All for You (8 page)

But maybe if he’d written back, after the first four months of training when he had the right to contact people again, she would have kept writing. She would have written,
What the hell is this story Sophie is telling?
and he would have managed to answer that one at least, so she’d know the truth, and then he would have had new little cards and maybe eventually even letters that kept coming all through his stint in the Legion, instead just those first dozen cards he kept on the shelf of his locker so he could take them out whenever he needed to touch them.

He took a deep breath and scrubbed his face. God, it was a good thing he’d chosen the mechanic track back in school, because he would totally have failed his bac. He’d known it, too. Known he didn’t have a chance in hell of sitting in front of a blank piece of paper with his whole future in jeopardy and filling it with anything that had any worth or made any sense.

What could he say? What could he possibly write that meant something and was true?

“Célie” he finally wrote. Okay, there, that was true. That meant something. He stared at it a long time and then finally put a comma after it. Then sat there twisting and twisting the pen between his big fingers.
Clearly
not fingers meant to wield a damn pen.

The waiter came back and hovered.

Joss lifted his head and gave him a long, narrow look, and the waiter found another table to take care of. The waiter also sent a quick look up to the top of those stairs, like a soldier going into battle and making sure someone was ready to lay down covering fire.

Joss followed the glance. Yes, Célie’s personal hero, that big, black-haired guy
Dominique Richard
, was back in that corner where he could glare down at him.

Joss held the other man’s eyes a second, all his muscles firing for battle. Then he bent his head to the card again and wrote, in his slow, deliberate letters that always meant in school that the teachers were yanking his exams away from him before he finished:
I would wait more than five years for you.

He stared at it a moment more. And then he added a little heart over the
I
in her name.

He shoved it at the waiter before he could crumple it in his fist. “If this doesn’t get to her, I’m coming back and killing you.” Best sometimes to leave things clear.

The waiter blinked and backed up a step. “Dom won’t let you do that,” he said hastily.

“Yeah, right,” Joss said. “Him and whose army?”

He walked out of that beautiful, elegant, rough-and-romantic shop and went to find a much less comfortable wall to wait against.

“If she wanted him to actually leave her alone, I think she would be handling this a little differently,” Jaime said.

Ha! She knew it! Knew those two were talking about her. Célie pressed herself against the rolling wire shelves full of giant plastic containers of pistachios and almonds and raisins and every other possible chocolate ingredient that could be stored at room temperature in plastic containers, containers that currently shielded her eavesdropping on Jaime and Dom in Dom’s office.

Dom rumbled something. Damn. She’d missed it.

“Well, yes, probably she is confused, but what’s that have to do with anything? Caring about people is confusing.”

“If he hurts her, I’m going to beat his damn brains out.” Well, that one boomed clear enough.

A soft sound from Jaime. “You are such a sweetheart.”

Célie rolled her eyes to heaven. Really, there was
no
reasoning with Jaime’s insane idealization of Dom.

“I’m glad you’re trying to take care of your people, but if you get in a fight with him, I’m going to be seriously pissed,” Jaime said. “So just bear that in mind.”

Dom grumbled something much lower and more wary.

“No, not pissed enough to dump you, you idiot. Dominique.”

A brief silence. Célie stood on tiptoe to peek over the top of a container. Through the window in his office wall, she could see that Dom had pulled Jaime into his arms.

Oh, for crying out loud. If those two were going to get all mushy-faced again … Célie started to turn away and get some actual work done this afternoon.

“You know she’s always had a crush on you,” Jaime said, and Célie froze.

Hey!
Was that nice? To just
tell Célie’s boss
about a perfectly private crush like that and embarrass the hell out of her for the rest of her career? What had happened to female solidarity and all that?

“
What
?” Dom said. “I’ve never—I swear—”

“Not a crush like that,” Jaime said. “More like a safe-keeping crush, you know? A safe place to put her feelings while she’s waiting for the proper place. Kind of like I used to crush on actors and rock stars before I met you. You know?”

