All for You (Paris Nights #1)(52)

He’d been pissed as hell the next day when he realized what he’d done, too. But he’d never had it removed. From time to time, when he was in a T-shirt, that olive green would slide up hard biceps and the rose would peek out again, surreal in that tough, harsh world of fighting men.

Maybe that rose was his own postcard, his own dream of another life. A woman he wished upon, like a star.

Joss had gotten “Honneur, Fidélité.”

“I’ve got a girl,” Joss told them all for the third time. “And just because you don’t doesn’t mean you get to f*ck with me about mine.”

Because when it came down to it, that was why they messed with him about this: jealousy. Because Joss had a girl he could carry with him back into whatever hell they got sent to. In dust and mud and falling mortar shells, she smiled at him, she told him he could do anything.

And all the others had to carry them through the same thing was the memory of their last f*ck above a bar.

***

The pigeon gave Joss a disgusted look at his paucity with crumbs and flew off to find a park. The Eiffel Tower started to sparkle.

He lifted his head and looked at it. That was kind of annoying. Why did it do that? Sparkle like that. He’d heard about it, of course, but he couldn’t remember ever seeing it before that evening on the bridge with Célie. Oh, yeah, once, he and Ludo and some other guys had hung out at Trocadéro getting drunk and pretending Paris was theirs until they missed the last RER home. It had been a long, cold night, waiting for the line to start running again at dawn, and the Eiffel Tower had gone black at one a.m., leaving them to endure those five bleak hours with no sparkles. Luring them in and leaving them out in the cold. Suckers.

But now, at a distance, the sparkling was much smaller.

It kind of reminded him of Célie, actually. That vibrancy she had, that resilient energy, that sparkle of toughness she let nothing extinguish. Not rain or cold or … anything really.

God damn it, he wanted to kill somebody. Anybody who had ever gotten his hands on that sparkle of hers.

He supposed he should be grateful that the jerks hadn’t been worth her—if anyone had, she’d still be with him and not letting Joss up to her apartment instead—but it just enraged him further, to imagine some bastard who didn’t deserve her getting his hands on her. Some lazy jerk who didn’t even take her walking on the Seine.

Joss had done five years in the Foreign Legion, damn it, to deserve her, and meanwhile there were pieces of shit who thought they deserved to touch her just because, what, they existed? Assholes.

Fucking bastards.

It’s your own fault.

Yeah, but that was what you couldn’t start doing, as a paratrooper in the Foreign Legion: you couldn’t start calling all you were killing yourself to accomplish a fault, a mistake, a decision that would ruin your life. You had to have all your courage, all your strength, all your belief in your goals, all the time.


It was a funny thing. He could climb a cliff barehanded with fifty kilos on his back. He could march two hundred kilometers over steep, mountainous terrain in four days or run thirty kilometers in under three hours, with a similar weight. Drop him off with only a handful of men in enemy territory, and it was the enemy who should be afraid.

Yes, he could take hurt.

Yes, he could persist.

Yes, he could crawl through a field of barbed wire for her.

But she wasn’t hitting him, no matter how much she said she wanted to.

She wasn’t asking him to crawl.

So he had to learn new skills.

He started to make his way down the steep slant of the zinc roof to her window and then remembered—he still needed to get some damn condoms. He wasn’t using that other bastard’s. The trapdoor onto the roof was locked, so he climbed down the inside, courtyard walls—helped drain some energy off—and let himself back out onto the street, walking down it until he came to the nearest white dispenser on the wall of a building and buying several. Then he realized he hadn’t paid enough attention to her damn code, so he couldn’t get back inside to the stairs or the courtyard. He checked the street. Kind of occupied but no police. Passersby probably wouldn’t assume he was a thief at least, with this many people around.

He waved to a few people to make them believe he was doing some authorized stunt, and then just climbed back up the building to her little railing. At least it was entertainment. The lack of physical challenge in this city was making all his muscles frantic under his skin.

Be kind of fun to get in a fight with the police, to be honest, but since he was out of the Legion now, they might actually be able to arrest him, instead of just sending him back to his Colonel to get reamed out, put on some god-awful corvée duty, and then given a suspended sentence because the Colonel was secretly smug at how his police-defying wild Legionnaires enhanced the Legion reputation.

The casement window was still open—she hadn’t locked him out at least—but for a second he thought Célie herself was gone.

Then he spotted her, curled up between her bed and the wall, her arms wrapped around herself as if she was trying to turn into a turtle and shrink into a shell.

Hell.

He swung into the room, and she sprang up, forgetting she still wore only her bra and leather pants, her hands going to her hips. “You have one hell of a nerve.”

“I know.” He stripped off his own T-shirt so they matched.