“Must have been so painful for you, when all those people who like easy things turned back when the going got hard.”
She said nothing at all.
And still, this felt so easy, to hold her in his arms, on his thigh, cradled against him. As if everything in the world was right, as long as he had her here. Trusting him. Willing to let him hold her.
Ease and quiet and the pink shade all along the horizon and over the hills.
“You’re a lousy swan, Elena.”
“What?”
“I bet phoenix fledglings look pretty patchy and ugly to ducks, too, when they’re growing up in the wrong family.”
She lifted her head and gazed at him, her eyes damp and her face crinkled up.
He followed her chain down to her lionheart, lifted it, and kissed it, then tucked it carefully back away.
She hid her face in the join of his shoulder again. Not so much as if she was hiding from him, but as if it made her feel safe. He tightened his arms just a little. You are, in fact, safe.
“It was the second time I went into foster care,” she whispered. “But the first time I was just a baby, so I didn’t remember. This was the first time I knew. I was terrified and crying and clinging to my mother. She was crying, too. That was when she gave me the heart. So I could be un coeur de lion.”
God, what a story to twist a man’s heart out. He’d never felt so fucking helpless in his life as against this, the things that had happened to a little girl he hadn’t even known. At least when his mother had exploded his life around his ears, he’d been eighteen, old enough to be a man.
“They were a really good family,” she said. “They were really happy to be given a little girl to care for, I was just what they had wanted, and they were very gentle with me about how hard it was for me to adjust, and the mom liked to buy me pretty clothes. I loved them. But my mom got better, and I loved her, too, and she got me back, and then the next family after that…they didn’t really like me. They were older, and it was their first time being foster parents, and I guess it just wasn’t what they had expected. They’d send me to bed at seven and then talk about how impossible I was, so rude I didn’t even know to offer to pour everyone’s water when I got my own, that kind of thing. I think it was only this past year or so that I realized I wasn’t actually a terrible person at the age of eight, that they were just…not cut out to be foster parents. And I still have to tell myself that. I don’t feel as if I wasn’t to blame.”
Assholes. The salary for fostering counted toward the years of work a French citizen needed to accumulate in order to qualify for retirement. Sometimes that meant people took the job who only imagined they liked children and who couldn’t find another job and thought fostering would be an easy one.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you that,” she said. “I’m sorry. I always tell you the most downer things.”
No. He thought that when a whole continent participated in genocide and therefore eradicated all possible extension of a family support network that a little five-year-old girl could have, the consequences might last a really long time. He thought she was telling him because, deep down, she knew he needed to know. That if she kept hiding all of this inside herself and didn’t trust him with it, they would never have a chance.
“I think,” he said very slowly, tracing her exposed necklace chain up and down, “that you hold on to this one so much because it’s the only one that hasn’t gotten broken yet. So you think if you hold tight enough, you can pretend your real heart isn’t broken either.”
Her eyes filled, as if maybe that truth had cut more cruelly through her self-protections than he had intended it to. He tightened his arms around her again. Stroked her head back onto his shoulder.
There. Again, that utter sense of rightness when she was tucked against him like this.
He gazed across the rose fields at the first star.
It wasn’t going to war that was so hard to give up with the Legion. It wasn’t his ambition. He thought he could even handle the loss of certainty in who he was, the years it might take him to re-form his identity as a civilian.
But his men…it would break his heart to leave his men.
So that would make two times in your life your heart was broken. As opposed to how many in hers?
He found her lionheart again, as if it had become his talisman, too, rubbing his thumb over the chips.
And if you leave the Legion, you get things in return. Your cousins back. A new place in this family. She would lose everything she ever managed to become, and what would she get in exchange?
She’d have no new place to grow. But you—you’d be able to take everything you once were, and everything you’ve become, and try to synthesize those into the man you need to be now. A man who knows how to build a family and to fight for it.
“I love you,” he told her again. What did she hear when he said that? Not something rare and special that he’d never told anyone before, he was pretty sure. He wondered what love meant to her. He didn’t think it meant security. She buried her face in his neck, and she wrapped her arms around him this time, but she didn’t answer.
“Go for a ride with me?” he said.
“You can’t leave your cousin’s wedding!”
“It will go on all night. We’ll come back. I know how much you like dancing.” He twined her hair around his finger, tweaked it gently. He liked dancing, too. But he didn’t want her to dance with her heart broken. He wanted her to dance happy and whole.
She looked at him, as if she was wondering if he was just a creature formed out of shadow and sunset or if he might actually be true.
But after fifteen years of challenge and war, of being part of a unit and of leading men in life and death, he knew some things about himself. I am true.
His hand curved against her face. His thumb stroked her cheekbone. “We’ll take it slow,” he promised.
Chapter 28
The lavender was just starting to bloom, the first tiny flowers opening on some of the sprigs. If bees had found those tiny purple flowers, they had all gone back to their hive with the setting sun or hunkered down somewhere to wait until morning.
