A Kiss in Lavender

by Laura Florand

  “Can I tell you something?” she whispered suddenly.

  “Of course you can, chérie.”

  No, she really shouldn’t. “It might ruin the mood.”

  “What mood? We’re just up here taking a break where it’s quiet and there’s a nice view.”

  Oh. He wasn’t going to try for sex next? Really? Because what she for some damn reason wanted to say was a real mood dampener, she knew that in advance. And you’d kind of have to hate a man who pushed for sex right after you told him something like that.

  She hesitated against the warmth and strength of his body, wondering if she really wanted to douse all erotic undertones with a great big bucket of water.

  His arm squeezed her. “Go ahead.”

  She petted the leg of his jeans. Traced down to the hem. Traced over the seam work. “My grandmother, when she decided to…quit life. She went to the top of a cliff by the water, and…they found her body in the sea later, being pushed against the cliffs by the waves.”

  Lucien’s arm tightened around her, pulling her snug against him. His other hand petted the back of her head. “I’m sorry, bella. Were you very little?”

  “I wasn’t born yet.”

  Lucien didn’t say anything, and he didn’t stop stroking her head, so maybe it was her imagination that she could feel his puzzlement as to why something that had happened to someone she had never known should be preying on her mind.

  “Anyway, sometimes I think of her when I look at the water at night. And it makes me…sad.”

  “Okay.” Lucien’s hand stroked her hair.

  She sounded like an idiot, didn’t she? He must think she was some kind of perennial victim, dragging something like that out to play for sympathy. She should never have brought this up.

  “Were you sad in Italy?” he said.

  “No, it was Italy. It’s a different sea.”

  It was the same Mediterranean, but Lucien didn’t challenge the compartment she had set up in her brain to make Italy a safe, magic place.

  Elena sighed a long sigh and rested her head against his biceps. She should probably finish this story. Only it never finished. Still no one in her family had ever reached happily ever after. “You know that famous photo of the little Jewish girl asleep in rose petals in the back of a wagon?” she asked very quietly.

  “The little girl my grandparents and Tante Colette saved? Of course I know it.”

  She swallowed against a lump in her throat that never, ever went away when she thought about this. “That was my grandmother.”

  A long, hissing breath from Lucien. His arm tightened around her as if he’d like to pull her entirely into his body. The wall of his chest pressed against her at the force of his hug.

  “I love your grandparents. I love Madame Colette. They did everything they could. They got her to Switzerland.” And that border had been hard to cross. German guards on one side and Swiss on the other. Lucien’s mountain-born grandmother was the one who had known the ways through. “They made sure she got to a family that promised not to turn her back over to the Germans and to hide her from any sweeps. They’re my heroes, even more than you.”

  A tiny, surprised flex of his arm there, but she was focused on her story and didn’t really notice.

  “But…she was only five. And everyone else in her family was killed. And…I guess she just struggled so hard with depression, later. I think she tried having a baby, to make her own new family, with my mother. But it didn’t heal her. And when she thought my mother was old enough that she didn’t need her anymore”—her mother had been thirteen—“or maybe when she just decided that my mother, too, would be safer sent away from her, the way her own parents had to send her away, she, um…yeah.” She rested her head very wearily against his arm. Elena, why, why, why did you have to talk about this?

  She was a crazy person. What a way to ruin a beautiful evening with a hot guy. Was it subconscious self-destruction? Still following that pattern the bastard Nazis had started, no matter how hard she tried to resist it consciously?

  “Putain d’enfoirés,” Lucien said softly and bitterly.

  “Yeah.” The Nazis had been assholes. Elena rubbed her face against his arm with her nod and realized she had smeared a little wetness there. Damn it. This was why she had had to shift her focus from unidentified fates after her master’s thesis. She couldn’t turn her emotions off when she worked on it, ever.

  “Was your mother okay?” Lucien said.

