All for You (Paris Nights #1)(72)

“Oh, that sounds like a really, really good idea to me,” he said, just before his peripheral vision caught feet striding toward them.

He was on his feet between Célie and the man approaching, faster than a blink. The park guardian stopped in his tracks, rocking back on his heels.

Joss eased his stance, calming himself down. There aren’t that many real threats here, you idiot. Just…easy, okay? He tried to change his expression and posture into something that wouldn’t scare the park guardian even more, keeping his hands loose by his sides. “Yes?”

“There … there are children present,” the guardian said stiffly.

Oh, for God’s sake. Because he’d been kissing his girlfriend in the grass? Like he was the first man to ever do that in a Paris park. Joss reached down and caught Célie’s hand, pulling her to her feet. “You’re right,” he told the other man evenly. “We’ll take it indoors.”

It was all he could do to lead her straight past their new apartment to her own little one and not spoil the surprise. But he managed it. He had to save that for her, until it was the best it could be.





Chapter 21


I wish you hadn’t … Célie stroked the thought down over biceps and sinewy forearm. You never should have … She traced her thumb over the strength of a wrist, over the hairs on the back of Joss’s hand and the scars across his knuckles that he hadn’t had before. If only you had … She caressed her fingers against the toughness of his palm, drawing her fingertips up the length of his, lingering on the calluses and the lines of the underside of his knuckles.

He shivered and grabbed at her pillow with his other arm, tightening his hold on it as his eyes closed.

I’m so mad at you for going. Her hand teased through the curls of hair on his chest, pressed into the hard muscle of his shoulders.

But you are gorgeous.

Her warrior returned, who had done it all for her.

You are amazing.

The way his head tilted back at her touch, his throat exposed to her, the only vulnerable spot on that hard, unyielding body.

No. That wasn’t right. It might be the only vulnerable spot to anyone else, but every single place on that ruthless body seemed to be vulnerable to her. The tough skin at his elbow, from crouching in low cover or dragging himself through it on his forearms. He drew a rough rush of breath, when she stroked him there. The stubborn chin that had a small scar on it now, from sparring practice maybe, or a fall during training, or shrapnel. He licked his lips and bit into the lower one, when she stroked her fingers over that chin.

Why did you do it? Expose yourself to shrapnel, to explosives and bullets. You idiot. Why? You don’t have to be this amazing for me. I loved you just the way you were.

Those words that she had to learn how to swallow and release from her heart unspoken. Because he had said it clearly to her: He had done something amazing, incredible, impossible, and she, instead of understanding and admiring, kept tearing it down.

And she couldn’t do that to him. She had to care for him for who he really was and what he’d chosen to do. Even if he thought he was doing it all for her when really, in great part, he had been doing it to fulfill a need in himself, she had to respect and understand that, too.


Such a profoundly incomprehensible need in him. She’d hero-worshiped him so much, and he’d gone off on an impossible quest to make her worship him even more? Without even quite understanding that the quest deprived her for five years of the hero himself?

Yet he’d done it. And he’d come back to lay all that incredible, brutal quest for glory at her feet.

“I love you,” she whispered and bit the rest of it back. I always have. You never should have …

Breathed that away, turning it into a caress of those so hard-earned muscles.

“Célie.” He shivered, his eyes opening to stare at her in the late afternoon light filtering through her windows, his face half shadowed by the pillow he clutched. “What are you doing? I can’t …”

“You’re beautiful,” she said, and his face crinkled in incredulous confusion.

She caressed her fingers down his body, over the bone of his hip, to the muscled thigh.

“This is too much,” he whispered, squeezing the pillow almost anxiously. “I can’t handle the way you’re … touching me, Célie.” But he didn’t stop her. He didn’t grab her hand or roll them over on the mattress so he could take over. He swallowed and shoved the pillow over his face a second, his body lifting toward her touch.

“You’re incredible.” She kneaded her fingers into his thigh.

He pulled the pillow aside enough to show his face again. “I’m not incredible. I’m just—”

She put her fingers over his mouth. “You shut up. I get to be the judge of how incredible you are. You clearly have no freaking clue.”

Where did it come from, this will to drive oneself past all limits, to never believe you were good enough unless you were the absolute best any human being could ever be? She knew it very well. Dom had it, too, after all—the man who had driven himself to be the best chocolatier in Paris, and who, whenever he showed up on some random list written by an idiot with no proper understanding of chocolate as only the second best or the third best in the whole entire world, ripped the paper and went to the gym to box to the point of exhaustion or threw himself on his motorcycle to cut through traffic in suicidal aggressiveness. (Although he’d calmed down about the motorcycle business now that he had Jaime, as if the desire to keep his happiness had trumped his aggressive recklessness.)