All for You (Paris Nights #1)(65)

“They’re, like, this big.” Dom brought his hand to a couple of centimeters below his shoulder. “And yet they want to go and trust a man just the way he is. That’s so stupid.”

Joss gave that some thought. “Not with me it isn’t,” he realized slowly. “Célie can trust me.”

The moment of détente was broken. Dom’s jaw set. “You seem very sure of that.”

Joss nodded.

“You already hurt her once,” Dom said grimly. “You’re so sure you won’t do it again?”

Joss hesitated. “I wouldn’t do it on purpose. But … doesn’t life hurt sometimes?” He’d gone through a shit-hell of pain in the Legion. And … Jaime Corey had talked about retirement and taking care of his family, and didn’t creating a family hurt the hell out of the woman creating it, for example? His mind shied away from thoughts of childbirth, though, before he could break out in a cold sweat.

Dom’s expression grew more menacing. “What hurts are you planning to inflict on her?”

Joss put a hand to his stomach. “Look, can we not keep harping on the childbirth thing right now? I’m only twenty-six!”

Dom blinked. And then that menacing expression disappeared before the flash of a grin, quickly contained. “You, ah … got something on your mind?”

Joss rubbed his abs. “No,” he said firmly. “I don’t. This is all very premature. Célie’s only twenty-three.”

Dom’s grin escaped again, and he firmly bit it back in favor of a menacing glare. “I meant did you plan to dump her and break her heart again?”

“I didn’t mean to do it the first time,” Joss said between his teeth. “I thought—it was just a teenage crush! I didn’t know she…” … would keep existing when I wasn’t there, and that I would make such a hole in that existence. “I was stupid, okay?”

“How smart are you now?”

“Now,” Joss said flatly, “I’m the man I need to be. To be worth her.”

Dom stared at him. “What, you think your job is done? At twenty-six? That you don’t have any growing left to do, to be as big as she needs?”

Joss hesitated.

“If you’re not going to dump her, you’re asking her to commit her f*cking life to you! And you don’t think that will require you to get any better, ever? Or maybe even day by day?”

Joss stared at him. He rubbed the buzzed hair at the back of his head, trying to think. “I—”

“Grow the f*ck up!” Dom said.

Grow up? After all the things he’d done to become a man?

Joss’s teeth bared. It took a lot to push him to rage. In the first months of Legion training, they tried to push every button a man could possibly have, and that man had to learn how not to break for it. But this attack on his potential worthiness of Célie surged rage all through him. “I know I’ll always have to work to be the best for her! I like always striving to be my best.”

Dom scowled at him, but that scowl slowly eased. “You might have to do something else for her besides strive to be your best,” he said slowly, as if he was trying to digest his own words even as he produced them. “You might have to adapt to what she needs from you. Which might be something different.”

Joss drew back in visceral rejection. “Something less than my best?”

“Something … different,” Dom said slowly. He looked down at that ring on his finger, eyebrows drawn together.

Joss frowned, disturbed in ways he couldn’t explain. As if parts of him he’d thought he’d made solid were melting under a sneak attack of rain.


“Talk to her,” Dom said. “See what she says she needs from you.” He rubbed the ring on his finger.

Oh, crap. Talk to her. What if she said what she needed wasn’t what Joss knew how to give?

“You ever had sex with Célie?” Joss challenged abruptly.

“What?” Dom jerked back, his expression crunching as if Joss had asked if he’d eaten worms. “No. She works for me, merde. What the hell?”

“You wanted to, though, didn’t you?”

Dom shook his head. “Trust me, I didn’t go out with women like her before I met Jaime. She’s more like a … I don’t know … a kid sister? A really impudent kid sister.” He looked grumpy. “A brat of a kid sister.”

Joss’s fists tightened. “I was her big brother. Not you.”

“Well, that would make you pretty f*cking incestuous, wouldn’t it? You’re not her big brother when you can’t even look at her without thinking about sex. When you’ve got it so bad you think every other man must obsess the same way. I’ll give you credit for trying to do the honorable thing by her, though.” An odd expression crossed Dom’s face. “Honor … and fidelity,” he said thoughtfully.

Honneur, fidélité. Just the reference to the Legion motto tightened Joss’s belly, as if he’d heard a call to arms.

“Well, hell,” Dom said slowly. “You really are a damn knight, aren’t you? That’s why you went into the Legion. It spoke to everything you were.”

Everything he wanted to be, Joss would have said, rather than what he already was back then, but before he could argue, the doors on the other side of the street slid open, and Célie ran straight toward them without even glancing for traffic.