Some of Lucien’s tension eased. Raoul and he were only a few months apart in age and had been as close as the closest of brothers. And even to this day, Raoul was the only one who could understand. He, too, had burned bridges and stormed off at nineteen—they’d left within a week of each other. Although Raoul had kept ties, come home for Christmas at least, not changed his name.
Of course, Raoul really had been a Rosier. Only Lucien had had to deal with the fact that their whole “blood brothers” thing had been a fucking myth.
Although…another thought, further easing the tension at the back of his skull, sending lines of calm down through his shoulders. He had a big band of brothers now. And not one of them shared the same genes with him.
Maybe…maybe he’d put too much of his heart into the blood and biology of it back then and let that heart get broken. He spared a flickering glance at his non-biological father, who had taken a step back now at Raoul’s appearance.
Elena gave Raoul a brilliant smile, as if he’d earned her gold star of approval, poked her finger into Lucien’s chest, said sternly, “I meant what I said earlier. Fuck off,” and headed back to the pavilion. Lucien watched that beautiful auburn hair slide against her back as she walked away and just tucked the image into his mind, front and center, where he could dwell on it no matter what else hit him today.
When he looked around again, Michel Rosier was striding away, too. And Lucien was able to watch his back with a flat, cold dismissal. You weren’t worth me.
“Was wondering if you were ready to slip off,” Raoul said, watching his uncle go. “A lot to handle this weekend.”
Yeah, Raoul was probably the only one who could even start to understand. “I’ll let you know, before I go back. I won’t just disappear again, okay?”
“I figured.” No judgment whatsoever in Raoul. No room for judgment, since he’d made some huge screw-ups himself. “We’re both past the age of melodramatic gestures.”
Yeah, true enough. Lucien sighed and rubbed his cropped hair. He’d been such a teenager back then. Running off to become a man who needed no one but himself.
The Foreign Legion had taught him differently immediately. Teams. The Legion as family. He’d thrived on it. Was proud as hell of his family, the men who had become his brothers in arms as a commando and now all the men who looked to him for his lead.
“Still pissing women off, though, I see,” Raoul said mildly, a little gleam in those wolf eyes.
“Fuck you,” Lucien said cordially. It felt good to say. Like they were still as close as brothers.
A line of sharp teeth showed as Raoul bit back a grin.
“You’re engaged now?” Lucien said abruptly, on a fresh wave of incredulity at all the changes. He tried for their old rough humor. “How the hell did that happen? Did you blackmail her into it?”
“I hold a puppy hostage,” Raoul said promptly. “Send her photos from time to time of pitiful puppy eyes so she’ll know not to dump me.”
Lucien laughed, but filed the idea away. He might have to up his flirting game with Elena. Or just quit screwing up. “When are you getting married? Pépé said the two of you got engaged Christmas before last.” Raoul had never been one to beat around the bush, not back in the old days anyway. Saw what he wanted and pounced on it like a wolf on a bunny.
Raoul was silent for a moment. It was odd, walking shoulder to shoulder with him along the edge of the rose fields, as two grown men. It didn’t feel the same as it had when they were teenagers. Instead of adolescents trying to imitate their grandfather, it felt as if they were their grandfather in some way. Strong men who now should be leading others in their turn.
“We were waiting for you,” Raoul said.
Lucien stopped in his tracks. Raoul had just reached inside his lungs and pulled out all his breath.
“I knew you were nearing the fifteen year mark, and I thought if we held off a year, you…might be available. To be best man.”
Lucien stared straight ahead of him. Then he closed his eyes. He couldn’t handle this. He really couldn’t. He understood exactly where that crunched, fierce expression on Elena’s face came from when she fought so hard against a sudden sheen of tears. It had been overwhelming enough to find himself suddenly roped into Damien’s line of witnesses yesterday. But this…
“Fuck,” he muttered. “Jesus.” He pressed the heel of his palm to just below his heart. “Jesus, Raoul.”
