All for You

by Laura Florand

  When I had no one to count on but me.

  “You got me a motorcycle?”

  “Like it?” Joss looked so pleased with himself.

  She rested her hand on the seat of her moped. She didn’t want to throw his gift back in his face. But, but … “I don’t have a license for a motorcycle.”

  “I’ll pay for the courses. It’s part of the present.”

  “I can afford the courses,” she said, a little indignant. She could afford a motorcycle, too, these days. It was just that she’d gotten attached to her little moped. It was cute, and it made her feel cheerful, and she’d always been able to count on it.

  “It’s a present, Célie.” Joss reached out and caught her hand, bringing it to rest on that black leather seat. “I want to do it for you. I wasn’t there to help you as you set out, just as you said.”

  Had she said that? She wasn’t sure that was quite what she had meant. Or it certainly wasn’t what she meant now, at twenty-three, grown-up and independent. “I was trying to say something about mutual help, Joss. Doing things together.”

  Like … shopping for a motorcycle. Or deciding on the purchase of one.

  Of course, they weren’t married or even living together and had barely started dating. As when he had left to join the Legion without talking to her about it, it wasn’t as if he owed her any input into his decisions.

  No matter how much they affected her?

  “Not just me clinging to you,” she said.

  “So you won’t be clinging on behind me.” Joss pushed her hand, still holding the keys, toward the ignition. “You’ll be driving yourself.”

  Right. It was a really nice present. Generous, special. Big. Kind of a guy thing to do, really—to give her a beautiful muscle machine, convinced that was the best present any human on the planet could ever want. And she always had liked motorcycles, as he knew.

  “Didn’t you need a motorcycle?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I can’t drive two at once. I wanted to get you one first.”

  Aww. Wow. Joss loved motorcycles. He rebuilt them. He loved the speed and power and control. And the first bike he bought, once he was free of the Legion, hadn’t been for himself but for her?

  Her heart melted. No man she had ever met would have been willing to get his girlfriend an impressive muscle machine in priority over himself. The sweetness of it. Her fingers stroked over the leather seat.

  “You don’t like it.”

  She looked up quickly. Joss’s face had fallen so low, but at her glance, he immediately schooled it into that neutral expression again.

  “Yes, I do!” she said quickly.

  He just looked at her, not buying it, his mouth that firm I-can-take-anything line.

  “It’s gorgeous. Wow, Joss.”

  He searched her face.

  “It’s a beast,” she said with delight. “All sleek and aggressive. Driving this thing must be amazing.”

  Except that she really didn’t want to give up her moped and change into that girl again. The one who depended on him.

  He started to smile a little bit. “It is. I tested it out. You’re going to love it.”

  “I’m sure I will!” And she was sure. She’d have liked to be involved in the decision, but … she could kind of get used to the idea of herself, all sleek and sexy on a bike instead of cute and determined on a moped. She might have to get a sexier leather jacket.

  “Hop on it.” Eagerness slipped back out from behind his neutral shield. “I’ll hold it to make sure you can balance.”

  So she straddled it while he held it for her. The weight compared to her moped and the sleek power between her legs gave her an exciting sense of slipping into some other role—Black Widow, maybe. Ha! No one will mess with me now. Maybe she should take martial arts. Whatever Black Widow did to get so tough.

  Of course, Black Widow probably never needed any man to hold her bike to make sure she could handle it. She looked up at Joss. A grin had escaped that control he kept on his expression. He looked like a boy.

  Actually, she kind of felt like a girl, receiving from that excited, proud boy his precious present of a snake.

  Something she wasn’t sure how to handle, and he really should have checked with her, but … the intention was so sweet.

  She smiled at him, her resistance melting. “Thank you.”

  “You really like it?” he checked, the doubt her initial reticence had instilled not quite ready to fade.

  “It’s beautiful. Do you think I look like Black Widow?” She leaned into the handgrips, trying to make herself look lethal.

  He smiled and touched her flyaway pixie cut. “Maybe with a helmet. One without flowers all over it.”

