But tonight she felt as if one of those guests, one of those big family members she’d snuck in behind, had picked her up and was petting her, studying her, enjoying making her purr.
And she wasn’t a kitten. A kitten had about a million times more likelihood of being adopted permanently by whatever family noticed it, taken in and made part of the family, than a woman did.
The older you got, after all…the less likely a family would want you.
She flexed her fingers into his, to link them, not wanting to think about that.
And also because she wasn’t a kitten, dependent on whether someone petted her or gave her milk. She was a human being, and she didn’t need anyone, and she could make her own choices—she had all the choices in the world—and flexing her fingers to hold his hand proved it.
Seize experiences. They may be all you get to keep.
You can’t be a lionheart if you’re afraid of breaking yourself.
She stopped in front of her door and looked up at him. He was a lot bigger than she was. And she felt it suddenly so keenly not as a threat but as a promise that it made her want to claw at him to fight her way free before she believed in him.
It was the expression on his face when he looked down at her that did it. The warmth in his eyes that seemed especially for her. The curve of his lips that was almost…tender. Possessive.
Like he wanted to keep her.
It made her nearly frantic.
You can’t keep me! No one can! I’m only mine. Only. And that is just a fine way to be!
“This the door to your apartment or to the building?” Lucien said, lifting a fall of her hair and stroking his thumb over her cheek.
“The stair only gives access to my place.” She pointed upward to her balcony. The little wooden chair and table with chipped pale blue paint were shared between her and the friendly artist who lived below her, but the stair was private. The lamp over the door shone low and warm over the two of them, low enough not to bother everyone else on the street, warm enough to welcome her home. She liked making homes. This one was hers.
Lucien still held her car keys, and he unlocked her door and then tucked the keys back in the outer zip pocket of her purse. He leaned over her slow and easy, the same way he had flirted with her in Italy, giving her all the space and time she might need to push him away.
But she didn’t push him away. She liked being closed in against the door. She liked the way his shoulders shut out the rest of the world. She liked the way her lamplight fell so softly over them, as if it was only theirs. That shimmer of butterfly wings woke, rippling up through her.
“You still don’t believe me, do you?” he said, in that easy, deep voice, like a hand stroking her fur.
“Mmm…no?” She couldn’t focus on much but how close he was and how warm his body felt. But whatever he was asking her if she believed, odds were…probably not.
“That I’m only bringing you safe home. That I’m not going to…jump your bones.”
Well, no. Of course she didn’t believe that. But it was okay. Actually, it might be perfect. The wedding was over, he was almost certainly leaving tomorrow, and she knew that. It would be kind of like Italy. She wouldn’t start thinking things. Wanting things. Just a fling. Everybody had to have sex sometimes. It was good for your health.
Like chocolate.
Everybody knew that. And he was a really…really nice specimen of…his face was getting closer, his knuckles stroking her cheek, his eyes oddly…tender, still. Tender.
“But I’m not, Elena Lyon. Because it’s hard to teach a woman she can trust you if she actually can’t.”
“Mmm?” His lips were so close. And his words didn’t make any sense. So she murmured something placating, the kind of thing guys liked that made them think she was listening to their bullshit, and she lifted herself onto her toes.
He liked that. His head angled immediately to match hers.
“I’m just going to kiss you,” he breathed against her lips. “I’m going to kiss you for a long time.”
Oh, goodie. He kissed so damn well.
She could trust his kissing. She could trust everything about hi…no, no. Not that. Not everything. But the kissing.
Yes.
Warm and seeking, his hands sliding behind her neck and stroking down her body to her butt, his thigh nudging her back against her door. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled herself up into him, and he scooped his hands under her butt and gave her his thigh to help her climb.
She thought she might know what he meant by “easy”. It was so easy to kiss him. God, it was easy. She could do it forever.