Raoul said nothing.
Lucien grappled and grappled and still couldn’t come to grips with it, but finally had to open his eyes.
Raoul gave him such a funny look for a big, fierce predator of a man. A wanting, even delicate look. “That’s what we always were, right?” he said. “Together against the world?”
“Oh, fuck.” Lucien turned away, striding a few paces into the roses again, hunching his shoulders, breathing deep.
The muscles at the back of his neck clenched when Raoul finally spoke again, and then relaxed as he realized Raoul was just talking, giving him a conversational bridge. “Allegra—she’s very confident. In herself. In me. She didn’t have any need to hurry to get married, and I…”
Raoul’s voice trailed off. Lucien tilted his head back and stared at the blue sky.
“So anyway,” Raoul finally said, awkward and rough. “I guess you say the word, and we can set the date.”
“Jesus,” Lucien said. “Fuck, Raoul.”
“You know, I kind of figured you would say something like that,” Raoul finally said provocatively. “You always had a limited vocabulary.”
Lucien turned at last and gave him a speaking look.
“But then, after, I was hoping you’d say, ‘Congratulations. I’d be thrilled.’”
Raoul’s amber eyes watched him. Alert, a little feral still himself. Gentled around the edges of that feralness, though, compared to when Lucien had seen him in a hospital bed in Centrafrique. As if someone petted the wild wolf regularly these days.
The two of them had worked and played in these fields and through these hills, and fought plenty of times, too. Lucien had felt he’d lost everything, when he’d learned they weren’t true cousins. Maybe the fact that his father had rejected him so abruptly and completely had made it impossible for him to believe his cousins and his grandfather still thought of him as theirs.
He cleared his throat. “Congratulations,” he said roughly. “I’d be thrilled.”
He reached out and gripped Raoul’s shoulder, as he’d know to do to one of his men or fellow officers who asked for his support getting married. Yeah. “Congratulations,” he said again, a little more easily. Fifteen years they had missed of each other’s lives. And now Raoul was asking him to stand at his side as he changed his entire life. Lucien cleared his throat one more time. “If you promise to release the puppy so I know the bride is willing, I’d be thrilled.”
Chapter 10
Elena loved pretty much every part of that wedding, from beginning to end—the happiness, the family, Jess’s dress, the way Damien fought so hard not to become completely overwhelmed in public, the dancing, the fellowship. But maybe her absolute favorite moment of the second day was when Damien gave a speech.
It was a simple one. “I want to thank you all for coming. It means a lot to Jess and me that you would celebrate with us. People came from all over. Quebec.”
Clapping at the table that held the family from Quebec.
“Argentina.”
A cheer for Damien’s uncle, Raoul’s father, over there getting a fresh glass of champagne for the toast.
“New York.”
A group of Jess’s friends all cheered together.
“But one person came from farther than most. So far away that we were afraid he couldn’t come. I want to thank Lucien Rosier, my cousin, home from the Legion.” He turned and looked straight at Lucien, caught with his arms folded near the great tent door.
So tough-looking, so out of place still, even today when everyone else was in casual
clothes, too. It was that air of hardness, of a long time fighting and the war not over yet. He didn’t move when Damien drew attention to him, his expression carefully controlled, but Elena saw his biceps swell with his effort to handle it all. She might be a little over-focused on his biceps.
Damien lifted his champagne glass. “We’re glad to have you back,” he said simply.
Elena erupted into cheers, leading her table, the whole room joining in, until she had to hug herself because she really didn’t know Damien well enough to hug him.
No one here was her actual family. A familiar situation, so she didn’t dwell on it, just gazed happily at Lucien, as he tried so hard to handle guilt and love and hope. The Rosiers are awesome, she thought. I’ve got things started now. He’ll be all right.
It was late in the afternoon, the sun casting the shadows of one set of hills on the other across the valley, when she realized almost all but the closest of family was slowly dispersing back to their daily lives and it was time for her to go, too. She said good-byes and congratulations again, gathered her things, stopped by the bathroom, and headed out to her car.