  Yeah, but … “I like the flowers.”

  He smiled, petting her hair. “Me, too, sweetheart. Maybe Célie is already the perfect, amazing person for you to be.”

  Aww. Damn it. She hopped off the bike and hugged him, hard. “Thank you.”

  “You really like it?”

  “I love it,” she said firmly. And she swallowed her deep reluctance when she added: “But I think for now you’ll have to drive.”

  ***

  “Joss.”

  Joss startled out of a daydream in which his fingers were slick and deep inside Célie, and she was twisting naked under him, her breasts lifting toward him in pleasure, and … he shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, incredulous. He never really lost his alertness in public these days. “God, your world is peaceful. Great park. Also, riding behind you on a motorcycle is really not that much better than riding behind you on a moped, in terms of its effect on my … what did you call it?.. Sexual starvation.”

  “You can’t still be sex-starved!” Célie said indignantly. “After last night!”

  “Oh, you have no idea.” He tucked his hands behind his head to make them behave and tilted his head back against the tree, gazing at the sky.

  She knelt on the grass and put her hands on her hips. “What would it take to make you not sex-starved?”

  “Uh …” His brain fused at all the possibilities that shot awake in it, all at once. They could … and she could … and he could … or she could … he finally managed to shake a couple of his synapses back to the purpose of producing speech. “I’m not sure that’s possible?”

  She tried to give him one of her minatory looks, but the blush on her cheeks and the way her eyes flicked over his body gave him a little bit of hope that she didn’t mind his sex obsession nearly as much as she wanted to pretend. So he smiled at her and blew her a kiss. Hell, that was fun. To finally be able to flirt with Célie, to tease her and stir her up.

  Thank God Dom Richard had stepped in to be her damn big brother instead of him.

  “How’s Ludo?” he asked suddenly. “In America? How’s he doing?”

  Célie’s face closed. She shrugged her shoulders sullenly. “I don’t know. He did the same thing you did, just went off without warning and never wrote.”

  Shit. That was pretty fucking crappy, to have betrayed her as badly as her real shit of a brother had. Actually, merde, he’d probably inspired Ludo to run off dramatically, like he had.

  Personally, he thought Célie was way better off without Ludo, but still … it was going to be a real damn trick, to teach Célie that she could depend on him again, like teaching a person who had spent her entire life walking on shifting sands that there was such a thing as rock.

  He itched to get back to work on the apartment. He could see its building from here. That would help convince Célie. A man who bought a home for them, who built it into the best possible space for them … that was solid. That was permanent.

  That was what she most wanted, right? Permanence from him.

  He reached out and caught her hand, putting it on his chest in lieu of the still-in-process apartment, just so she could get an idea of how solid and rocklike he was these days.

  She leaned enough into him to rest a little of her weight on that hand, and
he smiled.

  “Were you going to start talking any time soon?” Célie asked.

  Talk to her. See what she says she needs from you.

  “Sex is really a much more compelling subject for me.”

  “Joss!”

  He grinned at her. And blew her another kiss.

  She tried that squinty-eyed look on him that was so cute, but those squinty eyes lingered on his lips, and the squint softened out of them. He let his lips part just faintly, invitingly.

  “Damn it,” Célie said helplessly, and leaned far enough down to kiss him, nearly all her weight pressing for a moment into that hand on his chest.

  He toppled her all the way onto him and wrapped his arms around her.

  “Joss, you’re cheating.”

  He shrugged, enjoying the way that shifted his muscles under the weight of her body. “Can’t figure out how.” They were in a public park, a little out of the way of main traffic but not invisible, so he kept it subtle as he shifted the position of his thigh enough that it slid between hers and pressed against the seam of her jeans.

  She didn’t move away from that.

  He smiled, rubbing her back and maybe occasionally shifting that thigh.

  “About that communication,” Célie said.

