All for You (Paris Nights #1)(9)

She tossed her head, hard enough to knock his hand fiercely with her jaw, and took another step back, glaring at him.

He dropped his hands back to his sides. “Célie,” he tried again. He could say that. It made sense. It was even an answer.

“I’m working,” she said, furiously.

That shocked him. Her old home address had no longer been good, but people from around there knew where she worked. Of course he had come straight here, not waiting for working hours to be over. Five years, merde. She couldn’t take fifteen minutes to see him? She would rather he have waited even more?

“It’s a beautiful place to work.” Oh, look—words he could say. “You’ve done really well, Célie.”

For some reason that made her start crying again. “No thanks to you.”

The knife went right into his gut. He could only stare at her, while his whole body flinched around it, already starting to go into shock.

And … of course no thanks to him, he realized slowly and dimly. Célie had still been in her pastry apprenticeship when he left. He hadn’t been there.

It was such a different perspective from his own. Because he was pretty sure that what he had accomplished—well, it was thanks to her. To that sassy, teasing teenager who had looked up at him as if he could be her hero.

But she didn’t owe him any of her at all.

He looked down, that skimming view of his own big body. Maybe if she could see that body in action, how much stronger and smoother he moved these days. “Can we walk a little?” He glanced up at her big, black-haired boss and the woman with reddish tawny hair watching them from a second-floor casement window, the two other people in chef’s gear pressed to another casement window there. “Will it be okay? You won’t get fired?”

She blinked, and just for a second past the swollen eyes and tears, he saw spunky Célie. “I’m Dominique Richard’s chef chocolatier!” she said indignantly. “I won’t get fired. I make those things!” She gestured back to the gorgeous glass doors and presumably the shop inside, that beautiful, luxurious space of exposed stone, velvet curtains, and white rosebud walls, with its steel and glass cases elegantly displaying beautiful chocolates.

That space that was like stepping onto another planet, as if none of his life matched any of hers at all. They weren’t even the same sentient species, nor members of the same galaxy. And that was strange, because they’d grown up in the same building.

“The best chocolates in Paris!” she said.

His mouth softened, surprising him. He couldn’t remember the last time his mouth had softened. But that was so like Célie, to stick her chin up and insist she was the best. Maybe it was part of the reason he’d wanted to become the best, so that they’d match. “Are they?”

“Yes.” She put her hands on her hips. “They really are.”

“I haven’t tried them.” Or any of the other chocolates in Paris. Back before he joined the Legion, he’d had to make do with supermarket chocolate bars, the gorgeous, elusive luxury of Paris well out of his reach, and not just in terms of chocolate. He’d given some special chocolates to Célie once, for her birthday, and they’d cost him far more than he could afford back then for something so ephemeral. But they’d made her really happy. She’d hugged him, and he’d had to use all his strength of will not to turn that hug into something else.

She stared at him a moment. And then she spun on her heel and stomped right back across the street. Again his heart jerked in his chest when she did that without checking the rooftops, and he had to force his reflexes to calm down and remember where they were.

The glass doors slid open, and she disappeared back to her safety inside that beautiful shop.

Damn.

He braced his feet apart and settled his weight into a soldier’s waiting stance again, then reminded himself to press his shoulders back against the wall so he wouldn’t look so obviously military in a city far from enamored of the military.


But only a few minutes later, Célie came back out, carrying a small, flat, shiny aluminum box aggressively, like she was going to attack him with it.

He almost managed not to jump out of his skin this time when she crossed the street without looking up.

“Here.” She thrust the box at him.

He took it cautiously. Obviously she wasn’t going to hand a bomb to him—not Célie, no matter how mad she was—so this might be a … present?

He was going to go with the idea anyway. Pretend it was a present. Pretend she had given one single thought to his twenty-sixth birthday two weeks ago.

He eased off the tight-fitted aluminum lid stamped with an adamant DR and gazed at the contents. Nine exquisite, tiny chocolates, perfectly square, flat, each with a different elegant motif—a hint of green leaves, or a tendril of white, or a pattern subtly etched into the chocolate.

“You make these?” he murmured, fascinated. Célie did?

Wow, she must love that. Love it with everything in her.

Oh, thank God. Célie had grown up happy. Free. Big. He’d come back to get her out of there, now that he was big enough to carry them both to the top of the world’s glass mountain, but she’d already done it for herself.

All by herself.

He lifted his gaze from the chocolates to her.