Célie peeked again. Dom was shaking his head.

“You never did that?” Jaime said blankly. “
Everybody
does that.”

“I think the only safe place I ever found for my feelings was you,” Dom said, so quietly and with so little extra rumble to it that Célie could hear it very clearly.

It pierced her heart with this sweet tenderness for the two of them, this deep, precious gladness that the man who had been the big brother and refuge she had always needed and who had never believed he had the right to love himself had finally found that love. Finally found that place he felt safe.

Now if he didn’t hurry up and set the date for a wedding, Célie would personally start hitting him over the head with something. Maybe buy one of those foam sledgehammers so she could bonk him with it every day he walked in still a coward.

She went back to her work while Jaime and Dom did the mushy-face stuff, and maybe she might have peeked out the window to see if any clouds had rolled in.

Joss looked up at her movement in it, but he didn’t lift a hand and wave or anything. He just waited.

She looked at the card she’d propped in the corner of the marble counter, tucked under the wall of frames in all different sizes. She had it propped face forward, so no one could see what was written on the back, and because she liked the way Dom’s eyebrow rose and the ironic, challenging glance he slanted at her when he saw his own name crossed out and replaced with hers. Ha! Take that. Because she didn’t want the responsibility of running a business like this in Paris, and she didn’t want the financial pressure, but she poured her life into these beautiful chocolates just like he did, and she
did
like getting some of the credit.

She touched the card. And then she knew she really shouldn’t, but … she peeked at the back again. That stubborn, determined handwriting, and the little heart over the
I
in her name just like she always did for him, as if he’d
noticed
that, and, and …
I would wait more than five years for you.

Her eyes filled again.

Blast it! She scrubbed at them, but not before two people spotted her and shook their heads. She knew she shouldn’t have risked looking at those words again.

She glanced at the clock. It was nearly five. On normal days—not, obviously, the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s or the week before Easter or the whole month of December—she left at five, having started at eight. Of course, her afternoon had been about as unproductive as it was conceivable to be, and she wouldn’t normally leave without a heck of a lot more done, or else she’d have to come in at five in the morning tomorrow. And Dom got kind of grouchy when people came in too early unnecessarily—he liked having the kitchens to himself for a couple of hours. These days, he was torn, because he apparently also liked lingering in bed later than he ever had before he shared that bed with Jaime.

It must be nice, Célie thought wistfully, to like sharing a bed with someone so much you didn’t want to leave it.

“I need to go,” she told Dom abruptly, washing her hands. Dom came to fill the doorway of the ganache room and gave the quantity of work she had done that day an ironic look. “I’ll come in early tomorrow,” Célie said. That was a little meek. She stuck her chin up. “To make up for all those all-nighters I pull at Christmas.”

Dom pretended to look grumpy, but his dark water eyes gleamed
touché.
“He still out there?” Dom checked the window. His hands closed automatically into fists. “Célie—”

“It’s fine. Dom—I’m not worried. It’s Joss, okay?” He often used to show up just a few minutes before she was due to get off, to lounge against the wall of the building opposite her bakery. It had made her heart sing, every time, when she saw him out there waiting for her. “You guys just don’t understand because I overreacted.”

“If you’re trying to protect Dom—an effort I deeply appreciate—can I just mention that I could put a Corey security detail on you if you need it,” Jaime said, coming into the room.

Dom stared at his fiancée. “I think you must have me mistaken for someone else.”

Jaime smiled at him and shook her head, laying her hand on his arm. Dom sighed, looking down at it, and then covered her smaller hand with his.

“I need to go,” Célie said again. She went into the bathroom to change into her street clothes—jeans and a short-sleeved knit shirt, because it wasn’t as if she had been expecting to have to look hot on her way home from work—and grabbed her leather jacket and hibiscus-printed helmet. She hesitated, and then swooped back into the ganache room to fill a little metal box with chocolates. “Shut up,” she told Dom.