Kissing and kissing, as if they were the only couple that had ever kissed in these thousand-year-old streets, as if they were every couple that had ever kissed, and they could kiss time away, kiss the world away, kiss in a fall of lamplight and a scent of jasmine, against an old wooden door framed by stone. His body hard and growing harder, the slide of his hands more hungry, his mouth more urgent. Her hands running over that hard body, digging into his butt and pulling. Her mouth sought more, nipping and sucking and teasing and taking.
All those butterflies in her tummy just soared up and flurried all around them like a curtain of colors, and all that was left inside her was want.
She dragged at him, but he wouldn’t come.
She pushed the door to the stairs open and fisted his shirt and pulled, but he covered her fist with his hand and pried it free and pulled her back against him, bracing his arm against the stone arch since the door was no longer there.
She dropped her fingers to grip the waist of his jeans and pulled, stepping back toward the stairs, but he pulled her right back to him, and kissed her some more, breathing hard, their hearts thundering.
“Lucien,” she whimpered.
“You said that once before.” His mouth brushed her hair back, tickling her ear. “When you were scared. But it’s okay now, Elena. I remember my name.”
“No, I mean…I don’t care about your tactics. I don’t care about your stupid battle plan.” She pulled on him.
“I do.” He braced his arm and kissed her so that she forgot how to talk.
Until she pulled him again, and again he wouldn’t come. “Lucien. I don’t care about your stupid long-term strategy.” Long-term strategy, as if. His idea of long term was probably forty-eight hours.
“I do.” He rubbed his mouth down her throat and teased the hollow with his tongue.
She actually stamped her foot. “Will you listen to me?”
He pushed her shirt aside and kissed over her collar bone, and she felt his mouth curve in a smile. That little smile, that she felt but couldn’t see, ran like an erotic charge all through her body. “Maybe…non parlo francese.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she groaned. “Don’t you start with the Italian.”
His smile traced up her throat again, brushed over her chin. “Ma sei bella,” he whispered to her. “Molto bella.”
She was beautiful? Oh, that, that…cheater.
“Bellissima.” He nipped her lower lip. And then kissed her again, on a sudden rush, as if his own hunger swamped him before he could stop it.
And she thought she’d won, but she must not know any tactics to win at sex. She only knew how to fight a good defense, to ward off intruders. Because somehow he still didn’t fall. He buried his face in her hair, making a rough sound as if his whole body hurt.
If his hair was long enough, she’d yank it in frustration. “It’s just upstairs.”
“Shh,” he said into her hair. He was breathing so hard it was like having a dragon tucked up against her neck.
And just as he’d done before, he forced himself back from that peak of urgency. He turned gentle again, elusively, maddeningly gentle, his lips grazing down the side of her neck. “I know where your bed is, Elena.” He kissed the join of her neck and shoulder. “I know how far away that wall is just on the other side of this door and how easy it would be t
o close it.” His teeth teased her collarbone. “I know what I could do on those stairs.” He nipped her, gently, a teasing hunger that seemed to run from her collarbone through every other bone in her body. “And I’m not going to, bella.”
“Why not?” she snapped, in frantic frustration.
He pulled back enough to look down at her. And there it was again. Despite how full and open that firm line of his lips had grown, despite the flush on his cheeks, despite the way the stone dug into his arm as he held himself back from her. That tenderness. That possessiveness. That gentleness that swamped her with such an overwhelming conviction of her own security that she wanted to smack him.
“Because I told you I wouldn’t, chérie. And it’s very hard to get a woman to trust you, if she actually can’t.”
He bent and kissed her, quick and firm and final, and straightened and pushed her back, through her doorway.
She stood on the other side of the threshold and stared at him as he took a long step back.
“Go.” He gestured. “Up the stairs.”
“I don’t understand you at all.”
“I know, bella. If you manage to move that appointment up, you can tell your therapist all about it. How you met this completely unpredictable man who kept his word. And practiced self-control.” He was rubbing his chest with his knuckles as if to calm himself, taking deep breaths, arching his head back to stare at the slender sky above the alley. But he still managed to give her that warm, amused look that crinkled up his eyes. As if he just flat out liked her. “Buona notte, bella.”