  “Not really.” Elena rubbed her cheek against her own arm this time, to spare him the stupid tears. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I—can we talk about something else now?”

  “Of course we can.” He hugged her back against him. “Or maybe just not talk, would you like that?” His breath brushed warm over her hair.

  “I told you it was a mood killer,” she said after a while, tired. Why had she brought it up? You need to call that therapist and see if you can move your appointment up.

  “Good thing I had resolved not to jump your bones tonight, then.”

  She straightened her spine at that, twisting to give him a look.

  His smile was wry and warm and…supportive, somehow. He was helping her by changing the subject to something provocative. “Not that I don’t want to, bella, but your expectations are so low that sometimes it’s a real pleasure to defy them. I figure it’s good for you.”

  She stared at him, distracted by a rising sense of—was that outrage?—at him plotting something like that.

  He shrugged a little. “I’m not saying you might not have been able to override my convictions if you started dragging my clothes off in a crazy passion or anything, but you don’t seem to be getting drunk on the moonlight up here, so I’m thinking I’ll stick with my original plan.”

  “I thought you just wanted a break from your family,” she said slowly. “What do you mean, ‘plan’?”

  “Tactics, remember? No one says one action has to accomplish only one goal.”

  She stared at him, completely baffled by her own situation. “Have you ever heard of just flirting? And if you don’t get the response you want, moving on to the next person?”

  He shrugged again. “Always tended to favor chess over checkers, anyway. I think you really misunderstand what I mean when I say you make me feel easy. I don’t mean lazy.”

  Okay, this man was a total mystery to her. Which was ironic, because the main reason he was so puzzling was because he seemed so damn straightforward. “Will you stop acting as if I matter to you?”

  He laughed. “You’re really funny, Elena.”

  How was that funny? Because it was ridiculous to misinterpret his actions to such a degree as to think she mattered?

  His hand shaped her chin. “And beautiful by moonlight.” He leaned forward enough to kiss her.

  But when she started to sink into the kiss—all its warmth and passion and comfort—he pulled back and settled her head against his shoulder again. “Let’s just watch the moonlight and smell the lavender, shall we?”

  Oh, for crying out loud, was he carrying out his battle plan?

  He picked a sprig of the lavender and handed it to her, and somehow that quietened any urge to try to fight her corner. She didn’t know why. But she nestled in the hardness of his body, twirling the sprig under her nose, a little twist of lavender wrapped up in warmth and the indefinable scent of him.

  “This is pathetic,” she said very glumly.

  He raised his eyebrows as he looked down at her, amused. “Well, you know…I have been in the Legion for fifteen years. Maybe I’ll take whatever physical contact I can get.”

  Yeah, right. She’d seen the way pretty tourists flocked to those bars around Calvi, looking for a hot fling with a legionnaire. “Not you, me. I need to call that therapist and see if she has an appointment tomorrow,” she muttered. Although by tomorrow he’d probably be gone, so problem solved.

  Lucien was biting back a grin. “What’s this therapist going to help you
with here?”

  “I clearly have some kind of weakness for strong men who know how to take control of themselves and their situations.”

  Lucien’s eyes were crinkled at the corners in that way that filled her belly with warm fuzzies. “You’re going to go see a therapist to get him to teach you how to prefer weak men who have no self-control?”

  She frowned at him.

  “That’s going to be an interesting session,” he said, and kissed her—on the forehead. “Shh. Let’s just enjoy the view for a while.”

  Chapter 12

  Lucien could not remember, ever, having a woman fall asleep in his arms.

  It was nice. Made a man feel as if all those years building his strength and discipline had been well-spent.

  A little breeze got past the shelter of his body and stirred her hair across her sleep-parted lips, and he stroked the strand of it back. The moon stole the auburn color and turned it brown, but he could still imagine it. Damn, she was pretty. Her lashes lay long on her cheeks now, skin pale in the moonlight. Full, soft lips, and an expressive face that liked to frown and laugh and look at him as if he was some kind of alien from outer space.