And found Lucien leaning against the leather seat of his motorcycle beside it, waiting for her.
She stopped still a meter or so in front of him. His folded arms as he waited made his biceps swell even bigger, and he looked tough and hard and…patient. She wanted to sneak her fingers up under the edge of his sleeve and trace that tattoo that peeked out. See if it was just a rose or if it had someone’s name above it, too.
The name of the last woman who had been convinced he was steady and strong and the kind of guy she could count on forever.
“Come for a ride with me?” he said.
Oh, not again. “You know, you’ve been doing very well,” she said encouragingly. “Your family is so happy to see you. You don’t need to keep escaping.”
He studied her with that faint air of exasperation. “Might want to go for a ride with you, though. Have you looked at yourself in a mirror, ever?”
She frowned at him. “Men are so shallow.”
Lucien eyed her a moment. And then yawned and stretched hugely, reaching his arms high overhead so that his T-shirt pulled up to reveal ridged abs, then locking his hands behind his head and flexing his arms back, so that his biceps curved hard and his T-shirt stretched against his pecs. Slowly, he relaxed back against the bike, letting his hands fall to hook his thumbs in his jeans.
Elena snapped her jaw closed, over a surge of so much hunger it was embarrassing.
“I’m glad you’re so profound,” Lucien said.
She narrowed mean eyes at him.
“I like that in a woman, when she looks past the surface to see if, deep down, our souls match.”
“Oh, shut up.”
He smiled at her and held out a hand, fingers curled invitingly. “Come for a ride?”
“Why can’t you just stay with your family?” She flung out her hands, beyond exasperated.
“I need a break.”
Yeah, she could understand that. Kind of. She’d never really had a family welcome her home with delight, but if she had, it would have felt so wonderful that…maybe she would have sat down on the gravel and cried.
She bent her head and slid a sullen glance up at him. “And I’m easy?”
“No, you’re a pain in the ass.” He said it like a caress. “But yes. You make me feel”—he hesitated and used a military term—“at ease.”
She beetled her brows at him for a moment. “Fine.” She held up a hand. “But only because I’m perforated with compassion.”
“And I’m taking advantage of it,” he muttered. “Right. This is worse than holding a puppy hostage.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” He handed her a black-and-flame helmet. “From my dirt bike days as a kid. It was still in the old barn.”
“Does it have spiders in it?” She inspected it, but the inside looked completely free of even dust.
Lucien tweaked a lock of her hair. “No, bella. I checked that for you.”
Had he really? She smiled up at him, and his blue eyes gazing back at her looked so damn trustworthy. Like a guy who wouldn’t be so careless as to hand a woman a helmet full of spider webs. Which was a really important and vastly underrated measure of reliability, if you asked her. She took a step toward him, so utterly sucked in by this kind of attention that it scared the hell out of her.
“Fast or slow?” he said, as he slid the helmet on her head.
“I don’t know. I haven’t ever ridden a motorcycle before.”
Those warm, steady blue eyes. Callused fingers fastened the strap under her chin. “We’ll go slow,” he promised.
Chapter 11
It was just as sexy as she had imagined it, to ride on that powerful motorbike behind Lucien Rosier, holding onto him as he guided the bike up into the hills. It was also oddly reassuring. It probably would have been better if he had been a jerk about it and tried to scare her, but he took it slow, just as he promised, careful on the tight turns and reaching back to pat her thigh a couple of times and signal thumb up or down. She laid her hand on his jeans-clad thigh and showed a thumb up.
He took them up above the valley, to where they could see far out to the moon shining on the sea. Twilight was deep enough when he reached the heights that she wasn’t immediately sure of the nature of the field on the edge of which he parked the bike.