Elena clamped her teeth over a scream of frustration, so that it came out as strangled rage. Abruptly she spun and ran all the way up the stairs.
And straight out onto her balcony, where there was a convenient pot of lavender she could drop on his head.
But he was standing there looking up at her, and his expression was so damn…wistful. She gripped the railing. “I’m going to smack you if you speak Italian one more time.”
“Trust me, I am already suffering enough.” He reached under her arch and pulled the stairwell door closed. “Sleep tight, bella.”
And he strode stiffly away down the alley.
Chapter 13
The sun slanted over the valley, catching pink roses in its light, glinting off leaves, as the rows of roses filled with men and women in long sleeves and hats and sometimes head scarves. Fifteen years ago, much of their seasonal crew had come from Spain, but now apparently more came from Morocco. Lucien stood near the truck and took a slow, deep breath, full of fragrance and memories.
He glanced at Matt, who was surveying the fields with pride. Big now, a man whose body showed its muscle and his jaw a tendency to shadow, Matt seemed to have grown into the patriarchal-heir role he had filled so clumsily as a teenager. His birthright as heir had led to tension in his dealings with Raoul and Lucien himself, who were older than he was but not the only son of Jean-Jacques Rosier’s firstborn son, dead far too young. His role as heir had most certainly been part of the reason Raoul had ended up heading out to seek his own fortune. Lucien, who had always liked to range far, might have gone with him, but then learning he wasn’t really a Rosier had pushed him into an even more extreme choice.
Only the half-curls in Matt’s dark hair made him still a little familiar, and a tendency to growl to cover up how sensitive he was and impose his will. He was better at the growling these days, though, his voice deep and come into its own.
Lucien stared out at the morning fields, releasing a hard sigh. He’d opted for fifteen years of combat training and military exercises and actual war over this. The choice of a boy who had felt desperate. But now he saw the roses through the faces of his men, the medals he had earned, the impossible mountains he had climbed, the planes he had jumped out of—all the impossible things he had achieved himself and the impossible things he had trained other men to achieve.
I’m proud of who I’ve become.
But damn, I missed these roses.
I missed my family.
Involuntarily, his fingers slid under the edge of his T-shirt sleeve and rubbed the rose tattoo he had gotten once long ago, at twenty-one, when very drunk. One of the reasons he’d learned never to let himself get quite that shit-faced again. Plus, he’d moved higher up in the ranks, and a man responsible for his men had to keep his head.
“Is this why you left?” Matt growled abruptly, and Lucien glanced at him again, taken aback.
“This?”
Matt’s big shoulders were almost hunched, his voice very gruff. “This.” He gestured and cleared his throat. “The fact that you couldn’t have this.”
The fact that he couldn’t deserve this, maybe, rather. “I’m not even a biological part of this family, Matt,” Lucien said wearily. “How could I have imagined I should get this?”
Matt turned so aggressively that all Lucien’s fight instinct flared up, ready. “Oh, shut the fuck up about that,” Matt growled.
Lucien’s eyebrows went up. Was his little cousin challenging him? Okay, not little anymore, but he sure as hell didn’t have Lucien’s combat training and—hey. You’re not teenagers anymore. You don’t have to respond to his wolf challenge like you’re a wolf yourself. “Excuse me?”
“That ‘biologically part of this family’ shit. No one ever cared a fuck about that except you.”
Lucien stared at him, his jaw hardening. “Well,” he said, knowing his voice was going into that tone he used on his out-of-line men. “I am me. And I did care.”
“Well, it was a stupid reason to leave,” Matt growled and stalked off abruptly to go give orders.
Well, that was a…relief. The unadulteratedly joyful welcome during the wedding had made Lucien feel so totally wrong. Anger and wounds, now…those made sense. It felt right for them to show.
