All for You (Paris Nights #1)(82)

That shame grew bigger as he opened the door, this acute, puncturing pressure from his belly out all through him. He stepped to the side and pressed his back to the wall, bracing himself so that he didn’t leap forward and start blocking her way to the worst rooms.

The rotten floorboards were right there for her to see. The stains from God-knew-what on the walls. The half-ripped-out bathroom. The old, cheap, yellowed linoleum counters in the kitchen, and the ugly, rusty, chipped white sink. He drove himself back against the wall with all the strength of his legs and closed his eyes, listening to her move around the place. God, he didn’t want to see her expression.


“It, ah, needs a lot of work,” she said finally, coming back from her solitary exploration of the rooms.

“I know,” he said between his teeth, staring at the floor.

She stopped in front of the windows. “Oh, wow. What a view.”

He lifted his head a little.

She opened one of the windows and leaned out. “You can see most of the park! And the Eiffel Tower!”

He watched her silhouette against the light outside. “And you, ah, like the neighborhood, right?”

“It’s funky. Diverse. Not so—” She did a snobby thing with her nose and waved toward the horizon, apparently indicating other possible quarters in Paris. “Wow,” she said after a moment. “I can’t believe you found a place right on the park.” She snuck a quick glance at him. “No wonder you grabbed it.”

He opened his hands, palm up. See? I thought I was doing the best thing.

She pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket and showed it to him. “Maybe you could have texted me. Sent me a photo. Called and said, ‘Célie, I found this awesome place, but I have to grab it fast. What do you think?’”

“I had a plan.” He rested his head against the wall behind him. Go all out for your goals. He’d already waited at least eight years for Célie, which seemed a long courtship. And he’d forgotten what she told him, that she hadn’t been waiting for him.

Because he’d been too proud to ask her to.

She turned away from the window to look at him. “What was your plan, Joss?” she asked, her tone so much gentler than it had been last time this came up.

“To turn it into something beautiful before you saw it. So that your face would light up, you’d think it was so wonderful, and you’d, you know … cover me in kisses.” His cheeks heated. That same old stupid dream. “I didn’t want you to see it like this.”

“Joss.” She came toward him. A little shock ran through him when she slipped her hands around his waist and leaned back to look into his face. His cheeks grew hotter under her look, but he stared down at her, caught by the fact that she had touched him again. “I’m never going to think of you as a failure. You know that, don’t you?”

He swallowed, and then tried to harden his jaw. He’d learned young to shut out shame and blame—his teachers’, and later his mother’s. A psychopathic corporal on a power trip could dress him down during training and try to shame him and his fellow engagés into giving up and quitting, and he just let it wash off him, water off a duck’s back.

But Célie … she mattered.

“Never.” She lifted her hands to rest them on his shoulders. “Not then and not now. That’s not who you are.”

It was who he had been refusing to be since … maybe since he was twelve. When his dad lost his job and everything started to go so wrong.

Maybe he’d been drawn to the military because he, too, needed a strong big brother or father figure. To help him figure out how to be the man he was trying to be.

Célie gave his shoulders a gentle squeeze. “You’ve always sparkled to me, Joss.”

His blush swept up so deep he could feel it burning in his forehead.

She stroked it, from his forehead down to his cheeks, which she framed.

He took a deep breath, trying to absorb the coolness of her hands.

“Sparkle is maybe not the right word,” she admitted. “You’re so steady and deep and true. And you try so hard. Joss, I just … you have to trust me with you enough to let me in. Because otherwise it’s always you going off on your own to make sure everything’s good enough, and leaving me alone.”

“I’m trying,” he said.

She looked around, at the wreck of an apartment in its perfect location. “Joss. Maybe there are men who were born perfect, born rich, born princes. But I don’t give a crap about them. I like the … work of you. The heart. The effort. I like that if you walk into a dump like this, you immediately see that all it will take to make it magnificent is you.” She ran her palms down his arms to take his hands and lift them. “Your own hands.”

His cheeks just refused to cool. His fingers wanted to link with hers and clutch, like a drowning man. And he was supposed to be stronger than all this. He was supposed to be saving her.

“But I like to work, too, Joss. I like to build, and make things better, and put my stamp on the world. If this is supposed to be our home, I’d like to be right in here with you, from the very beginning, scraping plaster off brick and painting walls and doing whatever else needs doing, to make it a perfect place for us.”


“It’s filthy work, Célie.”