She bit the tip of her thumb. “Did the drink go well?”
Lucien’s tone shifted, warmed. “I think so. Sometimes a man just needs a chance to talk. He’s going through a divorce, and he had a tough last tour. How about your day?”
She smiled, lying back again. This was kind of a nice way to end the day. Cozy. Solid. “Great! We’re working with Tristan and Malorie to preserve Niccolò and Laurianne’s perfume book, and it is gorgeous. It’s amazing. I can’t tell you how exciting it is to get our hands on this. It’s the single most important artifact of Grasse’s development into a perfume capital that we have.”
“Yeah? Can you give me a behind the scenes look at it? Tristan told me that he and Malorie had found it, but he didn’t have it with him at the wedding.”
“Of course!” Elena said, delighted. “I would love to. I’ll take you this weekend.”
A murmuring, smiling noise from the other end of the connection. “So it’s a date then.”
Elena hesitated, realizing she’d just somehow stumbled into a commitment to him for this weekend, but she was too excited, and she rushed on. “Actually…would you be at all willing to let me have your ring, too?”
A tiny pause. “You want the ring?” Lucien’s voice sounded odd.
“Not to keep!” Elena hurried to reassure him. “Just for a special exhibit on Niccolò and Laurianne, now that you have all those treasures back.” Maybe with a mirror or a special camera and screen, they could show the inscription through a glass case. That inscription that said, J’y suis, j’y reste.
I am here and here I’ll stay. She sighed wistfully, wondering what it had been like to be Laurianne.
“You want to borrow the ring?” Lucien’s voice had grown so odd she was starting to wonder if she’d turned into Sam in Mordor or something. Maybe she was morphing in his vision into a slavering Orc.
“Not to keep it!” Good lord, she really did sound like Sam. “It’s okay if you don’t want to. I understand. But I’ll take very, very good care of it, if you want to trust it to me.”
“Will you.” Lucien’s voice had grown very neutral.
“And I’ll give it back,” Elena assured him.
Lucien made that sound he sometimes made with her, amused and resigned and exasperated all at once. “Good to know.”
Was it her, or was everyone else in the world just crazy sometimes? She blew her hair off her forehead. “Even if we’re not even speaking to each other at that point. I’d still give it back. I mean, the museum would. There would be a contract and insurance and everything.”
“I’ll think about it,” Lucien said. “Sometimes I have the strangest conversations with you.”
Yeah, him and her both.
“Tomorrow I’m going out with friends,” she told him firmly.
And she did do that, or rather she had them over for dinner, and that was great and everything, but it just made her miss being able to talk to him that night so badly it was as if she was already addicted to it.
Which made her play his sleep tight, bella audio again and curse herself as hopeless.
Chapter 17
He sat on her stone doorstep in front of her little blue door, the jasmine climbing up the stone wall around the door to frame him. He was looking at his phone, but he lifted his head as soon as she stepped into the end of the alley, and smiled.
And she felt as if all her world had just turned perfect.
Maybe she should pivot and run before this monster trust ate her alive.
“Did you get my text?” He smiled up at her as she reached him, as if all his world had just turned perfect, too. It reached in and squeezed at her heart.
“No.” She pulled out her phone. A text from him about twenty minutes before, letting her know he had arrived. “Sorry.”
She stood still in front of him, feeling suddenly shy. It was just so good to see him.
He patted his leg, and she just went and sat right down on it, dropping her purse on the stones by their feet. “It’s good to see you,” he said, heartfelt, and kissed her slow and sweet and long, as if he wanted to make up for a whole week right there but knew he couldn’t.
Feelings surged up in her and tried to overwhelm her, and the only thing that felt steady in her whole world was his thigh under her butt.
“Did you have fun with your friends?” he said, when the kiss finally broke, kneading his fingers into her lower back.
She nodded.
He smiled. “Did they steal your tongue?”
She shook her head.
So he kissed her again. Sweeter. Even familiar. “A picture is a lousy substitute for the real you.”
He pulled out his phone and stretched his arm up high to take a photo of them. “For next week,” he told her and texted it to her.
The two of them with lips full and flushed, her own eyes shining and a little shy, his blue and intense and smiling.
He put his phone away and stood and hugged her to his body a long moment. “I think you get more beautiful every day.”
“You’ve only known me about a week.”
“Yeah. It’s scary to think how beautiful you’re going to be by tomorrow.” He ran his hands up her back and down. “You might already be able to slay me with a look.”
“You’re silly,” she said, but she couldn’t help smiling, a surge of warmth from her middle up through her.
“No. You underestimate your power.”
She shook her head, but couldn’t stop smiling. “Did you calculate for my slaying glances in your battle tactics?”
“No. They blast through all my defenses, and now I just might have to suffer an epic defeat.” He leaned her back in the arch of her doorway to kiss her again, a curl of jasmine brushing his head.
“Do you…do you want to come upstairs?” she said. “Or is that not part of your tactics still?”
He pulled his head back and studied her, that way he did, as if he needed to see through her before he answered some of her questions.
“For a drink,” she said. “You must be tired.”