  He was having so much fun getting to know her, and he’d barely started yet. Hell, he didn’t even know what she did for a living. Even his family wasn’t crazy enough for her to be able to find stray relatives for Tante Colette as a full-time job.

  He stroked a knuckle down the curve of her cheek. Pretty. Sexy. What did happen to the girl ugly duckling when she turned pretty, Elena?

  And what had she meant when she said he was one of her heroes?

  He slipped a finger under the chain of that little glass heart of hers and lifted it so that he wasn’t accidentally feeling up her breasts while he studied it. She had to be awake to allow him to touch her breasts. Murano glass, a brilliant, deep red in the daylight, with gold foil inside it making it richer. Maybe a memento from some trip to Venice, which was only a five-hour drive from here. He sure as hell hoped it wasn’t a romantic trip, but with this being a heart, odds were not in his favor there. Maybe the guy who’d given her such a cynical attitude toward men? And she carried it to remind her to keep her head on straight? Kind of a messed up memento, if so, but he’d seen men get worse tattoos. He touched the two chips in the glass, then settled it gently back over her shirt.

  Protectiveness wasn’t a feeling he got to indulge in very often. He’d missed it. A man just couldn’t be protective of other legionnaires. Men joined the Legion for the opposite of protection. Care-taking, sure—ever since he’d become an officer, more than half his job was care-taking, he swore. With the other half, a deep dichotomy, sending men into harm’s way, and the other half administrative, for his sins. And yes, being a captain in the 2e REP in the Foreign Legion took 150% of a man.

  But protectiveness he only got to do, say, in bars, when he made sure the woman with three legionnaires surrounding her wanted the attention and wasn’t feeling threatened by it. Or that the woman leaving the bar on the arm of one of his men hadn’t had too much to drink before she made that decision. He’d always been the guy to get in a fight on behalf of a strange woman. He’d been raised that way, by his grandfather, but also…he just liked it. Liked saving someone, liked being the hero, liked protecting, liked taking care.

  Hell, he’d nearly gotten kicked out of high school right there at the last for beating the crap out of some asshole who had cornered a barely-adolescent kid from the collège down the street. His grandfather was the one who had fought the school over his expulsion, cowing the director with icy moral authority. Lucien still remembered it. He’d held to that vision of his grandfather in the face of some of the great challenges he’d had in the Legion, especially as a young man who could easily have been led down some dark paths. He’d used the desire to retain his own moral authority to keep himself centered.

  This was a different kind of protectiveness, now. Intimate. Asleep in his arms on the top of the world, under the moon in a field of lavender, Elena Lyon felt very much his to guard.

  He grazed his thumb very gently over the curve of her biceps, thinking of that self-deprecating but defiant pride of hers in the fact that she lifted weights and did martial arts. Good for her. Still. Kind of a screwed up world she lived in, where she had to fight for herself. Evolution pretty obviously hadn’t intended it to be her forte.

  Nope. Evolution had pretty obviously made her forte one of getting a guy like him to want to fight for her.

  He smiled down at her, wondering if she’d argue with him or stare at him as if he had eyeballs stuck on two green antennae on top of his head if he told her that, and sat there enjoying the weight of her against him and the beautiful view.

  Home. It roiled around him too much down in the valley where those lights sparkled. But up here, where the scent of lavender cleared his head, and he could see the life he’d made for himself in the Legion there on that sparkle-and-shadow that was Corsica, and a beautiful, wannabe-tough little redhead curled in his arms, he felt for the first time at home.

  ***

  “I thought your battle plans didn’t include jumping my bones,” Elena said. Waking in his arms had made her very grumpy—he was going to take a wild stab here and say she had trust issues—and she was currently withdrawn into the corner of the passenger seat of her own car, her arms folded, taking about ten years off her age by how sulky she looked. He had stopped by the mas again and persuaded her to give him her keys so that he could take her to Sainte-Mère in the comfort of her car, but she was still arguing about it.

