A Kiss in Lavender

by Laura Florand

  “I didn’t mean it that way.” His hand shifted from the burlap to her knee. “I’ve had far too many one-night stands to judge you for one. I just wanted to know. If there was anything unique about me, to you.”

  Elena looked down at him helplessly. He didn’t realize how unique he was? Come on.

  Maybe spending most of his life in uniform in a mass of similarly trained men blinded him to how much he stood out, in a world full of lemons and roses and everyday life?

  “I had a very hard time letting you leave with your buddy Antoine last night,” he said. “Without doing something to him. And see? I didn’t.”

  “Seriously? Are you bragging that you didn’t start a fight at your cousin’s wedding?”

  He laughed a little up at her, eyes more blue than gray now. “I have been in the Foreign Legion for fifteen years,” he said meekly. “And we do have a reputation to maintain.”

  “For being male chauvinist pigs?”

  He laughed again and rubbed her thigh. That gentleness. Merde but it got to her. Maybe it was the contrast, the range it showed he was capable of—from hard watchfulness toward most of the world to careful softness with…well, her.

  It made her wonder if she could let down her cynical guard and show softness with him, too.

  “For not letting another man walk away with a man’s woman,” he corrected.

  Elena rolled her eyes. “Or exactly what I just said.”

  He blinked. “That’s male chauvinist?”

  “‘A man’s woman’? Seriously?”

  He considered that a moment, and then just smiled up at her. “You’re so damn pretty.”

  “And you’re changing the subject.” From a lot of things. Meeting her challenge with a distracting compliment. And changing the focus of his emotions from the impossible family ones to what must seem so easy and possible—her.

  He shrugged a little and played with the soft folds of her skirt, not trying to slip his hand up under it, just enjoying the texture. “It’s a nice subject.”

  It was. She could definitely get used to it. This factory building wasn’t even remotely a romantic spot, and yet there was a quiet safety here that seemed to build from him and wrap around her. It was almost the way she felt when she could sit near Madame Colette’s chair or stand by Jean-Jacques Rosier and see that old face soften for her. She had never known it was possible to feel that security around a sexy man.

  As if sexual attraction could be safe.

  Wow. Now that was just crazy talk.

  But it did feel safe. Even as he seemed to unwrap her, peel away all her guards, just by standing there, not pushing her, playing with her skirt. He’d done the exact same thing in Italy. The exact same thing last night in the rose fields.

  Elena drew a slow breath, and when it released all her muscles went with it, and she felt just quiet, and safe, and…aroused.

  How the hell could so much arousal feel so secure?

  Lucien’s lashes had fallen, that lean, weathered face focused on her hand as he slid his own under it, playing with her fingers. He seemed content to focus on her hand for a long time, spreading her fingers across his palm, running a thumb down one after the other, lifting some of them up on the tip of his thumb to study her nails. Fortunately, she’d planned to run into him and redone her polish that morning, because, well…she cared what she looked like to him. His lips curved as he ran his thumb over the smooth pearl-pink polish. “Very pretty.” He lifted one fingertip to his lips and kissed it. “Che bella.” A little glint of mischief as he looked up at her.

  She stiffened. “Don’t you start with the Italian.”

  “We did well in Italian. When we could barely say a word to each other.”

  “Oh, I see. So a woman’s more attractive if she can’t talk?”

  He cupped her hand over his mouth, as if to seal it shut, and laughed up at her over it. “Sounds as if you might think I’m more attractive if I keep my mouth shut.”

  “Quite possibly,” she said severely, and he laughed and nipped her palm. Arousal ran through her, so damn warm, so damn vulnerable, so damn secure. Oh, great, here she went. The woman who’d grown up without security falling for the strong, self-possessed military man. You going to walk right into that cliché without a second thought?

