard to tell sometimes with Captain Fontaine—but whatever else he might be doing, Captain Fontaine always looked after his men. He had the scars to prove it, too, and the fine lines of fatigue around his eyes despite the energy in his body even in repose. Scoured by sand and sun, until all of him, sand and skin, were that same faded brown. You could always tell a Legionnaire by the way he carried himself, tough as nylon rope but rough around the edges like hemp.
“Bar full of tourists, mostly women,” Delesvaux told Joss, in that lazy, easy-boy tone he did so well, even in the midst of a firefight. “Not the send-off I’m looking for. Come on, guys, reassure me that you’re going to survive without me.”
“Cool it,” Fontaine told Victor flatly. He, too, knew better than to waste syllables with Victor.
Victor subsided. One thing they had all learned fast was not to mess with Captain Fontaine. Unlike some of those namby pants they sent over as officers from the regular Army or fresh out of Saint-Cyr, Fontaine had worked his way up to captain from that same bare room of what-the-hell-did-I-just-do engagés volontaires that Joss and Victor and all the others had passed through. Joss knew almost nothing about Fontaine’s past before that or his real name, per the usual Legionnaire silence on that subject, but he did know that the man who called himself Fontaine came from the south of France—that bouncing, drawling accent, strong on the N’s, made it obvious—that he had a lot of cousins in a family who worked in some kind of agriculture, and that once, after a nasty week in the Uzbin Valley, when they’d lost two of their men to f*cking friendly fire because of a radio malfunction, Fontaine had actually gotten drunk, and drunk enough he’d gone along with the rest of them to get a tattoo. Exactly the kind of thing Legionnaires liked to do to assert themselves in a country where both alcohol and tattoos were illegal, at least for locals. Only instead of “Legio Patria Nostra” or “Honneur, Fidélité” or “March ou crève” or even the names of the dead, like most men got in those circumstances, Fontaine had gotten, of all things, a small rose.