“He growls because he cares,” a wry voice said from behind Lucien, and Lucien turned toward his youngest cousin. Tristan was long and lean these days, and nothing like the still-awkward fourteen-year-old Lucien had left behind. He still had that wicked glint in his eye, though, as if he was surrounded by highly amusing people and was about to do something to get them all stirred up.
“I figured that out,” Lucien said dryly.
“Layla calls him Growly Bear,” Tristan said, with a lurking glee.
That jerked a laugh out of Lucien. “Does she really?” He’d known he liked that curly-haired fiancée of Matt’s when she got his grandfather out on the dance floor.
“Oh, yes,” Tristan said, in tones of great savoring.
Lucien grinned. Tristan had always liked to see his elder cousins get a bit of a comeuppance back in the old days, too. Not enough to really hurt them—he’d always been a highly empathetic kid—just enough to bring them down a peg. He’d struggled in school, but it was no surprise to learn he’d become a great perfumer. Specifically not a surprise because once in a while Lucien had checked the Rosier SA website, when he was maybe not shit-faced but a little drunk and willing to poke at old wounds.
Tristan shifted to the start of a row of roses, picking them as if it was a compulsion. The kid—hell, the man—lived on his nose.
So Lucien, perforce, shifted to start the row on the other side of the bush. That first touch of a rose stabbed him right in the heart.
But Tristan kept on lightly talking. “What’s Elena call you?”
“Trust me, if it was as embarrassing as Matt’s nickname, I wouldn’t tell you.”
Tristan grinned. “I’ll see if I can get it out of her.”
Lucien couldn’t figure out how his cousins had been so slow that one of them hadn’t snatched Elena Lyon up long ago. What the hell had they been doing?
You’re never going to know. You can look at photos. You can get glimpses of what you missed.
But you’re never going to know the teenagers and men they were for those fifteen years.
“If you flirt with her, I’ll have to kill you.” Lucien dropped a handful of roses in his pouch.
Tristan just grinned at him. “You and whose Legion?”
Lucien fixed him with the kind of look he’d frequently had to fix that kid with when he was a wiggly brat and Lucien was responsible for keeping him out of trouble. Along with Raoul, Lucien had been given the responsibility of keeping Tristan, Damien, and Matt out of trouble before he had even learned to read, a habit that had made his first promotion in the Legion come as a relief. Finally, I can keep these idiots in line. “Tristan. Don’t flirt with her.”
Hell, women these days might find Tristan irresistibly charming. He acted like a guy who was used to women finding him irresistibly charming.
“I’m engaged, actually,” Tristan said. “To Malorie Monsard. Just a couple of weeks ago.”
That stopped Lucien cold. “Engaged?” Even Tristan was engaged? “Hell, you’re only—”
“Twenty-nine,” Tristan supplied, holding Lucien’s eyes with an odd glint in his own. Not amused this time, not wicked. Almost…oh, yeah. Accusing.
“Twenty-nine.” It came out of Lucien with a huff of breath. He rubbed his hand over his head. Tristan had been fourteen when Lucien left. The kid of the family.
“I missed you,” Tristan said suddenly, low. “I mean…not to rub it in, but…just so you know.”
“Yeah.” Lucien looked down at the roses he was picking for a moment. “I missed you all, too,” he said, very, very low. Missed them so bad those first months that he’d been grateful for the relentless, even abusive training at La Ferme that had left him no energy at all to think.
“Yeah?” For some reason, it seemed to be what Tristan needed to hear. His expression eased. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”
But he hadn’t realized it before?
“It was a tough time,” Lucien said with difficulty.
Tristan looked at him over the rose bush a long moment, a straight, steady look that reminded Lucien of their grandfather or their Tante Colette when the elders searched his soul. A look that made him realize that, yes, Tristan was a man now. Suddenly, Tristan’s face split into that old Tristan smile, the one that always made everyone around him smile, too. “You know what, Lucien? I’m really glad to have you back.”
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