  But merde, he got to her, with that long, lean, powerful body, with the little crinkle at the corner of his eyes when she made him laugh and the way the sun lines reappeared when that crinkle relaxed again. She liked how he wasn’t young anymore, how he radiated experience and self-possession, a control and comprehension of his emotions in every situation except his family. He must have worked his way through fear and rage and grief in their most extreme renditions and figured out how to handle them and keep going.

  She liked the way the green T-shirt clung to hard pecs and heavy shoulders. She liked the glimpse of the rose tattoo under his sleeve that showed he had never forgotten his family, and wondered how drunk he’d been when he got it and how many times he’d tried to make himself laser it off. She liked the swell of his biceps against those sleeves.

  Really hard not to like that.

  She liked the way those sun lines reappeared right this second, as he gazed up at her, and the way his expression softened into sensuality as he turned his face into her wrist and brushed his lips there.

  She liked the jolt of pure, sweet hunger that ran up her arm to her heart.

  She liked the callused warmth that stroked up her arm and gently curved around the nape of her neck. Not too hard. Not forcing.

  She liked the way his eyes met hers as he pulled her head down, liked being higher, liked falling into him, liked the way her hair spilled around their faces in a veil of fire as he brought her lips to his.

  Warm and hungry and she missed the taste of lemon. And then she didn’t, because she had found the taste of him. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

  How well he kissed. As if it was something they did together. Him seeking, her responding. Him inviting, her coming inside and letting down her guard.

  Kissing him was an exploration that felt as warm and sure as curling in a great armchair by a fire and as rushingly exciting as jumping off a mountain. Like going on an adventure with a bodyguard by your side. Like running to the ends of the earth and finding you were home.

  Hunger bloomed in that safety, taking her over. Curiosity turned all erotic, the resilient hardness of his shoulders under her hands, the yielding and firming of his lips against hers, how quickly hers parted for the tease and play and pure, open longing of tongue.

  She’d imagined Lucien kissing her many times, back as a thirteen-year-old rescued by a hot nineteen-year-old. And yet she’d never imagined what he was really like at all.

  There was almost nothing left of him, of that teenager he’d been—maybe just that willingness to fight to save a stranger, that strong streak of honor that couldn’t conceive of letting a woman be hurt when he could stop it—and yet everything he was now, everything he’d become, called to her. She sank into him, sliding on burlap, opening her legs so he could step between them, pulling his head against her breasts.

  Chapter 9

  Easy. She was so damn easy.

  Arousal swelled through Lucien, pressing out all other thoughts. Shame, pain, confusion, the knowledge of how much he had lost. Desire created a bubble around them, safe from a past of work and laughter and bonding in this factory and fifteen years of not being here while his cousins grew into men.

  It siphoned off his need to flee back to Corsica, to where he had fifteen years of memories, of work and risk and laughter and bonding and trust, built with his bare hands and will, from scratch, by a man so new and so beholden to none that he’d started out by giving up his name.

  Giving up all this.

  Everything outside this bubble of desire.

  But here, inside it, the two of them were brand new. His mind could focus all on her. That silky feel of her auburn hair. The gloss of something shimmery she had put on her
lips, and the way she and he kissed all that gloss away, until it was only silk and slide and them. He could focus on goals that were clear, and incremental, and made sense. If he did this, and this, would she enjoy it so much that she’d let him touch her breasts next, slide his hand up her thigh again but under her skirt next time. Would she—

  She lifted her head, with a little gasp, and pulled his head hard against her breasts, bending over him, so that her hair still fell around them.

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. His face against that generous swell, her hair a veil against all the world.

  “Merde, you’re easy,” he whispered wonderingly.

  And he lost it.

  Her body stiffened up as if she’d been frozen solid, and she shoved them apart, her legs pulling up on the burlap as she withdrew.

  He looked up at her, trying to find out what had yanked them out of this moment, and caught a sheen in her eyes, a fierce crumpling of her mouth, as if he’d struck her straight to the heart. An abrupt shift from falling into him to fighting tears.

  What?