He hadn’t said anything, of course, busy rapping his knuckles against the nearest marble counter and looking from her to Jaime to the casement window.

“It will be
fine
,” Célie said. “Damn it, men are such idiots.” She stomped down the stairs.

Outside, she hesitated, glancing between her moped up the street on her left and Joss, leaning against a wall in the opposite direction. But she couldn’t resist the pull of that muscled body, those hazel-green eyes.

She turned toward him, and he straightened from the wall as soon as she did, coming toward her. He moved differently than he had five years ago. He’d always been strong, fit, someone who made her feel safe, but now he had this hardness to him, as if he could cut a path through stone and steel just by walking toward it.

Or through bullets. Her stomach knotted even to think about it. She’d read about the Foreign Legion when he first disappeared into it—about the training he would be going through, about the brutal dog-eat-dog world of it, about the situations they were sent to handle in the world—and she would crawl between her own bed and the wall to hide, like she had when she was a little girl and her mom brought home a doubtful boyfriend. She’d clutch her arms around herself there, fighting in desperate anguish the knowledge of all he must be going through.

He stopped in front of her, taking her helmet for her but keeping his other hand at his side, his eyes sweeping over her face as if he was touching every part of it. Her skin burned from the look, and she flexed her hand around the box of chocolates so she wouldn’t drop it on the ground and just fling her arms around him.
You’re home, you’re home, you’re home.

“You’ve still got chocolate on you.” That sand-rasped quality to his deep voice now made her want to go up on tiptoe and kiss his throat, to slide silk over it so he remembered what softness felt like.

“I’m a chocolatier,” she growled. “It’s a hazard of the trade. Like mud and blood for a Legionnaire, only … much nicer.”

His face closed, and she wondered abruptly if she had just said something terrible. Like … maybe that was a really stupid, flip thing to say to someone who might actually have seen a lot of blood in the past five years.

She thrust out her chin, somewhere between defiance and apology. “What I mean is, you might be tougher, but I taste better.”

Wait. Did that sound—

Joss clasped his wrist behind his back, going into parade rest, his face almost completely blank. Except for the gleam of gold in those hazel eyes. “You don’t know what I taste like.”

A slow fire kindled somewhere down in the curl of Célie’s toes and just started to burn, burn up through her. Joss didn’t
hit
on her. He’d never, ever said anything sexual to her before.

And she’d never even imagined what he might taste like, until now. She’d imagined how warm he would be, in bed beside her. She’d imagined the texture of his strength. She’d imagined kissing him, even. But his
taste
—

If she opened her mouth against his skin, the taste of it would be—

No taste, maybe just a little salt, and … and she realized she was actually sucking on the knuckle of her thumb to establish this for herself, right there in front of him. Whipping her hand away from her mouth, she shoved it into the pocket of her leather jacket.

“Here.” She thrust her box of chocolates at him, pressing it flat against his chest, a metal shield between her hand and his heat. “Now you know what I taste like.”

Wait. What the hell had she just said?

Joss brought one big, callused hand to cover hers, holding it against the metal she pressed against his chest. It must be her imagination that she could feel his heart thumping even through that aluminum box. It must be her own heart, beating in her brain.

Calluses and strength and warmth, sliding over the back of her hand. He held it and the box together, sliding it down, down his chest, to tuck the box in the waistband of his jeans. Célie’s brain fused. She just stared at that flat silvery box angled there where it was absolutely too hot for chocolates … they were going to melt … it …

He linked his fingers with hers, these big, firm fingers that felt
way
better than she had ever managed to imagine, making their space in between her smaller ones, and brought her hand to his mouth … to suck on the knuckle of her thumb. “Hmm,” he said. “I expected something a little more exciting.”

Hey! More
exciting
? She was going to dissolve in a puddle. Her heart felt like one of those cartoon hearts, thumping in great zigzag elastic bounds outside her body as if it wanted to break free.

“Maybe you’ll taste different in other places,” he said.