All for You (Paris Nights #1)(73)

She even had it, the little pastry apprentice from the banlieue who had come to work for the rising star chocolatier in Paris and made herself into his right-hand woman, someone who could produce that best of the best of the best. When she saw their chocolates appear as only second or third best in the world instead of the best, she drew faces of the guilty journalists on craft sticks and gave them yarn hair and suspended them over her chocolate as if she was going to drown them in it—and then left them there, just shy of actually tasting that chocolate, like Tantalus. Okay, fine, she’d only done that once, in great ceremony in the middle of the laboratoire for a particularly idiotic critic who had put them all the way down at number six, but it had made even Dom laugh.

Célie Clément did not do second best.

Striving for the best was kind of her way of being worthy of herself. And of Joss.

Too proud to be small, Joss. Too proud to give her a cheap diamond ring.

And I was too proud to be just a little baker en banlieue if you were going to be a glorious Legionnaire.

His dad had been a decent dad when Joss was little, based on the things Joss used to let slip in their easy conversations as teenagers. Then he had gone rapidly downhill after he lost his job when Joss was twelve, descending into alcohol, no longer there for his son. Had that been part of what pushed Joss? His mom was a bitter woman, blaming her husband, blaming her son, blaming even Célie after Joss left, claiming it must have been her fault.

Was that part of why he’d never given Célie a chance to have a say? He’d been afraid she would try to reduce him, just like his mother did?

Was a refusal to be his father part of what drove him?

Was it nature or nurture, really, that kind of drive? Or both? All these circumstances and choices that had fused Joss into the hardened, determined warrior who was now shivering under her hand.

He stuffed the pillow back over his face.

“Hey.” She pulled it off. “Don’t make me throw this one out of the window, too. It’s the last one. Your chest might make a great pillow in fantasies, but in real life, it’s actually pretty hard to punch into just that right shape under my ear.” She smiled at him.

“Célie. I just—I need the pillow.” He reached for it again.


She dropped it on the floor. “No, you don’t.” She framed his face in her hands as if he was a fragile chocolate she had to touch just right and lowered her head toward his. “You’re just fine, Joss,” she whispered between his lips and let her own close gently over his and then slide away, stroking him with her lips, lingering at the corners of his, exploring the bow of his upper lip, the way she could make that firm line relax and yield to her. “You’re just about perfect.”

“‘About’?” he asked, like a man ready to jump down and do a few more push-ups right then to fix any possible flaw.

“Well, you’ve got this.” She caressed her fingertips over that square jaw and followed with her mouth, lingering over the tiny scar. “That’s not perfect. It’s too stubborn. So stubborn you’ll let it get hurt, rather than give up or give in.”

“Célie.” The corners of his lips trembled in such a vulnerable start to a smile. “You—”

“And this.” She brought his big hand to her lips and turned it over to kiss all along the thick calluses at the base of his fingers. “Look at this hand. You’ve been getting it into trouble. You need cocoa butter.”

He shook his head. “I need the calluses. Soft skin just gets ripped to shreds when you want to do anything.”

“Oh.” She considered her own hands, kept soft by constant exposure to cocoa butter. She’d taken to weight training when Joss had shown her as a teenager how to get started—taken to it at first because of the erotic sweetness of having him adjust her arms or hover ready to catch a weight—and she was extremely proud of herself to be able to do a pull-up, these days, but she wore gloves for that and hadn’t a single callus to her name. “So soft hands aren’t perfect?” She ran her palm slowly down his arm.

He shivered. “They’re perfect. Célie—”

“Are they both perfect?” she asked in pretend surprise. “Yours and mine? But they’re so different.” She drew his hand over her own arm, rubbing his calluses against her skin, and a shiver chased through her, too, her eyes closing into the pleasure of it. “Oh, yeah. I think, after all, yours are definitely perfect.”

“You like them?” He caressed her bare back, rubbing those calluses up her sensitive skin to her bra strap.

She arched into the touch, erotic delight spreading out from it all through her body. “Yes.”

He smiled a little, watching her, playing with the textures he could bring to her back, stroking his callused fingertips up her spine and down, then walking them out in little pressures that made her muscles flinch and her back arch and relax again into the pleasure.

“Remember when I was teaching you how to lift weights?” he asked suddenly. Sometimes Joss picked thoughts straight out of her brain, she swore. “God, that killed me. Your little muscles straining, and the sheen of sweat on your skin, and me just barely touching you to adjust your form and not ever being able to touch you for real. The way you would strain so hard to get strong.”

“You wouldn’t go dancing with me back then. So I had to do something physical around you.”