All for You (Paris Nights #1)(63)

“For a starting salary, we were looking at …” Jaime said, and Joss went blank at the figure she named.

So that was why billionaires always got what they wanted. He’d be earning more in a month than he ever had in a whole year as a Legionnaire or a beginning mechanic in a poor suburb of Paris.

“Plus, bonuses and benefits, of course. Besides the benefits the French government requires we give here, there’s a great educational benefit—all tuition paid for your kids at any accredited university in the U.S.”

That was a weird benefit. He could pay for a complete education in France with only two weeks of the salary she had just named.

“And you’re vested after only a year in your stock options, and then we’ll contribute the equivalent of 13.6 percent of your salary into your private retirement funds as long as you put in three percent, and you get to keep that, no matter when you leave.”

Joss stared at her. “I don’t, ah, have kids.” Good lord, retirement? He wanted to protest that he was only twenty-six, that he couldn’t think that far ahead yet—that part of his brain hadn’t turned on. And yet suddenly his own solidity struck him—that he’d become a man, someone who could raise kids, who could see them through to a successful adulthood and provide them an education, and … he’d been hit by some pretty hard blows in the past five years, but this one took a minute to absorb. Struck by himself, the sheer mass of who he was now.

He’d gone into the Legion to create a much greater worth out of himself.

Apparently that had been successful.

What in the world did a man do with that much money? Ten times what he’d ever earned before. Take Célie on a nice trip somewhere she’d been dreaming of going? What else?

A motorcycle. A really nice motorcycle. Something he could soup up and customize and … his palms itched with the desire to feel the hand grips.

“Remember, this is just a starting salary,” Jaime said. “But I could go ten percent higher.”

Joss didn’t blink. Damn, but that Legionnaire training in a neutral expression was coming in handy. Apparently she’d misread his blank face as being unimpressed by the salary offer.

“Another ten percent,” he said thoughtfully. “If you can push it to twenty, I think I might be tempted.”

Jaime gazed at him a moment. And smiled again. “You know, you’re going to do all right for yourself, Joss. And for your family.”

He didn’t have a family, he almost pointed out again. But he didn’t say it, because … it settled in him solid and centered, that he was the very opposite of a loser, now. He’d turned around his entire life and the lives of anyone in his care. He could even imagine how a loft bed would fit in that second room in the new apartment to maximize the kid’s play space. He could kind of even imagine what a kid might look like, with Célie’s brown eyes and vivid smile and …

Whoa. This was getting scary.

“Twenty it is,” Jaime said, and he kept his expression neutrally unimpressed, as if they were talking about the bare minimum a man like him could be expected to work for.

Jaime’s smile deepened. “I should have made you negotiate salary with my dad or my sister. They’re better at this game than I am.”

“It’s a game?” A man’s salary? His life? “I might find being involved with billionaires a little bit challenging sometimes.”

Jaime smiled wryly. “Don’t worry, I find it challenging, too.”





Chapter 20


“He’s got flowers,” Zoe hissed, poking Célie in the ribs. With her vintage black cat’s-eye glasses and her ruler-straight brown hair pulled back in a ruthlessly smooth bun, Zoe looked as if she should be shushing people in a library, not mocking her chef chocolatier. Either looks were very deceiving, or Célie’s and Amand’s irreverence had worn off on her far too quickly. “No, Célie, I swear.”

“He does,” Amand called from where he was stirring caramel. “I can see them from here.”

Célie abandoned the chocolate test batch she was tempering on the marble counter to peek through the window.

“See?” Zoe pointed. “He’s trying to hide them, but you can see a couple peek out by his hips.”

“I’ve got a good angle on them from here,” Amand called, his loud voice mercilessly exposing Célie’s private life to the whole laboratoire. Which, fine, might very well be payback for all the ways she had twitted Dom and Amand and everyone else about their dating lives, but still …

Okay, fine, she liked it. But it made her blush.


She hugged herself, entirely baffled by how much happiness kept surging up in her. What did she do with it all? She’d always thought of herself as a happy person—well, a tough happy person who could wear black leather and cut aggressively through Paris traffic on the back of a … not-pink moped—but this happiness was so, so … bubbly. It was like being a bottle of champagne.

Dreams fizzed when they were coming true.

She turned back to her chocolate before she had to start the tempering all over. Joss would have to wait.

It drove her completely bonkers to wait. She paced, she bounced, she fidgeted. But Joss always stood patiently for her.