All for You Page 5

  But now he was even bigger, stronger. He looked so tough, people probably crossed the street when they saw him coming.

  The only person who would mess with him now was a man like Dom, someone who saw another big, strong male and went straight at him to confront him and get him the hell out of his territory. The kind of man who would rather kill or be killed than trust another strong man near anything his.

  “Wait,” Joss said suddenly, sitting up a little straighter. “How was I already an idiot about women? I did just fine with women, I’ll have you know.”

  Célie stood up as fast as if he’d just touched a live wire to her and started striding away. But she didn’t head back toward work. She strode farther north up the canal.

  He swore under his breath and caught up.

  Her phone burped. She pulled it out. Dom: OK?

  Oui, she typed. Laisse-moi tranquille. Leave me alone.

  Bossy idiot. Her heart warmed, though. It was good, really good, to have someone strong and with a good heart looking after her.

  She glanced up at Joss, who had been that person when she was a teenager. He had angled his head enough to read the screen of her phone, and his mouth tightened.

  She hit send and shoved the phone back in her pocket. “Sorry. I should get back to work.”

  But she kept walking the wrong way.

  “This isn’t going at all like I expected,” Joss said.

  Her eyebrows scrunched together. She looked up at his profile, that stubborn jaw, those straight lashes, and a glimpse of those hazel eyes. “So what did you expect?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged, an odd movement on those big, square, military-straight shoulders, and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I guess I thought you’d still be in Tarterets, in your apartment with your mom, and that you’d look up at me, and your face would just light, and you’d throw yourself into my arms and not be able to stop kissing me from how happy you were.”

  She stared at him so hard she tripped over a cobblestone. His hands came out of his pockets, but she had already righted herself.

  “I mean, kiss on my cheeks, of course.” He touched one cheek and then the other, where bises would fall. Was that a tinge of color on his face? Impossible to tell, given how much the sun had darkened his already Mediterranean skin.

  “I was just supposed to be sitting in my mom’s apartment in the projects in Tarterets? Waiting for you? For five years? Not growing up, or accomplishing anything, or making anything of myself? Thanks a lot.”

  A faint frown. His hands went back into his pockets. “You could have kept writing,” he said suddenly, low and rough. “Let me know what you were doing, what you were becoming. Sent a few pictures whenever you changed hair color, that kind of thing. I hear selfies are hot these days.”

  She glared at him. “Yeah. You could have written, too.”

  The strangest wistfulness crossed his face. “I thought about it,” he said, the same way a man might say he used to dream of flying to the moon. “Once those first four months were up, and we had the right to send letters. I read once in a book about World War II how often soldiers would just make something up.”

  Kind of weird to think of Joss reading. But all at once she could imagine him, slow and painstaking, focusing on a book to pass all the dead downtime in some place like Afghanistan. Maybe books, which had always been his enemies in school where they were things he always failed at, had become friends when his real enemies fired bullets. She flinched away from the thought of those bullets.

  “You would have letters dated from days of brutal bombardment and confrontation, written from the front lines, and the men would say, ‘Everything’s going well. Spending all my days playing poker with the guys. Miss you. Tell me more about you and the girls.’ I thought about just making things up, pretending I was just a traveler enjoying the sights.” His eyes closed for the briefest instant and opened again, immediately scanning the area for anything he might have missed during that second of weakness. “But my imagination has always been terrible. Even—” His mouth twisted with a wry wistfulness, and he broke off a second. Then resumed: “Even my best fantasies have always been … well, at the time I thought they were … realistic. Possible.” A bleakness slid across his face and was stoically pushed back. He squared his shoulders.

  Which was kind of a funny movement on him, given that his shoulders had never once lost that straight line. It spoke of a pretty rigid self-control, that he had to double-check that squaring of his shoulders no matter how automatically they were already squared. Maybe five years in the military did that to a man.

