All for You (Paris Nights #1)(83)
She shook her head. “I’d way rather crawl through the mud beside you to get to a goal than sit somewhere in a tower wondering what you’re doing and if you’ll succeed.”
“I’ll succeed,” he said immediately. “I won’t fa—”
She put her hand over his lips. “Maybe you will fail, sometime, Joss. Maybe you’ll screw up again. Most of us do, don’t you get that? It’s what we do with our failures, and how we pick ourselves back up and grow, that shows our worth. Just because something might not succeed as well as you want it doesn’t make you a failure, as if that one effort defines your whole worth.”
His breathing grew slower and deeper at her steady, firm voice, that sickness starting to calm. That warmth she brought him was growing in his middle, quieting the rest. “I should … talk with you about this more,” he said.
She smiled wryly, but her eyes were such a rich, welcoming brown.
“You—make sense.” He rested his hands on her shoulders. God, they felt good under his hands. Small and strong. Her own kind of strength.
“See? If you help make sense of me, and I help make sense of you … you see how that works? But for it to work properly, you have to let me know when you feel weak or wrong. So I can, you know, help get your head back on straight.”
“Center me.”
A surprised smile kicked across her face. “That’s what you do for me,” she protested.
He ran his hands down from her shoulders, squeezing her upper arms gently. “I guess you’re saying that we can do it for each other.”
The surprise faded from her smile, and she looked so happy. But she grew solemn again. “And if you’re doing something hard that I can’t help you with, that I can’t do, too, I’d like to be around to support you. I would have done that, you know. Finished up my baker’s apprenticeship and come to join you in Corsica, maybe opened up my own little bakery there. I bet I could have made a killing off all those hungry soldiers. But you would have had to trust me enough to risk letting me see you fail.”
Trust her not to think of him as a failure, not to make him a failure by that very loss of belief in him, if she saw him struggle with or even fail at one of the thousands of impossible challenges thrown at men who wanted to become paratroopers in the Foreign Legion.
“I’m not your mother,” Célie said.
He stiffened. “I know that, Célie.” For God’s sake, he was twenty-six years old, a paratrooper in the Foreign Legion, and she assumed he was still confusing his girlfriend with his mother? What the hell did a man have to do to prove himself as strong, free of his parents, above all that?
Besides, Célie wasn’t anything like his mother.
Not … anything.
No matter how mad she got, she never shamed, she never reduced, she never called a man a failure. You’re amazing. Actually, half the time when she got mad at him, it seemed to be because he didn’t think he was amazing enough. The very opposite of shame.
Célie smiled ruefully. “I know you know that here.” She rested her hand on his heart. “But sometimes you forget it here.” She touched her other hand to the back of his head.
He raised his eyebrows at her.
“Is that where the subconscious part of the brain is?” she whispered. “The back of the mind?”
So he had to laugh a little. Damn, he loved her. He pulled her in closer.
She held his gaze. “I won’t ever try to make you smaller. I won’t ever look down at you for not being good enough.”
She was so fierce, as if the princess in the tower had always really been a dragon who happened to have long, curly eyelashes. No wonder that, eight years in, he still hadn’t managed to win her. He’d been trying to court the wrong damn species.
“I think I always knew that here.” He covered her hand on his heart. “But maybe I sometimes forgot it here.” He covered her hand on the back of his head. “Or wherever that idiot part of the brain is.”
She smiled a little. “And you know,” she said quietly. “I might do something hard. I might like to have you around to support me, too, in my quests. When I’m, I don’t know … working forty-eight hours straight the week before Valentine’s and would maybe, when I can finally stop, like someone who can just pick me up and take me home and feed me something besides chocolate and put me to bed, instead of having to make it home on my own.”
Oh, yeah, he could do that. He liked the thought of it so much. Carrying her home—in his head, it was literally in his arms, through the streets, up the stairs—putting her to bed, giving her that cuddle. He wanted to be her source of cuddles more than anything in the world.
He took another slow breath, long and clean, relaxing tension. “I like this communication of yours. Just talking it out. I like it this way, kind of … calm, you know? When you’re not angry or accusing or blaming, I can … hear you better.” Instead of his whole being bracing against it.
She squeezed his face very gently. “I could maybe improve my communication style, too.”
That made him smile. “I don’t know. The chocolate take on boiling oil from the castle walls had a certain flair.” Or maybe that had been a chocolatier-dragon’s version of fire-breathing.