All for You (Paris Nights #1)(78)

From the vicinity of the doorway past him came a sharp sound of protest. Everyone in the laboratoire must be jammed into the door of the ganache room, watching this show.

Oh, God, she was rejecting him before all of them. Shaming him.

“But—” Joss looked down at the ring and then back up at her. “I thought that was what you said you wanted. I thought you said you would have been incandescent with joy.”

“I would have, Joss. When I was eighteen. God, I would have been so happy. But now … now I know how crappy it is to be the princess in a tower. Now I want someone who will include me. I’m not very good at waiting up in my tower for the prince to get back. I want to be part of the life I live. And of the life you live, too. I want us to live together.”

“I’m working on that, Célie,” he said in a rush. “I’ve got an apartment for us and everything. I just—it’s not ready for you yet.”

“You got us an apartment?”

He drew back, dumbfounded, alarm flaring. “Célie—”

“Without even—without even—” She pressed her hands to either side of her skull, hard, trying to hold it in. “Without even talking to me about it?”

“It’s not ready. I want it to be perfect first.”

She stared at him. Her fingers dug into her hair and slowly started to pull. “Good enough for me?”

“Exactly,” Joss said, relieved. “You really don’t want to see it in the state it’s in now. It—”

“And you figured that out all by yourself? What I needed? What would be good enough for me?”

He hesitated. And then he fell silent, staring at her.

“For us?”

His lips pressed together. That look, that dive-deep neutral look he got when he knew things were going to get really bad.

“There are two people in an us, Joss. One of them is me.”

“It’s for you, Célie. It’s all—”

“No.” Célie’s hands fell slowly from her hair. She straightened from the wall.

Joss’s hand shot out and covered her mouth. “Célie, don’t—”

She jerked her head away. “No, Joss. The answer is no. I’m not who you think I am, and I can’t and I won’t ever be that person again. But you—you’re still the man who would walk off on me because you thought I deserved better and never think to ask me what I really wanted. In case it obliged you to change your mind. Or bend your pride.”

He stood stock-still, staring at her.

“No,” she said again, even though he had chocolate smeared across his face and mouth and across his shirt and she wanted to take him home and lick him, even though his eyes were so beautiful and stubborn and true, even though he had the hottest body a woman could ever dream of. And even though he’d done it all for her. “No, Joss. You’re destroying all the happiness I ever built for myself. Please go away and leave me alone.”





Chapter 23


Joss stood dully in the middle of the apartment. God, he felt tired. As if he’d been through one of those training weeks with only an hour of sleep a night, and gotten nearly all the way to the end of the White Képi March, and then just sat down and given up, without ever earning the képi. Utter exhaustion. All coated and weighed down with unforgivable failure.

Finally he just lay down on the stained and rotting floorboards, half of which needed to be replaced and all of which needed to be sanded down and refinished. Hell, he’d probably best just rip out the whole thing, get some proper hardwoods in here.

Except who cared?

None of it mattered now.

Not the view on Célie’s favorite park.


Not the shower that sat there, delivered and uninstalled, where she was supposed to have stood caught in sprays at the end of the day, washing the chocolate scent off her and maybe smiling at him through the glass or even wiggling her naked butt saucily, when he came in pretending he needed to brush his teeth, just so he could eye her.

Not the measurements for the marble counters, so that her own home kitchen could be a place that gave her as much pleasure to work in as that beautiful laboratoire. So that it became a place where they could maybe make supper … what was that word of hers? … together.

Not the wall-to-wall closet that he had been going to set into one bedroom wall, to maximize the space, so that her clothes and his clothes both fit in the bedroom. Together.

Definitely not the damn bed.

He slowly pulled out the little box. God, he’d loved the fancy jeweler’s name on it. Loved standing in front of the shop on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and thinking, Yeah. Now I can get her this.

His chest ached.

His throat resisted all his efforts to swallow.

He rolled over and pulled his old battered duffle to him from the corner of the room, unzipping and unzipping, until he found what he wanted.

He pulled it out.

A cheap, slim ring with a stone so big because it was fake, cubic zirconium. The kind of ring a man bought when the words swam in front of him all the time at school, and the teachers thought he was stupid, and he had to take the mechanic track instead of anything that would let him go to university. When he was a good mechanic, he was good at it, he liked it, and he thought that was worth something, but then he got fired from his job because his closest friends were f*cking drug dealers. When his father was a bumbling alcoholic who once, long ago, had seemed like a decent dad, and his mother was a bitter woman whose every word focused on how her husband or her son was failing or going to fail.