All for You (Paris Nights #1)(87)

He snatched her into him, hugging her hard as he buried his face in her hair. “You can have either one you want.” His voice hurt, coming through his throat. “As long as you say yes this time.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

Yes. His arms tightened on her so hard that she made a muffled sound of protest, and he eased his hold, but his empty hand kept petting her too deeply, over her back, her arm, up to frame her face. Yes, she was still there. It was the real Célie. She wasn’t disappearing before his over-urgent fantasies. “Really? Hell, Célie, really?”

She opened the fist he’d made over the rings when he grabbed her and eased the tip of her ring finger into the cheap ring on his palm.

Damn that cheap one. But he took her hand and eased it on properly, then followed it with the other, much finer one.

Which looked ridiculous. “Célie.” He covered the cheap one with his finger. There now. That expensive one on her finger—that looked beautiful.

“Maybe one on each hand.” She pulled them off, and Joss quickly pre-empted her choice and slid the expensive one on her left ring finger, leaving the right ring finger for the cheap one.

She held out both hands. “Okay, that looks kind of … excessive.”

Joss frowned at the cheap ring. But … it still did look kind of pretty on her hand. Way, way better than leaving that hand bare. He rubbed it, an almost wistful affection brushing him, as if he was honoring a fallen, difficult comrade.

“I’m going to have a jeweler frame it in gold,” she decided. “So that it makes a pendant, the ring in its little frame. And wear it here.” She placed her hand over her breast, right near her heart.

Because she valued everything about him. His accomplishments and his failures. Who he was and who he had been.

“You really have always loved me,” he said low. “And I’ve always wanted to be good enough for that love.”

“And you always have been good enough, Joss. Always.”

He petted the wisps of hair on her forehead and stroked down her cheeks. “You make my life light up, you know.”

She linked her hands behind his head. “You, too.”

He shook his head, a little bemused. “Hard to imagine myself as lighting things up.”

“It’s all those sparkles off you,” she teased gently. “Now that I’m wearing your ring.”

A slow smile seemed to grow deep down in his belly and blush all the way through his body. He thought this might be what happiness felt like. Just this utter, blissful security of accepting and believing in love. “Think I should get us costumes made out of sequins?”


She shook her head, nestling into him. “It would be redundant.”

Joss snuggled her in more closely. A deep, profound wonder filled him, a warmth and surety he never could have believed possible, once upon a time.

“You know, you were right all along,” he said softly. “Together is a really good way to be.”