All for You (Paris Nights #1)(7)

Well. Mostly quit.

“He’s still out there?” Célie said, and repeating the words out loud made them true, made her heart beat harder, as if she was going to be sick. He didn’t just leave? Again. “Dom, don’t go get in a fight.”

Joss had left her to go join the Foreign Fucking Legion, so by now, he was probably one of those people who knew how to kill others with his left pinky finger.

She didn’t want either one of them to get hurt.

“I’ll go talk to him,” she said sullenly. She’d been so happy. And here, bam, let’s just shatter that like crystal.

“Why don’t you tell me a little bit more about what’s going on with this guy, first?” Jaime asked, pulling her outside the glass doors to the top of the steps so they could tuck themselves into some illusion of auditory privacy, if they kept their voices low, even if they were pretty visible. “Was it a bad relationship?”


“No! It’s not—it wasn’t even a relationship. I just, I don’t know—I just trailed around after him, I guess.”

Jaime narrowed her eyes. “He had other girlfriends, too?”

“I wasn’t his girlfriend, Jaime. That’s what I’m saying. We just—we lived in the same HLM, and he was friends with my brother. Then he decided to make a better life for himself, and I haven’t seen him in five years.”

“Oh.” Jaime sat still on the steps, trying to digest this. Since in normal times people ran up and down those steps between the laboratoire and the salon below constantly, they were really getting in the way, but no one pushed by them.

That was Dom for you. He’d be more willing to piss off any number of customers than shortchange one of “his” people.

“So,” Jaime said slowly. “He never hurt you, and he didn’t betray you?”

Célie’s eyes filled again. “No,” she said. No, it had all been her wanting, her hurting, her needing. He’d never deliberately fed it. And he’d left her with all of it, having better things to do with his life.

“Oh.” Jaime eyed Célie doubtfully. Célie scrubbed at her tears again. Jaime sat waiting. The glass door nudged gently against their backs, and they scooted over to the far side of the top step, so that Thierry could squeeze out with a tray with a mille-feuille and a cup and pot for hot chocolate on it.

Sorry, Thierry mouthed, face scrunching with the force of his apology, as he snuck past them and hurried down the stairs. They must be getting desperately backed up, behind that glass door. Célie wouldn’t turn around to see if anyone was watching them, or if they were all trying very hard to work—as long as that work kept them in full view of the glass doors.

Right now, she almost didn’t care.

“Maybe I should go talk to him,” Jaime said. “Do you want me to ask him to leave?”

Célie’s heart seized. Leave? Again? Just disappear into that dark void again, and this time maybe she would never see him again. Never know what became of him.

She sprang to her feet. “No. No. No. I’ll talk to him.”

Jaime stayed seated, arms wrapped around her knees, watching Célie a long moment. Then she nodded and stood. “I’ll make sure Dom stays upstairs. You promise nothing is going to happen that will make him jump through the window and break an ankle in his rush to go smash that guy’s face in?”

Célie shook her head. “Joss would never hurt me.” She hesitated, one step lower. “Enfin … not like that.”





Chapter 4


Joss waited.

He’d gotten good at it in the Foreign Legion, waiting. That grim, stubborn, determined waiting for someone to move, for a chance to kill or be killed to open up. For backup to arrive, for their unit to move on, for mail.

(That throat-tightening effort not to wait for mail, not to hope for anything.)

He could wait with purpose, as long as he needed to, for his opportunity to live to fight another day to open up.

This waiting didn’t feel like any of those waits. It hurt his throat, this waiting. Struck in his chest over and over, this hard battering in time to his heart. Made him want to bow his head.

He tried to press his shoulders back against the wall, tried to make himself look slouching, because he was much less obtrusive that way, but he couldn’t. His hands felt funny tucked in his pockets, chained, the hands of an idiot, and they kept slipping out again, where they could be ready for trouble.

He’d stuff them back in. Then a few minutes later, he’d realized they had pulled themselves right back out.

He missed the weight of a FAMAS across his chest while he waited—it would give his hands something useful to do at least—but an assault rifle would do no good here.

He only had a few skills transferrable to this situation. He couldn’t fight that guy up there, her boss presumably, and mess up her life and her work situation. And get himself arrested, just as if he was still another loser from the banlieue.

But he could wait. He could persist. He could take hurt and keep going.

Sometime she would have to leave her hidey-hole. Have to go home.

Sometime … maybe she would want to see him.

Célie used to like him, or she seemed to, anyway. She used to make him feel he could be the greatest man in the world. That he had to become a better man, to be worth the opinion she had of him.