All for You (Paris Nights #1)(57)

He gave himself up to her.

And it was better than any fantasy he’d ever had.

It was worth the wait.





Chapter 18


“Célie?”

She started, tightening her arms around her knees, looking up at Joss as he came up onto his elbow in her bed.

“Célie, what are you doing?”

“Nothing.” She kneaded her upper arms, feeling embarrassed and stupid. “I thought you were asleep.” He’d seemed to be, when she came back from the bathroom and suddenly found herself too scared to climb back into the bed.

Joss stretched out a hand from the low bed to graze callused fingertips over her folded arms, gently. “I was faking it. Harder to kick a man out if you think he’s asleep.”

“I know,” she said and winced. She probably shouldn’t have said that. But she did know. The first time she had tried to be normal, to move along and have a healthy, happy love life and forget her stupid teenage crush, the guy had fallen asleep. She’d hated it, having him there in her bed all night. The whole thing had been awful.

“Damn you,” she muttered.

Joss pulled his hand back, his expression closing.

“You made me try all this out on other men! Try and try to make it work and not really understand why it didn’t work or why it always left me feeling like I had this big hole in my soul. You made me feel like there was something wrong with me! And all the time it was you!”

“Célie—”

“I needed you.” She wanted to pound his chest in a flurry of stupid Scarlett O’Hara fists. “It was supposed to be with you.” Wanted him to pull her into his chest while she pounded on it, like Rhett did, taking the blows and making it right.

“I loved you.” She covered her eyes with her hands. “Damn you, Joss. Couldn’t you have at least told me before you left that you wanted me to wait?”

“No,” he said flatly, obdurately, and she grabbed the spare pillow, crushing it between her knees and her face, and smothered another scream in it.

“I could ask you to wait for the man I am now,” he said, “if I needed to be gone again.”

She whipped her head up, shocked through with fear. “Joss, don’t—”

“But I couldn’t ask you to wait for the man I was then.”

Her hands tightened on the pillow until she couldn’t stand how damn yielding the thing was anymore and slammed it against the bed. Stupid, wimpy pillow. She needed a three-kilo pack of chocolate to slam right about now. She needed something hard, that made noise, that she could beat to smithereens. “I’m going to hit you, Joss. I swear I’m going to hit you.”

“I’d prefer it. Over the words. But I suppose that’s not fair, since you can’t really hurt me with your fists, to ask you to use the thing you do the least damage with, instead of your strongest weapon.”

Oh. Did her words hurt that much? She bit at her lip, unhappy. “I’d smack my head against yours instead, except it wouldn’t work. I’d break my head open on you, and your skull would just stay there, as stubborn and unyielding as ever. It drives me mad.”

He gazed at her a moment, and then he lay on his side amid the sheets again. Maybe he was trying to make himself look yielding. It didn’t work at all. It did make him look sexy, though, that hard body, brown from so much sun, the white sheet pulled across his hips and otherwise totally naked. Hers. In her bed.

“Damn you, Joss,” she said weakly. She couldn’t hit a man lying down. She could only touch him. Stroke him. Feel him.

Curl up next to him, that heat she had always dreamed of in her bed, and fall asleep, and not have to hide between her bed and the wall, not even in the darkest hours before dawn.

Until he disappeared again.

“I’m sorry about the words.” She bent her head. “I just—” She broke off, unable to explain better than she already had.

“I’m sorry about the nights you curled up on the floor between your wall and your bed. I’m sorry about the other men. It’s okay about the words, Célie. If you didn’t care about me, they’d never come out of you that way.”


“Joss.” Célie clutched her knees. Her eyes tracked over him, up to his eyes watching her in the low, warm lamplight. She’d bought that lamp and that bulb so that she could have something that would gently diffuse the darkness, if a woman couldn’t stand it anymore at three in the morning. She’d bought a night-light first, one that cast stars on the ceiling, but gazing at them, she’d imagined Joss out under some Afghanistan sky, and she’d started to cry.

She sighed that memory out, very slowly, and let herself focus just on him. The him he was now. That powerful body, the rugged strength and ability to do anything that he’d forged … for her.

“You did something incredible.” She touched his chest, carefully, trying to think past fear to concentrate on just what a precious treasure had been offered to her. Her hand slipped to his arm and stroked over the words Honneur, fidélité. “Utterly amazing. I’m proud of you. I’m sorry to keep making it all about me.”

“Well, it was all about you,” he started, and she closed her eyes tight and fisted her hand against his chest.