All for You (Paris Nights #1)(66)

Joss jerked spasmodically toward her, his heart slamming, and then caught himself. Fuck, he needed to get over that reaction.

He found Dom giving him an odd look, as he took a deep breath and shoved the flowers behind his back before she spotted them. “No snipers here,” Dom said quietly. “She’s been safe.”

Right. Safe with Dominique Richard. He struggled with it, his fist clenching on the roses behind his back. But … she really was happy. Safe. He really did owe that to the fact that Dom Richard had been a good guy. To the fact that when Joss, at twenty-one, had been clueless as to the effects his actions might have on Célie, at least one other man in the world had been decent and honorable, too.

“Thanks,” he said suddenly, low. “Thanks for that.”

Dom took his own long breath, releasing it slowly out. “So you’ll help keep my wife safe for me, too, then, is that it?”

“Yeah,” Joss said quietly. “I will.”

The two men faced each other.

“Although that thing about calling her your wife will work better if you actually marry her,” Joss couldn’t resist adding as he lifted his hand.

“Stop!” Célie yelled, throwing herself toward the space between them, just as their hands met. She bounced against the solid clasp of their hands. “Don’t—fight.” She grabbed both their arms, her words fumbling as she looked down at their steady grip. She looked back up, confused. “Are you two fighting?”

“Just working some things out.” Joss loosed Dom’s hand.

Dom raised his eyebrow at Célie. “What were you going to do to stop us if we were? Stamp your foot?”

Célie stuck her tongue out at him. “Take a picture and send it to Jaime.”

Dom’s eyes narrowed. “Somebody wants to lose her day off tomorrow, doesn’t she?”

“Somebody wants me to form a union   and organize a strike.”

Dom sighed and gazed heavenward a moment, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like, “Why me?”

Célie grinned, and he rolled his eyes and stomped back toward the shop, grumbling.

***

Célie turned toward Joss, her grin fading slowly before solemnity. She stared up at him, again stuck in that choice—between kisses on each cheek, as if he was still the big brother-friend who looked after her, and a kiss on the lips, and all that meant.

“Célie,” he said quietly, and her name shivered through her. He had a way of saying it as if it encapsulated her whole existence and reaffirmed it.

Which was why life hurt so much when that affirmation disappeared and you had to remember how to affirm yourself.

“Joss,” she said defiantly. She’d like to see his name from her lips have as much power over him.

Oh, wait. Wasn’t she the first person to say it in five years? The person he had sought out to be the first to say it? Maybe it did have power over him.


“What was that all about?” she demanded. “You and Dom?”

He shook his head and shrugged a little. “Just working a few things out,” he repeated. Joss’s communication skills drove her completely nuts sometimes.

Like that evening when he had kissed her good-bye very slowly on each cheek, four times instead of two, and then stood a long time looking down at her, and lifted his hand to cup her cheek, and tugged her hair. And she’d thought that expression in his eyes meant he was falling for her, waking up to the idea of her as something more than a friend, and she’d gone to sleep hugging herself in hopeful excitement. And the next morning, she found out it was instead his way of saying, Good-bye, I’m off to join the Foreign Legion.

He lifted a hand and rubbed a firm thumb over her cheek, then up over her eyebrow. His thumb left a path of heat over her skin and woke all the other heat trails he had left on her body the night before, until she felt as if an infrared camera would pick out the pattern of his hands on her. He brought his thumb to his mouth and slowly sucked it, his eyes holding hers. Her brain melted. “What’s the flavor of that chocolate, Célie? The chocolate that gets stuck on your skin?”

“It’s—it’s probably—it—that is, it might be—” What had she been working on today?

He bent his head and brought his lips to just under the curve of her jaw, parting them to suck gently and thoroughly.

Her lips fumbled and stopped working. Her head fell back.

He smiled, rubbing the moist spot on her throat with his thumb as he lifted his head. “I think it tastes a little bit like you. Hot. Spicy. Sweet.”

She stared up at him, blind to everything but the green in his eyes and the lingering sensation of his lips sucking her skin.

His thumb trailed over her chin. “You know how I’m always the quiet one, and you’re always the one who talks? You don’t know how much I like flipping that around, just by doing this.”

She swallowed, and his palm rode gently against the motion of her throat.

“I brought you something.” He pulled his hand out from behind his back to show the sweetest, most beautiful bouquet of roses—soft pink and variegated red and white, carefully arranged by one of the many expert florists who filled the Paris streets. “You can have it if you give me a kiss, like my girlfriend. Remember how we’re dating?”