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  He’d said she was—hell. “Not like that.” He rested his hand on her thigh again, stroking.

  She struck it away.

  “To me,” he said. “You make me feel easy, Elena.” How to explain? “As if everything makes sense here.”

  “I get why men seek out women for sexual oblivion, thanks.”

  Shit.

  “Soldiers even have a reputation for it.” Those golden-brown eyes locked with his, and if you asked him, it was a real violation of their nature that they could go so ironically cool. “I bet some of them do it as a habit.”

  That set him back. His hand curled against the burlap. He’d had plenty of moments of sexual oblivion with someone picked up in a bar off base as soon as they got back from a mission.

  Maybe he did have a habit. It usually felt like a pretty damn good one.

  “Maybe you need better habits,” he said between his teeth. “Or to quit assuming I’m judging you.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “Oh, because ‘you’re easy’ is a compliment now?”

  It had felt like one when he said it. The ease that filled him, that had risen up and wrapped them in their own protective bubble, nothing in this world easier or surer than how much he wanted to keep touching her.

  “Yeah,” he finally said flatly. “Yeah, it was.”

  The ease that he had felt on a lookout above the Italian coast, soft breeze and luminous villages and a little play of words as her hair drifted across the space between them and grazed his arm and she never noticed it was teasing him that way. The ease that had toyed with him just like those strands of hair, almost there if she would let it, when he stood under a moon in a field of roses that hurt so much, and instead focused on her, rubbing her knuckles against his chin because he hoped she liked the prickles.

  “I wouldn’t sell ease short,” he said. “It isn’t as easy to come by as it makes itself sound.”

  That bar hook-up ease she correctly assumed was a habit, for example. It often left a man feeling cheap and alone and tired. Wondering whether it wasn’t about time to get out of the Legion and go build a normal life.

  Only he couldn’t get out of the Legion because, up until exactly two days ago when Miss Don’t Call Me Easy had dropped Niccolò’s ring on him, it was the only home he had.

  He closed his eyes, remembering that struggle in Italy after she left. The profound revulsion at the idea of her looking down at him the way she’d seemed to when she walked out. The frustration with himself for driving her away, and the complete inability to calm the roiling of emotions inside him enough to go after her on the spot and try to smooth things over. The damn ring burning his hand so much it made him feel like fucking Frodo.

  Visions of family crowding his head, visions of joy, childhood, and the brutal sudden loss of everything he was. But now I belong, he’d told himself. He’d made his place in the Legion. Now I know who I am.

  A him that didn’t need blood family. That didn’t need the Rosiers. A pure him he’d made all by himself. And a place he’d formed for himself, too, his own family, the Legion.

  With that solidity and solidarity at his back, the bedrock certainty of who he was, he had thought about Elena’s straight back as she walked away from him. He’d thought about the ring of fire he’d have to go through to follow her. And he’d told himself that he could surely go back to make some kind of peace with the Rosiers, because he was big enough that he no longer needed them. Also, she would be there. And knowing she would be there had made him feel oddly centered. Eased, yes.

  “Well, excuse me for not wanting to be your easy,” Elena said, with a curl of her lips.

  “Oh, fine then,” he snapped, profoundly frustrated. “Go ahead and be complicated, too.” He pressed the heel of his palm against his aching head and turned and paced a couple of strides.

  “Shut up,” Elena said to his completely silent back. “I’m not playing that sucker game. The sweet, compassionate little woman who wraps her maternal self all around the warrior and soothes his wounds.”

  He turned enough to give her a hard look he usually reserved for one of his men getting out of line. “A, I’m not wounded.”

  Elena rolled her eyes.

  What the fuck? He wasn’t wounded. “And B, thanks for caring.”

  She scowled at him, halfway to sulky. “Don’t you pull that on me. Act like I’d let you get inside my panties if only I was nice enough.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He arched his head back and glared at the ceiling. What a way to screw things up, you asshole. Never, ever tell a woman she’s easy. “I don’t even know what I was thinking. You’re the polar opposite of easy. You’re fucking high maintenance.”