Lucien settled between rows and pulled her down to her spot between his knees with a sigh, as if every tension in his body had flowed away. She nestled there, his presence siphoning away her fear. The dusk had deepened enough that the lights sparkled in the valley and on the hills and way out there, that faint glint of Corsica. The moon which had been full at Damien’s wedding shone three-quarters full again.
They were all alone in the world here. And it was lovely.
“I used to think of you as a loner,” she said. “Who went off to join the Foreign Legion. Even in Italy I thought that. I thought you needed me to give you a home, and it was a thing I could do for you, to say thank you for helping me fifteen years ago. A thing I could do for your grandfather and your Tante Colette, to thank them. But you’ve always been intensely social, haven’t you?” His cousins. His very close working conditions with all those men.
“I like this,” he said. “More than I know how to tell you. Being alone with you.”
“Yeah.” She sighed wistfully and rested her cheek against his knee, her arm curved around his thigh, turned mostly away from him even though nestled in the shape of his body. She would like having him in her alone space, too. Saying sleep tight, bella in person.
His hand stroked her hair. “Nobody ever did anything hard for you, did they? Not ever.”
“My mom.” She felt a little indignant. “She pulled herself together so many times. It’s hard to stop an opiate addiction, even for a while.”
Lucien was silent a moment behind her. Then he sighed, too. “Succeeded at anything hard for you, then, let’s say.”
Elena was quiet. She wished still so much that she could fix her poor mom. Right now her mom was successfully handling rehab, even though Elena couldn’t go see her often because it woke all her mother’s guilt about h
er childhood and that was the kind of thing that might drive her back toward drugs. She’d done well in rehab a few times before, then lapsed later, but this time was a longer program, and Elena…well, she knew better than to have much hope. But she did have some anyway.
Kind of like she did sitting here, surrounded by Lucien, gazing at that distant glint of Corsica.
“I’m sorry I overreacted,” she began.
His hand moved over her hair with just the right degree of heaviness, as if the stroking could sink all through her body. “I didn’t think you overreacted. I thought you should have maintained communication about your reaction and not just cut to radio silence like that.”
Maybe. But it had hurt so much. And every time anyone had ever explained to her why they were saying good-bye, it hadn’t made her feel better.
“I don’t even know if you wanted something long-term, yourself,” she said. Stupid dreams of permanence, sneaking up on her again. It was his fault. He seemed so damn permanent.
“I do.” Lucien’s voice, deep and firm behind her, resonating through her bones.
She loved that resonance. She would miss it so much, if she lost it.
“Lots of couples can only see each other on weekends,” she said. She didn’t know a single one, but she’d heard of that kind of thing. There had been her friend Suzanne, who tried maintaining a relationship with her boyfriend after she got a job in Paris, until they both started cheating on each other.
Lucien kept petting her hair. “If I re-up, the contract they’re trying to get me to sign is for five years. Can you see yourself doing weekends for five years?”
No. Her heart twisted. She had not, ever, dreamed of a five-year weekend-maybe relationship. She didn’t dream too much for herself—she didn’t believe in it. But if she had, it would have been something more like what Layla and Jess and Allegra and Malorie had.
Someone they could count on.
Never drink limoncello with a stranger in Italy.
“So you need me to quit.” His voice was thoughtful and matter-of-fact, as it so often was. This is the situation. This is my objective. Now I choose how to get to it.
But Elena shivered in horror. “No. No, I can’t ask you to do that.”
“I know you can’t ask. You think I’d say no.”
“It’s not just that!” Although…of course he would say no. “I don’t want you to have to give up a family again.” It was too enormous—to ask him to give up everything he had become for her.
“I admit that it’s tough,” he said, “but—”
“And I only have me to give up,” she said. “Just me. So it wouldn’t—matter as much.” A tiny hiccup in her voice, but she suppressed it. She never had mattered as much, but—do you want to give up the way he looks at you? No. So tough it the hell up, just like he said.
His eyes tightened as he searched her face. He lifted a hand to her hair. “Elena—”
She turned back around to face the sea. “I could finish up my PhD.”
“What?”
“That is—this is premature, obviously. But if we get sick of the weekend-only relationship”—hell, she was already sick of it, just in her imagination—“I could go back for my PhD. I can do most of that long distance. I might have to take a couple of new courses, but mostly all that I have left to do is write it. I could go back to my research into the fates of children lost in the war.”
“Elena. You told me you hated doing that. It tore you up.”
“It needs doing.”
“Yes, but…Elena, if you find that a healing thing to do, then by all means, I’ll support you. But I thought you needed to move on. Focus on flowers and perfumes and something hopeful. You told me so yourself.”
She closed her eyes tight a moment. “Fine. I’ll keep thinking. Maybe I could change my thesis, although I would probably have to do more coursework, which I’d have to do on the mainland. I just—” She broke off. God, it was going to be so lonely living on that base. All that alien hierarchy, all the women’s worth predicated on the men’s. Maybe if she’d had a father or a grandfather, maybe if the women in her family had had a habit of forming themselves around a patriarch, it might seem more doable now. But everything in her rejected the gender roles on that base. The tiny, tiny dependent space left for the women.
