All for You (Paris Nights #1)(70)
“Joss!”
He grinned at her. And blew her another kiss.
She tried that squinty-eyed look on him that was so cute, but those squinty eyes lingered on his lips, and the squint softened out of them. He let his lips part just faintly, invitingly.
“Damn it,” Célie said helplessly, and leaned far enough down to kiss him, nearly all her weight pressing for a moment into that hand on his chest.
He toppled her all the way onto him and wrapped his arms around her.
“Joss, you’re cheating.”
He shrugged, enjoying the way that shifted his muscles under the weight of her body. “Can’t figure out how.” They were in a public park, a little out of the way of main traffic but not invisible, so he kept it subtle as he shifted the position of his thigh enough that it slid between hers and pressed against the seam of her jeans.
She didn’t move away from that.
He smiled, rubbing her back and maybe occasionally shifting that thigh.
“About that communication,” Célie said.
He sighed. “Célie … I just did it, all right? I just … I didn’t have a single doubt, I was absolutely determined, until I was sitting in that room after I signed the contract, surrounded by all the other potential engagés, and I started to think, ‘What the hell have I done?’ But I didn’t … you don’t have time for doubt. You’ll fail if you take time to doubt. You have to give it your all, all the time. So I did. And Célie … I just didn’t realize you would miss me that much. I knew you had a crush on me. That was one of the things I was trying to protect you from. But … I guess I was just that self-absorbed. I didn’t understand that I would actually make a hole in your life.”
“Self-absorption?” Célie asked his chest suddenly. “Or not understanding your own worth?”
Yeah. Maybe being too proud for his own actual worth, so proud he was ashamed to not be more, could really lead a man to let the girl he loved down.
“I understand it now,” Joss said firmly. Or he thought he did. He just had to resist her anger and blame and doubts. The blame that wasn’t like his mother’s, because he wasn’t like his father, but sometimes it got to him anyway.
She braced on her elbows on his lounging body to smile at him in approval.
Something about that relaxed a smile out of him, too—that a statement of his worth didn’t make her react against bragging but made her glad.
She might be angry with him, and she might blame him, but she still … believed in him. Believed that he had worth, that he was trying.
“And it’s hard to think about anything else, once you’re in it,” he said. “You don’t get any sleep. For four damn months. There were weeks when we might have gotten seven hours of sleep total, the whole week, and all of that while we were spending our days scaling fortresses, crawling through mud under barbed wire, marching fifty kilometers with fifty kilos of equipment. They try to push you past all possible breaking points, and then they only keep the men who don’t break. Only about one in five make it through, and then, if you want to become a paratrooper, you go straight down to Corsica for even worse. Or better, depending on your attitude toward that intense a level of training and what it teaches you about what you can do.”
“Did any crazy sergeant ever make you do two hundred push-ups in the hot sun with rocks in your mouth?” Célie’s fingers kneaded into his chest.
Hell, they’d done way worse than that. He smiled at her. “The rocks in your mouth thing is for speaking a language other than French. For the twenty percent or so of us who actually were French, that wasn’t that big of a risk.”
Her hand shifted to knead his biceps suspiciously. God, that felt good. He hardened his biceps just to show off. “And the push-up part?” she insisted.
“There might have been a few push-up drills in there,” he allowed, amused. If she only knew. The guy he’d bought the motorcycle from—an old Legionnaire who liked to customize them—had warned him that civilians could never even begin to imagine it, the demands that a man’s mind and body could meet and surpass. Just get used to it, the other former Legionnaire had said. No one is going to ever really understand you and what you’ve done.
“Josselin Castel,” Célie said sternly, and his full name just kind of silked all through him, erotically. “You’re supposed to be telling me about it. Communicating.”
“I missed you.” He kneaded her butt. “That part was really hard.”
She thunked her head against his chest in frustration, which surprised him.
“Really. It was one of the hardest parts of the whole five years. That and …” He fell silent.
She lifted her head. “And … ?”
His silence hardened on him like a shell, this need not to talk, not to let any of this out.
“Joss.” Her eyes were anxious.
He closed his a moment.
She laid her head on his chest and began to stroke up and down his biceps. Even to show off his muscles, he couldn’t keep them tense under that gentleness and slowly let them relax.
“It’s kind of sexy to be shot at,” he said suddenly, and she flinched against him. “There’s this buzz to being in a firefight. Especially early on, when you don’t really know what death looks like yet. It’s not hard to kill enemies. It’s actually quite easy, especially with the training we had. You don’t think of them as people, you think of them as guns that you have to take out before they take you. But afterward, when the adrenaline dies down, it kind of … weighs in your belly.” He tried to knead his, reflexively, but her body covered it, so that he kneaded her lower back instead. “Like all the bullets you fired were swallowed instead and just lodged there, down in your gut, forever.”