  Elena put her chin in the air as if that was a well-deserved compliment. Or at least should be meant as a compliment.

  Lucien narrowed his eyes at a completely blameless blue barrel for a long moment. And when that failed to explode satisfyingly under the pressure, took a rueful breath, rubbed his nape, and sent her a sidelong look. “Still sexy as hell, though.”

  Elena looked confused.

  She was pretty as hell confused. Like maybe he wasn’t quite the man she expected all men to be.

  “Come on.” He picked her up off the burlap and set her back on her feet, letting his hands hold her hips just long enough to bend and kiss her hairline. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  She stared up at him as if he’d just sprouted two heads.

  “You know, Elena, something tells me you’ve met far too many assholes in your life.” He twined a lock of that gorgeous auburn hair around his callused finger, smiled in pure pleasure at how unfamiliar and yet perfect that looked, and then tucked it behind her ear. “Want me to fight the rest of them off for you?”

  For some reason, she looked as if he’d punched her right in the gut. Her lips parted, and all at once there was that hard-fought sheen in her eyes. “Oh, fuck you,” she said fiercely, and strode away leaving him staring dumbfounded.

  ***

  Of course the first person Lucien saw after that was his dad.

  Not his dad, fuck these habits of mind. Michel Rosier, the man who’d been tricked into parenting a…fucking cuckoo bird.

  He was smoking under one of the apricot trees near the extraction plant doors, and he stiffened just as much as Lucien did when they spotted each other. It was all Lucien could do not to snarl. His little escape to safer emotions had not worked out for him, and here he was right back in the worst of the fire.

  Lucien gazed across the gravel at the other man grimly. It doesn’t matter anymore. I’m bigger than you, I’m tougher than you. I don’t need a father now.

  He’d gotten his blue eyes from a one-night stand his mother had had a few years into a marriage she was already wanting to escape. An American tourist, she hadn’t even had a last name to give Lucien. Realizing she was pregnan
t had changed her mind about leaving the marriage, and at the time she’d kept her secret well. Back then, his mom had always insisted that he had Michel Rosier’s ears, his chin, his height, and that the blue eyes were a throwback to his grandfather. Stupid things he could see through for what they were now, looking at the puffier, aged version of the man he had thought his father, the gray hair and the weary lines around his brown eyes, as if life didn’t hold a whole hell of a lot for him.

  Yeah, well, it could have held a son.

  Michel Rosier looked at his watch and looked away, as if counting the minutes until he could shake the dust of this wedding from his feet and never have to see Lucien again. But then he looked back at Lucien.

  A slim body appeared suddenly by Lucien’s side and tucked herself under his arm, slipping her own arm around his waist. Lucien looked down at Elena. “Didn’t you just tell me to fuck off?”

  “My sense of self-preservation is perforated with compassion,” she said resignedly.

  Lucien gazed down at her thoughtfully, so glad to focus on her instead of his father he wished to hell she would let him kiss her again. “And you’re testing me by telling me that, aren’t you? Seeing what I do with knowledge of one of your weaknesses.”

  “You’ve spent most of your life steeped in military tactics. I’m expecting you to exploit it.”

  “You only exploit an enemy’s weaknesses, Elena. If someone’s on your side, you help compensate for their weaknesses and they help compensate for yours.”

  She got that stymied look on her face again, but her arm tightened around his waist. So he tightened his own around her, hugging her more securely to him.

  His fath—Michel Rosier took a half-step in their direction, almost as if he was going to attempt conversation. Or thought he had to and wanted to get it over with.

  “So there you are,” said a deep voice from Lucien’s right. Raoul. Charcoal in the hair that had once been all red-brown but still the same wolf-amber eyes, that hint of feral to them that he’d had ever since Lucien had found him shot and lying in a rudimentary hospital ward in Centrafrique a few years ago.