“After a sixty-minute plane trip? I’m not tired. But yes. I’d love to see your place.” He picked up a duffel sitting by the base of the steps.
She was very conscious of him following her up the narrow stair, and she liked the way her silky skirt brushed against her legs and slid across her butt as she climbed. Her apartment wasn’t huge, but it had a living space and a little kitchen and a decent-size bedroom, space enough to have her friends over and not space enough to feel as if she echoed in it.
She could feel Lucien looking around the living area, with its comfortable couch and bean bags so that friends could install themselves, as she opened the balcony shutters and went into the kitchen. “What would you like?”
“I brought you a present,” he said. She turned.
He unzipped his duffel enough to pull out a bag of lemons and a bottle of golden liquid. Limoncellu, the bottle said, the Corsican spelling.
He smiled at her. “Corsicans claim theirs is better than the Italians’.”
“It doesn’t bring back memories of the moment I destroyed your life?”
“I think I’ll call it ‘upended’.” He emptied the bag of Corsican lemons, with their bumpy, vivid yellow skins, into her nearly-empty fruit bowl, where they glowed like a promise of happiness right there in her kitchen. “Want some?”
She considered the bottle. They weren’t in Italy anymore. He was blurring her boundaries, between the real world and the world where it was okay to play at couples.
He did that all the freaking time. He made him seem like the real world. She picked up a lemon and pressed her nail into the skin to release a little spark of that bright, hopeful scent.
“Did you go see your family yet?”
He smiled and began opening the limoncellu bottle. “You know, bella, you claim I use you as a distraction from my family, but are you sure it’s not the other way around? Because you certainly do bring them up a lot wh
enever you’re feeling in over your head. Do you want to come with me to help them with the harvest tomorrow?”
Help with the roses? Her face lit. “Yes.”
Smiling, he opened cupboards to look for her glasses.
“And I do not feel in over my head.”
He laughed.
“Look, you might as well know that I’m not interested in a relationship.”
He began to laugh so hard that he had to set the thin glass down on the counter. “Oh, no, you don’t feel in over your head at all, do you?”
Elena folded her arms and gave him a very dirty look. She had to keep the dirty part up a while, because it took him a moment to stop laughing and appreciate it.
He bent and kissed her. Then kissed her again.
Then pulled her against him as he sank against the counter behind him and kissed her long and slow, making a little groaning sound like a man finally sinking into a rest after a long, hard day. His hands ran up her body and down, kneading her into him.
Trust and security rushed right back up through her, so charged and erotic. I like this spot.
Elena. Never get too attached to a certain spot. It’s never yours.
A shiver of old hurt ran through her body, as if someone had walked on her wounds, and she pulled back.
Lucien drew a lock of her hair through his fingers. “Maybe we should go out for drinks,” he murmured, gazing down at her with so much possessiveness that it confused the hell out of all those old wounds. They felt coddled. “Dinner on the place?”
“Could we invite Madame Colette?” Elena said. “I know she would be so happy to see you.”
An odd smile on Lucien’s face. Still possessive. A little rueful. A little tender. “That’s a very nice thought.” He stroked his thumb across her cheek as if he loved to touch it. “And so exactly like you to duck behind my family.”
Was it? Elena tried to think through her motivations but was only sure of one. “I love Madame Colette,” she said, stubbornly, as if someone had thought about trying to wrest that from her, too.
Lucien’s hand spread against her cheek, and his eyes were so warm.
“Anyway, getting you back with your family is the whole point of this. You need a home.” She was positive about it.
“Mmm. Tell me, Elena, why do you always think of family and home in the second and third person?”
“What?”
“As something that you make happen for other people. You’re not in it.”
Elena pulled back, all the way to the bar and the bowl of lemons. She focused on them long enough to regroup, curving her hand around their bumpy skin. “We should bring some lemons to Madame Colette. She would love them.”
Lucien sighed, studied her one moment more, and then went back into the living area to his duffel, pulling out another bag of bright yellow fruit. “I thought so, too.”
Elena broke into a delighted smile, on her own golden wave of possessiveness. You’re a good guy, Capitaine Fontaine.
And also—this whole restoring him to his family idea was working. His roots had found their soil again and were stretching out to sink themselves into it. She had done it.
She had given him a home.
Chapter 18
Elena radiated security and happiness in the company of his aunt. The streets were sometimes too narrow to allow three people abreast, so Lucien had fallen a few steps behind, watching the two of them. The way Elena’s head turned up to Tante Colette’s, the way his tough Tante Colette had a certain gentleness for her. It must do her heart good to see the granddaughter of a little girl she had saved grown up to be such a warm-spirited person.
To think Elena could have been snuffed out seventy years ago. That was what the Nazis had tried to do, after all—erase her genes from the earth.
I owe you, he thought to his aunt’s straight back. We all owe you.
They passed under an abundance of rich fuchsia-colored bougainvillea, arching over the cobblestoned street. Elena was on the subject of the old forbidden balls, eagerly inquisitive. Where did the balls take place? Did anybody ever get arrested by the gendarmes? Who were the best musicians in this area? What did Tante Colette wear to them? Was Lucien always such a good dancer? Wait, she’d jumped a couple of generations there.
