All for You (Paris Nights #1)(85)
Their motorcycle leathers hung by the door, drops of rain still clinging to them, and the light from the fire flickered over them. They’d finally been able to move in three weeks ago. Just in time for the Christmas season, when Célie was utterly swamped.
She’d worked until ten yet again, and Joss had swung by to pick her up. Mostly Célie preferred to drive herself. In fact, he’d kind of created a monster with that gift of a motorcycle, because she drove way the hell too fast, he was always having to fight with her to slow down, and she’d decided to let her hair grow to shoulder-length so she could see if that and the motorcycle leathers made her look like Black Widow.
She teased him about being Captain America, too, but Joss just shook his head at her. No offense to Captain America, but that man did not need to wait around eight years respecting Black Widow and not making his move on her. Just a little tip Joss could give him.
Plus … Captain America was a superhero, serum-enhanced. And Joss … Joss was human. All the impossible tasks Joss and his fellow Legionnaires had accomplished, all the buildings they’d jumped from and cliffs they’d scaled and weights they’d carried, all the wounds they’d survived, they’d had to do it with their own base human bodies.
With the clay of them, that they fired in a kiln of their own will.
He liked the hardness of his human body. Liked the way it felt, when he picked Célie up on his own motorcycle because she’d worked so hard and so late that she … maybe didn’t need him. Maybe that wasn’t the right word. But it helped her, that he was there when she could finally get off, those nights when she was too tired to play at Black Widow. It helped her that she could slide exhausted on the bike behind him and wrap her arms around him and let him handle the traffic in the dark and the rain. It helped her that he made sure she put some actual decent rations into her body besides just chocolate, to get her ready again for another tough day tomorrow, and the next day, and all the way through until after New Year’s.
He liked being her strength when she needed it. He liked it a lot.
“I love this hot chocolate,” he said, because even as tired as she was, she’d made him some anyway, with a quick smile and sparkle of her eyes, whisking the chocolate into hot milk as he washed their plates.
He’d spent the hours between his quitting time and hers in the gym, working out, so he could use all the hot chocolate he could get.
His muscles were still a little pumped, in fact, which he was enjoying quite a bit because Célie’s eyes kept lingering on his biceps whenever she glanced his way. He smiled at her.
She rolled on her back on the rug, gazing at the brick wall. God, the backbreaking, tedious hours she’d spent scraping plaster off that thing. And now she beamed every time she looked at it.
Kind of like he did, every time he looked at the gleaming hardwood floors or the elegant efficiency of the bathroom or the beautiful kitchen he’d built her, after consulting with her every step of the way—how she moved, what she reached for, what kind of things needed to go on the high shelves only he could reach for her, and what things in the cabinets she had to bend for. It meant that most of the things were slightly misplaced for him when he cooked, but that was okay. It was still way the hell better than anywhere he’d ever lived before.
On the wood mantle he had built for the fireplace sat photos Célie had framed. Them dressed up at Jaime’s wedding—about damn time Dom got his guts up for that—and another of them a mess of sand and fun after helping build a sandcastle that same wedding weekend over in the U.S. Joss in Legion camouflage, with the men from his unit after they’d just finished cleaning out camps of drug dealers in Guyane. Herself, splattered with chocolate and beaming, holding up a trophy she’d won in a chocolate-making competition. Joss loved that one. It made him want to lean over and taste her for chocolate every time he looked at it.
She kept the postcards he had sent her in a drawer by her side of the bed, hidden, thank God, so that every friend who came over didn’t have to see how bad he’d been at putting his heart down on paper. But sometimes, if they started snapping at each other over some minor thing, she would stomp off to the bedroom mad. He’d take a few minutes to calm down and want to make up, then follow to find her sitting on the bed looking through the postcards. And she’d smile at him, the irritation forgiven and forgotten in favor of what really mattered.
“I love this place,” she said softly.
“I love you,” he said.
She found his bare ankle and curved her hand around it, her thumb caressing his ankle bone as if even that part of his body had a texture she couldn’t resist.
Hell, that felt good.
He set his chocolate on the hearth and pulled her up to nestle back against his body, her head tucked against the join of his thigh and hip.
“A lot. I mean … really a lot.”
He just didn’t have the eloquence to tell her how much. “Really a lot,” hell. Maybe he should have gone off for five years of poetry classes instead. He suspected Corey Chocolate wouldn’t pay him nearly as well for an expertise in poetry, though.
She smiled at him. “I love you, too.”
Maybe … now would be a good time?
His stomach tightened. He tried to breathe through it. Hell, if Dom Richard could finally get up the nerve to propose to Jaime, Joss could risk a second rejection.