  “Tactics,” Lucien corrected. “They can be applied to something other than a battle.”

  “Then why are you insisting on driving me home?”

  “To make sure you get home safe,” he said patiently. Jesus. She had dated some prizes, hadn’t she?

  “How are you going to get home?”

  Now there was a question. The scent of lavender was gone, she was pushed to the far side of the car, and he wasn’t sure this was home anymore. And at the same time…Elena had been right, and it was a home he had needed to go back to. To reclaim? “You live in the same town as my Tante Colette, right? I can always sleep there. Maybe I’ll climb the wall of her garden and break my arm.”

  “What?”

  Damn, they’d had fun together, him and his cousins. “We always wanted to find the old missing treasures of our house from the war.” The ring was warm against his chest. “It was a game for us. So we climbed the wall of my aunt’s garden in the middle of the night to go on a treasure hunt, and I broke my arm.”

  The recalcitrant look faded as she turned her head against the back of the seat to watch him as he told the story.

  Lucien smiled a little. Elena Lyon might be all messed up and very stubborn, but she liked him, and he loved that. “My aunt’s face when she found us. She always leaves her door unlocked anyway, and it was pretty obvious that she thought there was no idiocy five boys would not get up to together.”

  “You five must have been holy terrors.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Lucien agreed fervently, and memories surged up in him. Running through the woods. Climbing cliff faces. Jumping off the Bonifaccio cliff the first time he ever went to Corsica, because he had to go save Tristan, that little brat, who had run and jumped off first. Building bonfires in the middle of the night. Trying to find Tristan before they got in trouble after the kid snuck away from them in his determination to hike to the sea by himself, since no one would drive him. That time Damien had cut himself up trying to catch the moon, which Tristan had also been involved in now that he thought about it. That kid was pure trouble.

  Hell, the things they’d gotten into.

  Good, good times.

  He took Elena’s hand, rubbing it as he handled the surge of emotions. Not so painful maybe, this time. Not so forbidden. As if he really could dwell on those memories, and the joy of them, without hurting himself.

  She let him hold her hand, but after a mom
ent, she pulled it back and tucked it under her arm, looking out the window, tilting her head until she got a fall of hair to hide her face.

  Okay.

  Walking through the cobbled streets of Sainte-Mère with her was another blast from the past. The jasmine grew thick up walls and over doors, white blooms all fresh from their winter rest. The old church clock tower glowed above them, and lamps warmed the night streets. It was late enough that most of the restaurants were shutting their doors, a murmur here and there of people still returning late but the streets mostly quiet. A hush of all the time in the world, and the stir of mortal humans enjoying the moments they had.

  They made you feel temporary, these streets. And they made you feel as if some part of you would be here for hundreds of years.

  They had pain in them—Elena’s grandmother, for example—and they had hope, and they had persistence. The streets had them, her hand in his, his blood thrumming and his body tightening, more and more eager for touch, with every step they took toward her building door.

  Oh, good. It was in a little angled alley shielded by jasmine where no one was likely to walk by.

  Just them. Just the night.

  ***

  Just them. Just the night. Elena could feel her breathing growing shallower, that waking of shimmery butterflies in her tummy, as they walked through the streets to her place, that big, callused hand holding hers so gently and so firmly, as if her hand inside it was as secure as it could be.

  She loved this little town enough to live in it, even though it gave her a twenty-minute commute to Grasse every day to work. She loved its little side streets, its arches, its jasmine, its quiet and cobblestones and the way the lamp light warmed the dark. She loved that Madame Colette lived here and so sometimes she could slip over there for tea, like a stray kitten that snuck in behind a legitimate guest and curled up in the knitting basket by the fire while the family members talked over and around it and hopefully never noticed.

  She always felt like that around the Rosiers, and unlike Antoine it suited her. She was perfectly happy in the knitting basket.