All for You (Paris Nights #1)(64)

As if he would be there forever.

A very tricky, treacherous thing for him to do. She scowled at the ganache. But then she remembered his kiss good-bye that morning, and the scowl softened so as to be ready for more kissing. I would wait more than five years for you.

“I think they might be roses!” Amand called again across the whole damn laboratoire.

Heat trembled across her cheeks. No one in her whole life had ever brought her flowers. Certainly Joss hadn’t. It would totally have blown his cover as her big brother’s friend.

And roses?

He had brought her roses?

Across from her, Zoe gave her an amused-librarian look over her glasses and set a bowl of praliné on the scale. Célie looked down. In the chocolate Célie was supposed to be tempering, some idiot had written Joss and signed it with a graceful heart.

She sucked the chocolate off her guilty finger, flushing hot, and quickly scraped up the rest of the chocolate and finished the tempering. Good thing this chocolate was just for a small test batch and not for customers.

When she was ready to go, she hesitated over the selection of chocolates loose on the wire racks, unable to think which nine to choose for him. Not the bitter dark. Her fingertips flicked it away uneasily. There was the new idea she’d played with today, with just this hint of heat blushing through it so that the bite of it lingered on one’s tongue as the chocolate melted. She and Dom had had an argument about it—whether anyone wanted anything but the chocolate flavor to linger on his tongue.

Or there was this ridiculous soft, sweet one, that had made Dom roll his eyes and object to having it in his cases, this softest, sweetest chocolate that didn’t have a tough darkness in its entire chocolate being, an inexplicable experiment of hers that day …

She finally put them side by side, to trick the palate—keep it guessing, unable to figure out what was coming next.

But then, she added the ones she knew already to be his favorites—the mint and the coffee and the plain dark, but not the extra bitter dark. She left that one on the wire rack.

“Uh-oh,” Zoe said.

“Oh, no,” Amand said.

“Where’s Jaime?” Zoe asked.

Célie lunged back to the window. Dom was crossing the street. Joss straightened away from the wall at his approach, his hands loose and easy, his body ready for action. “Oh, crap,” Célie said. And Jaime wasn’t here. “Damn it, that can’t be good.”

She spun to run out of the laboratoire.

***

Joss felt a kick of hungry pleasure when he saw Dom Richard crossing the street to him, big and dark. That eagerness for aggressive action was immediately followed by resignation.

It was going to be up to him not to fight that bastard, wasn’t it? To use the control and discipline and self-confidence he had developed in five years in one of the most elite regiments in the world to just refuse the fight.

Too many things on the line—Célie’s job, his own new position and all it meant for them.

Damn. Sometimes it seemed as if a man had to spend his whole damn life exercising self-control over his aggressive urges.

The big, black-haired man stopped with a couple of meters still between them, clearly feeling that same frustrated buck of his aggressive tendencies against his own self-control. “You took a job with my wife?”

Joss’s fingertips curled restlessly into his palms. This damn bastard had taken his place as Célie’s hero. “If you want a woman to be your wife, I’m pretty sure you have to marry her. Little tip I learned from Célie last night.”

Dom glared at him.

Joss smiled. “If you have the nerve.”

Dom’s eyes narrowed. “You are criticizing me for not having the nerve to go after the woman I want?”

Joss’s smile pressed out. “You know, I’m getting pretty damn sick of having five years in the Foreign Legion dismissed as lack of nerve. I went after the woman I want. It just took me a while to get up to the standard I wanted for her.”

The aggression eased unexpectedly out of Dom’s stance. “They don’t really get that, do they?” Dom glanced at the ring on his left hand. Joss couldn’t quite figure that ring out. It looked like a wedding ring to him, but the two were only engaged? “That we might want to make sure we’re worth them, before we ask for them.”


Joss winced at the thought of trying to articulate that again to Célie and about what her reaction would be if he did. “God, it pisses them off,” he muttered, heartfelt.

For a second, the two men exchanged a glance of complete understanding. That glance didn’t feel so weird to Joss, after five years with tough men who fought each other when their great and incompatible prides clashed, but who fought side by side more often, and then went and played rugby to let off steam. But he had the impression that Dom found that moment of male understanding far more difficult to process.

Joss had known men like that, too, though. Men who had good reasons for never trusting other men near them, and who, when they came into the Legion, had to overcome their hostility toward other powerful males in order to form a unit.

“Women are funny,” Dom said uneasily. “They don’t really make that much sense.”

Joss kept his lips sealed. No one was trapping him into saying anything sexist that Célie might later be pissed off about. No way.