But as she walked into it, she knew immediately. Lavender. Not yet in bloom, but the leaves out already, and the tiny green buds starting to form on spikes. She brushed them and straightened with the scent of lavender on her fingertips. “I’ve seen this from below, but I’ve never been up here. It’s unusual to have lavender this close to the sea.”
Lucien shrugged in the moonlight, but it was one of those shrugs that didn’t seem nearly as indifferent as it was meant to. “I pushed for us to try it. It was one of those experiments a teenager gets into.”
Only a teenager in an agricultural perfume family, she thought with a little smile.
“I’ve always liked lavender, and I was convinced this particular plateau had the right balance of exposure and sea breezes to work maybe as well as the plateaus back dans les terres. I don’t know if they were ever able to produce any worthwhile oils from it, though.” He bent to run his hand over the leaves.
“They still maintain it,” she said. “Fifteen years later.”
He pinched some leaves between his fingers and lifted those fingers to his nose to scent. “Yeah.” The expression on his face was so complex.
“Maybe they were hoping you’d come back for it,” Elena couldn’t help saying.
He didn’t say anything, rubbing the leaves between his fingers and breathing in the scent. His lips were soft, though. Wistful. Finally he sat between the rows, facing the sea in the distance, setting his helmet down for her to sit on.
She chose to sit on the dirt instead, by his upraised knee, also facing the sea. His knee would have made such a great resting place for her cheek while she gazed at that view, which always made her feel a little sad, but…
Elena. No.
She wrapped her arm around her own upraised knee instead and rested her head on it. A warm hand settled over her nape and rubbed it gently, flexing in her hair.
“Will it be yours?” she said. “One day?”
Lucien was silent for long enough that she wished she hadn’t asked a painful question and turned to look at him. “I don’t know how well you know inheritance laws, but since my grandfather had five sons, he has to pass on one-sixth each of what he has equally to his sons. Some of the stock in Rosier SA has already been distributed and is separate from my grandfather’s personal holdings, and he’s given usufruct to various parts of the land in advance of his death. He can decide that Matt gets the land and someone else gets stock in Rosier SA, but the portions he passes on to his sons—or a son’s heir, in Matt’s case—have to be legally equivalent. He can only control distribu
tion of one-sixth himself—that’s the law. Now my…father. Michel Rosier. He has to pass on at least half of what he inherits to me. He doesn’t have a choice. It will kill him, but it’s the law. He can only dispose of half of it how he wants, provided no other heir appears out of the blue.”
His eyes flicked over her face at that, searching. What, did he think she had another Rosier heir in her pocket to bring out when they least expected?
“But I’m his only legally obligatory heir. So unlike my grandfather, he could, without detriment to any other child, sell the land he inherits and fritter all the income away—no law requires the inheritance to be unspent during his lifetime. And he might. That would be up to my grandfather, to dictate terms in his will that might prevent or allow that. Or to give him something other than land, or…whatever. Let’s just say that I’m not really sure anymore what my grandfather might think.” Lucien touched his T-shirt, feeling—oh, his dog tags. “But he certainly can't skip over his actual son for my sake, even if he wanted to. And I’m pretty damn sure Michel Rosier will do anything he can to not have to pass on his inheritance to me.”
“Bastard.” Elena scowled down into the valley at an invisible Michel Rosier. She could see the sparkles of light from the old mas and pavilion, but they were too high up to make out people.
“I’m not his son,” Lucien said, so excessively neutrally that she gave up and wrapped her arm around his leg, leaning her body against it and resting her head on his knee.
“I hate him,” Elena said fiercely.
“Yeah?” Lucien rubbed her hair against her nape again. “I like you, Elena Lyon.”
Please stop feeling so ridiculously happy around him, Elena. Stop it right now!
“All perforated with compassion,” Lucien said gently, and picked her up and re-settled her between his legs, back against his chest. “There.” Was it her, or did his voice grow more possessive with her all the time? “Warmer?”
She hadn’t been cold. But…yes. It was warmer. The view of the water didn’t even make her feel sad anymore.
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