A small smile from his aunt. “That boy would be out on the dance floor clapping his little baby hands when he was still in diapers.”
Seriously, Tante Colette? Did you have to mention diapers? I’m trying to impress her here. Paratrooper, former commando, captain in the Foreign Legion.
Elena sent a bright smile at him over her shoulder.
Okay, fine, maybe his aunt knew what she was doing.
There was something profoundly…easing, to pull out chairs for both of them on the place at the top of town. He could see the sea and Corsica in the distance, the twilight warming the lights of all the houses that filled the slopes between Sainte-Mère and the water. Nothing about the open place was all that different from Corsica, off base. The court for boules over there with the old men playing, the pine trees around it, the paving stones, and the kind of golden warmth that came from the people gathered at tables to share a drink and a meal and their time together. Because spending it together made it richer.
But the company was different. Feminine and strong and belonging to him in a way his men—despite the fact that they were his men—didn’t. His aunt, whom he had known since he was in diapers, who had tended to his growth the same way she tended her garden—trimming off a branch that was growing wrong, with some moral guidance, making sure he had enough sunlight and enough nourishment for his roots, with the way she listened so well that a kid talked himself around to the right answer.
And Elena, who…he watched her. The way her open love and admiration for his aunt added to her vibrancy. The way the breeze pulled at that auburn hair. The slim strength of her arms, one gesturing, the other resting on the table near his. That chipped glass heart that dangled deep red above the table as she leaned forward, into her conversation with his aunt. Yes, both she and his aunt felt his, profoundly his. An old treasure from his past, that he had rediscovered, and a new treasure that had walked out of a sunset in Italy, into his life.
He closed his hand over Elena’s, content to listen to the two women talk. To direct their attention to the waiter when he hovered, to refill their drinks from the bottle left on the table, to enjoy how the lights below them sparkled more and more the darker it grew.
Elena didn’t understand about easy. Ease like this was a rare and precious thing.
A man who stumbled upon it knew damn well better than to let it get away from him.
You hooked me, Elena. I may be one hell of a lot bigger fish than you expected, but that doesn’t mean you get to throw me back.
***
“So you did all right in the Legion,” Tante Colette said quietly, when Elena left the table to go to the bathroom. “Grew tougher. Smarter. Learned how to spot what you want.”
He smiled at his aunt. “How can you tell that? We’re just sitting here enjoying the view.”
“You’re a paratrooper. A commando.”
“Former commando,” he specified scrupulously. To accept the promotion to captain, he had had to choose to leave his commando unit and take on a company. He’d chosen the responsibillity, although he had let the adrenaline and the tight bonding with his former unit go with a great deal of regret.
“Captain in the Foreign Legion. That’s a hard job. For a hard man.”
Lucien opened his mouth but then decided not to argue. It was just…people had this impression about the Legion. Maybe about military men in general. Yes, you had to be a badass. You had to be tough. But from his own perspective, inside the job of leading those men, of becoming the man whom wary loners learned to trust…he thought it also took a lot of heart.
People who believed in no one and nothing weren’t going to start believing in you enough to follow you into battle unless you gave them a
good reason.
“But here you are. Going after what’s important.”
Lucien remained discreetly silent, his eyes flicking toward the restaurant door where Elena had disappeared.
“I worried about you in the Legion. That’s a hard crucible. I worried you would become someone I didn’t know, and maybe didn’t want to know. That happened a lot, with people caught in the war. But you kept your core. I still recognize you.”
Lucien said nothing, but something released in the nape of his neck and spread through his shoulders and down his back. Relief.
“I don’t see how you can tell any of this, Tante Colette.”
“You’re getting that girl to trust you.” Elena re-appeared at the restaurant door. Colette sat back. “And she’s a wary one. Even more careful than an old Resistance fighter to give her trust. Although she never would tell me why.”
***
Elena’s heart thumped, thumped, thumped as Lucien followed her up her little staircase. She missed Madame Colette already. The safety of her. The security.
But oh, she liked the way her skirt slid over her butt with Lucien watching it. His own strength and promise of security prowled after her up the stairs, as if it was going to catch her. All she had to do was trip and fall back into it…and it would catch her and hold her tight.
“Still want that limoncellu?” he asked her, leaning an elbow on the bar counter, big body filling her kitchen. She always left the kitchen lights on their dim setting to welcome herself home, and she had not yet turned on any other lights, so the apartment held a quiet to it. An intimacy and promise of night.
“Maybe just a sip.” She held her thumb and index finger a centimeter apart.
He poured her a couple of finger’s widths in one of her narrow apéritif glasses, added ice and soda water, and slid it to her, pouring a similarly small portion for himself.
A sip of it, like Italy, her eyes lifting to his. The evening in Italy had started out so magically. As if anything was possible, just for a night.
She touched her lionheart. That, if it got one more chip, might shatter. But you can’t be a lionheart if you’re afraid of breaking yourself.
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