  “What were your best fantasies?” Célie asked curiously. She’d always wanted to know what Joss dreamed. When he’d gone off and joined the Foreign Legion it had been a total shock to her. Never once had he mentioned military service as a possible ambition. In school, he’d trained as a mechanic, a career she’d certainly admired—all those things he could make work, all those motors he could soup up and get running, machines to take a girl out of there, take her anywhere she wanted. He’d been such an essential part of her life that she’d just assumed he would always be there keeping an eye out for her, providing her that strong body to walk beside through a tough neighborhood. That maybe they’d even speed out of their banlieue one day on the back of his motorcycle, with her holding on tight to that hard body.

  Instead, she’d had to crush on a boss who drove a motorcycle and buy herself a moped.

  Joss’s lashes lowered, and now definite color burnished those stubborn, proud cheekbones of his. He pressed his lips together and shook his head.

  Fine. Don’t tell her. Célie stomped extra hard on the next cobblestone. That was just like him—bottle up everything that was fragile and beautiful and fanciful and then take it off to the Foreign Fucking Legion, never share it with her. Her and those stupid hearts she used to sneak in over the I in her name whenever she put her name on anything she was going to give to him.

  Like he’d gotten that message. Or cared about it, if he had gotten it.

  She cringed inside at the memory of her sappy, puppy-crush teenage self and gave herself a shake. “So how long have you been back?” she forced herself to ask briskly, as if they were just old semi-friends chatting now, catching up.

  “My train got in to Paris this morning,” Joss said.

  Célie stumbled and looked back up at him. What? “Who—who else are you looking up?” Her voice sounded funny, not as casual as she kept trying to make it. “Your old girlfriend?”

  His eyebrows drew slowly together as he searched her face. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Sophie.”

  “Who the hell is Sophie?”

  “Sophie,” Célie said incredulously. “Your girlfriend.”

  “The only girl named Sophie that I remember is the girl your brother was sleeping with before he got arrested. Not that he ever gave her the respect of calling her his girlfriend. Your brother was kind of a bastard.”

  Célie blinked over that a moment. “She told everybody she was with you. Her boyfriend in the Foreign Legion.”

  Joss was silent for the distance between two bridges. “I guess that must have been better status for her than to be the ex-bootie call of someone in prison for dealing drugs,” he said finally, with a quiet pity. “It’s—not a good area to be a woman on your own with no protection, I guess.”

  “I managed,” Célie said dryly.

  Joss’s face went blank.

  “When she had the abortion, she said it was because you thought it would be better if the two of you waited until you were out to start a family,” Célie said. It had made her throw up, when that happened—everything about it. That another woman should be pregnant with Joss’s baby, and that Joss, the man she looked up to more than anyone else in the world, should say he didn’t want his child. It made a woman never want to trust herself, her body, her chance at a happy life, to any man again.

  Joss winced. “Merde,” he
said under his breath. “Bordel de … Célie. That must have been your brother’s kid. Or someone else’s. But—but I can see why she would have wanted to tell that story instead of one where she was pregnant and alone and the dad was either worthless or didn’t give a damn.”

  Yeah. Célie wondered if she would have told that kind of story about Joss, too, if she’d ended up pregnant in an area where a young woman was considered to be asking for it if she even wore a shirt with no sleeves, let alone a knee-length skirt. But there’d been no chance of her getting pregnant in those days. Joss had never picked up on any of her embarrassing attempts to sometimes get him to slide their friendship sideways into something a lot cuddlier.

  She would have loved so much to cuddle with Joss back then.

  Actually—she snuck a sideways glance at that big, hard, confident body—she would probably still love to … she cut her thoughts off.

  “What did you do?” Joss asked. “When she said that?”

  “I cried. And I ripped up the postcard I was writing to you. And I ripped up your photos.” And boy had she regretted that one. “And I took a train into Paris, and I knocked on Dominique Richard’s door and told him I would work my butt off, if he would only hire me. That I’d work for almost nothing, if it was enough to be able to afford the rent on a nine-meter apartment in Paris itself and not the banlieue, that I’d live off chocolate and water if I had to.”