“And what would you do after you finished your dissertation?” Lucien said. “If we’re thinking long term. Because I was thinking longer than just the next four or five years.”
Four or five years of themselves was so much more than anyone had ever given Elena. Wouldn’t it be wonderful? To let the thought of him stretch out all the way to the horizon, as if she would never reach the end of him, as if he would always hold her tight.
But what would she do, after she finished her PhD, if he was still in the Legion? Maybe she couldn’t cobble together a forever out of short-term solutions.
“I’m still thinking,” she said, rather hopelessly. “I have no idea.” I think I was happy, before I met you. And I got tempted by you into a world where all that old misery could come back.
Because he was just that tempting.
Be brave, Elena. You can’t be a lionheart if you’re afraid of breaking yourself.
Why did she always have to be brave?
Lucien closed his hand around her shoulder and turned her around to face him. “Elena. Did you hear what I said before? I love you.”
Elena looked down. So many people had told her they loved her. The word was as insubstantial as a wisp of fog.
Ephemeral. Easy to feel in the moment. Hard to keep.
Lucien curved his hand over her cheek and under her jaw, lifting her face so he could meet her eyes. “I love that you think Tinuviel is a reasonable girl’s name. I love the way you are so freaking irrational sometimes that you make me want to kiss you…and how I have to figure out that, deep down, there is a reason, but you have to trust me to tell me. I love your red hair and your resilience and the fact that, even though you were afraid to accumulate anything for yourself in your apartment, you still bought a dozen place settings and a dozen wine glasses and even a dozen champagne glasses, so you could make the home for your friends that you were afraid of for yourself. I love the way your eyes look into me as if you’ve never in your life met a man you could believe in—but you’re going to believe in me. Yes, you are, Elena. I’m still working on it.”
Her lips trembled, and she drove the edges down to try to steady them. He made her heart all mushy with hope and love. But he was wrong. I’m not going to believe in you. I don’t know how.
“I love how happy you are for other people at weddings, even when you’re afraid to be happy for yourself. I love how hard you tried to say the right thing to my fellow officers and my colonel, even though it hadn’t occurred to me that you might need help and so you were feeling abandoned under fire. I love how much you like the taste of lemon, and the feel of roses, and the scent of lavender. I love how pretty you are, because I guess I am that shallow. I love your lionheart.” He laid his big hand over the glass heart and her own heart at the same time, so that her heart thumped as if it was trying to jump out and nestle itself in his hand.
“The heart that’s been broken so many times,” he said. “And yet, you still worried about me more than you. And came to find me to make sure I was okay. Because you’re perforated with compassion.”
She looked down, and her lashes caught the tears swelling in her eyes and lifted them into the moonlight. “I also just like you,” she whispered. “When I’m with you, and you’re holding me, it makes me feel as if everything in the world is just right.”
“Easy,” he said gently, catching a tear, then drying it by tracing her eyebrow. “But Elena…a smart man might be willing to do very hard things, to keep something that feels so right and so easy.”
She sniffled and tried to pull herself together. “Well, yes, but I never suspected you had brains.”
He laughed, and two more tears spilled ov
er her eyelashes.
“That’s right, they always promote the idiots to be superior officers,” Lucien said. “That’s what I thought when I was a corporal, anyway. And they do say that in the army, a man always gets promoted to one rank higher than where he’s actually any good. So maybe I should quit before that happens.”
She shook her head rapidly, violently, so much that it trembled through her whole body. “You should never give up a home and family.”
“You had all those families, and not a single one ever chose you, did they?” The heel of his palm rubbed her little glass heart against her real heart, beating so stubbornly. “I can see why it makes you a little angry, that I have an embarrassment of riches, when it comes to families.” His blue eyes still had that crinkle of warmth for her, but they were very serious. “Elena. Even with both those strong families, the one I choose…is you.”
He pulled his dog tags over his head and gazed at them in his hard palm a moment. His thumb ran over the raised words FONTAINE Julien. Touched his blood type. He stirred the twin tags to reveal the ring underneath them.
A smile twisted his mouth. “I wonder how hard it was for a penniless mercenary out of Italy to convince a competent, successful glove-maker with a perfectly good life to let him have all that power over hers.” He pushed his pinky finger against the ring, and could barely get it on the tip. “We don’t know much about either of them, but we know enough about the time period to know that an economically secure widow was far better off staying that way than marrying an arrogant stranger with a violent past. How the hell did Niccolò ever manage to get Laurianne to trust him enough to let him slip this ring on her finger?”
“He probably had good biceps,” Elena said, resigned, and Lucien laughed a little again.
“You are so damn kissable.” He slipped the dog tag chain over her head, settling the tags and the ring over her lionheart.
Elena started, as if he’d just tipped her over the edge of a sandy slope and she was sliding down, down, down into she wasn’t sure what. Hopefully not somewhere she would be slowly digested over a thousand years. “Don’t you need these?”
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