  Joss’s hands curled into big fists. He glanced down at them and thrust them in his pockets. “And what did he do?”

  “He said he’d better pay me enough that I wasn’t forced to sneak all his chocolate for meals. That it would turn out cheaper for him in the long run.”

  Joss’s hands shoved against his pockets. “So he was your hero. He saved you.”

  Célie considered that a moment. “Well, I mean … I kind of thought I saved myself.”

  The expressions on Joss’s face were so complicated and impossible to read. Not helped by the fact that he tried to keep all of them contained.

  “I mean, that took some guts, the little nobody from the banlieue, to insist that one of the rising star chocolatiers hire me. And then to work my butt off making sure I deserved it, that I helped make us the best.”

  After a moment, he nodded, and his face softened. “You always did dream really big, Célie.”

  Well … she supposed so. Dreaming of running off with Joss in some vague life of bliss and security had probably been dreaming really big.

  Her chin lifted. A smaller dream, nevertheless, than the ones she had turned out to be capable of accomplishing, once she put her heart into them instead of into him. “So who else are you looking up?”

  Joss had the blankest expression. Finally he shoved both hands across his face. “I hadn’t really thought about looking up anyone else.” And, while she was still trying to digest that, “You cried?”

  She tried for a flippant shrug. “A girl can change a lot in five years.”

  Too late, she remembered that she’d pretty much spent the last half hour crying, ever since she’d first seen him.

  Joss lifted an eyebrow but courteously refrained from pointing her tears out to her. He was silent until they reached the base of the next footbridge over the canal. “Célie.” Abruptly he grabbed her by the hips, lifted her off the ground, and pivoted to set her three steps up on the bridge, so that her eyes were on level with his. The easy strength of the act rushed through her entire body. “I came back for you.”

  Her breath stopped, and it hurt that way, all stopped up in her chest. It hurt so much she wanted to cough it out, straight into his face, to hack him back from her happy life and all the hurt he could do to it. “I haven’t been waiting for you, Joss.” She made her voice mean. She made it as mean as she could. “I’ve moved on.”

  He shook his head. “I can understand now why you didn’t wait for me, Célie. But I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Chapter 6

  “Work things out?” Jaime asked with quiet sympathy that afternoon.

  Célie grimaced and shrugged, whisking her chocolate into cream. Across the steel counters of the hot room in the laboratoire, where all the burners were, she felt more than saw Amand, their sandy-haired caramellier, exchange glances with Jaime.

  It was weird how subdued her own subsidence had left the laboratoire. As if she was its electric current and the power had gone out. Only Dom and Jaime resisted that power outage, and Dom had a particularly bad-tempered edge to him today. Every once in a while, he would look at her and then walk to the window to glare out of it and make sure Joss didn’t stand below.

  After each glare, Célie would find some excuse to sneak a look through a window and check for herself.

  So far, no Joss.

  Guillemette, from downstairs, slipped discreetly up to her. “Your, ah, friend just sat down at one of the tables. Should we serve him?” She tried to keep her voice low, but she underestimated Dom and Jaime’s current state of alertness.

  “Is that bastard stalking you?” Dom pivoted, chisel in hand. “I’ll go take care of him.”

  “Or we could call the cops for that,” Jaime intervened firmly.

  A sharp, feral show of teeth in what was Dom’s idea of a grin. “No, I want to do it.”

  “Dominique.” Jaime laid a freckled hand over his muscled forearm.

  Seriously, the way she said his name was adorable.

  Dom glanced down at her hand on his arm, one black eyebrow lifting. “Is that supposed to be your magic trick to get me to behave?”

  Jaime smiled. “Is it working?”

  Dom held up thumb and forefinger, about a centimeter apart. “Only a little bit.” But the energy of his body was shifting, as he turned more toward Jaime, as he focused on her. The aggressive gleam in his eyes was transforming to tenderness and a smile.

  “Dominique.”

  There she went again. Of course the man was going to go all mushy over someone who said his name like that.

  “I told you I was a bad bet,” Dom said.

  Célie slammed her big metal bowl of ganache against the steel counter. Chocolate fountained out of it, splattering up over her face and black chef’s jacket. “Damn it, Dom. Look what you made me do!”

  She swiped a hand across her face. Since her work in chocolate wasn’t “hot” work, involving few things likely to burn her severely, unlike Amand, she was able to wear a short-sleeved chef’s jacket, and a lightweight one at that. But that left her nothing to wipe with. She hunted around for a towel, growling under her breath. “Stupid bad bet thing. Men who ruin women’s lives … because they’re stupid idiots …” She sent Dom a venomous glance as she dragged a white kitchen towel across her face and chocolate-sloshed arms.

  He gave her a bemused look back, both eyebrows lifting a little. Jaime nodded at her in firm approval of all that grumbling.

  Célie threw her towel down on the counter. “I’ll go talk to him.”

  Dom’s eyebrows slashed together. “I don’t think so. If he’s stalking you, I’ll take care of it.”

  “It’s Joss, Dom! Don’t be an idiot!” Célie stomped across the laboratoire. “As if he would ever—damn it, I hate you stupid men!”

  The glass doors didn’t slam worth a damn, probably just as well right then or she would have left glass shards all around her. She stomped down the spiral stairs with clangs of metal and glared at Joss.

  He sat against the backdrop of the white rosebud-embossed wall. His little table looked oddly bereft in that salon. No one had served him yet, and he was such a big guy who had spent five years in war zones with the damn Foreign Legion and, and … someone should be spoiling him. With all the delicious melts-in-a-desert food the stomach of a big guy like that could hold.

  She stalked over to him. His gaze flicked over her face, and his eyes dilated visibly. “Hell, Célie, you know how much I like chocolate.”

  What?

  “You’ve got it all—over—” His hand lifted toward her face as he
drew his lip just a little under his teeth as if tasting something.

  She jerked back a step, thrown completely off balance. Something started to fizz disturbingly in her stomach as she stared back at him. His hand dropped, and he swallowed.

  Oh, hell. She tried to pull herself together. “Joss. What are you doing here?”

  He just looked up at her with those gorgeous eyes and that stillness he had, emphasized by five years of military discipline. “Would you rather I wait outside?”

  It was all she could do not to just shove the table aside and climb into his lap, bury her head in his chest and hold on tight. Why did you leave me, you bastard? Oh, thank God you’re home.

  Yeah, and that would be insane.

  Plus she’d already done it once.

  “Joss, you know I love you—”

  A little jerk ran through his body. And hers, as the echo of her own words ran through her.

  “Like a brother,” she hastened to add.

  “Fuck, Célie.” He turned his head away, his jaw setting. “Like Ludo?”

  Okay, well, maybe not like her actual brother. Or like any other male she’d ever known. But, but … “But I’m not your person to come home to here.” Oh, hell, had she just said that? Yes, I am. Yes, I am. “I’ve moved on.”

  “Moved on from what?” Joss asked.

  She stared at him.

  “We never dated, Célie. I wasn’t Sophie’s boyfriend, but I was never your boyfriend either. I was saving you for later.”

  Her jaw dropped. Fury sizzled once deep in her stomach and then just flared all through her. “You son of a bitch.”

  “For when you were older.” He tried to regroup. “And I deserved you.”

  “I’m going to fucking kill you!” Célie pressed her hands into his table and her weight into them as she leaned her body over his.

  “Okay,” Joss said, and just lifted the table to the side to expose his body to her, shifting the table as if neither it nor her pressure on it weighed anything. “You can do that.”