  He sighed. “Célie … I just did it, all right? I just … I didn’t have a single doubt, I was absolutely determined, until I was sitting in that room after I signed the contract, surrounded by all the other potential engagés, and I started to think, ‘What the hell have I done?’ But I didn’t … you don’t have time for doubt. You’ll fail if you take time to doubt. You have to give it your all, all the time. So I did. And Célie … I just didn’t realize you would miss me that much. I knew you had a crush on me. That was one of the things I was trying to protect you from. But … I guess I was just that self-absorbed. I didn’t understand that I would actually make a hole in your life.”

  “Self-absorption?” Célie asked his chest suddenly. “Or not understanding your own worth?”

  Yeah. Maybe being too proud for his own actual worth, so proud he was ashamed to not be more, could really lead a man to let the girl he loved down.

  “I understand it now,” Joss said firmly. Or he thought he did. He just had to resist her anger and blame and doubts. The blame that wasn’t like his mother’s, because he wasn’t like his father, but sometimes it got to him anyway.

  She braced on her elbows on his lounging body to smile at him in approval.

  Something about that relaxed a smile out of him, too—that a statement of his worth didn’t make her react against bragging but made her glad.

  She might be angry with him, and she might blame him, but she still … believed in him. Believed that he had worth, that he was trying.

  “And it’s hard to think about anything else, once you’re in it,” he said. “You don’t get any sleep. For four damn months. There were weeks when we might have gotten seven hours of sleep total, the whole week, and all of that while we were spending our days scaling fortresses, crawling through mud under barbed wire, marching fifty kilometers with fifty kilos of equipment. They try to push you past all possible breaking points, and then they only keep the men who don’t break. Only about one in five make it through, and then, if you want to become a paratrooper, you go straight down to Corsica for even worse. Or better, depending on your attitude toward that intense a level of training and what it teaches you about what you can do.”

  “Did any crazy sergeant ever make you do two hundred push-ups in the hot sun with rocks in your mouth?” Célie’s fingers kneaded into his chest.

  Hell, they’d done way worse than that. He smiled at her. “The rocks in your mouth thing is for speaking a language other than French. For the twenty percent or so of us who actually were French, that wasn’t that big of a risk.”

  Her hand shifted to knead his biceps suspiciously. God, that felt good. He hardened his biceps just to show off. “And the push-up part?” she insisted.

  “There might have been a few push-up drills in there,” he allowed, amused. If she only knew. The guy he’d bought the motorcycle from—an old Legionnaire who liked to customize them—had warned him that civilians could never even begin to imagine it, the demands that a man’s mind and body could meet and surpass. Just get used to it, the other former Legionnaire had said. No one is going to ever really understand you and what you’ve done.

  “Josselin Castel,” Célie said sternly, and his full name just kind of silked all through him, erotically. “You’re supposed to be telling me about it. Communicating.”

  “I missed you.” He kneaded her butt. “That part was really hard.”

  She thunked her head against his chest in frustration, which surprised him.

  “Really. It was one of the hardest parts of the whole five years. That and …” He fell silent.

  She lifted her head. “And … ?”

  His silence hardened on him like a shell, this need not to talk, not to let any of this out.

  “Joss.” Her eyes were anxious.

  He closed his a moment.

  She laid her head on his chest and began to stroke up and down his biceps. Even to show off his muscles, he couldn’t keep them tense under that gentleness and slowly let them relax.

  “It’s kind of sexy to be shot at,” he said suddenly, and she flinched against him. “There’s this buzz to being in a firefight. Especially early on, when you don’t really know what death looks like yet. It’s not hard to kill enemies. It’s actually quite easy, especially with the training we had. You don’t think of them as people, you think of them as guns that you have to take out before they take you. But afterward, when the adrenaline dies down, it kind of … weighs in your belly.” He tried to knead his, reflexively, but her body covered it, so that he kneaded her lower back instead. “Like all the bullets you fired were swallowed instead and just lodged there, down in your gut, forever.”

  He was silent for a moment, and then said simply: “That’s hard. That’s really, really hard.”

  Her arms slid around him and tightened, holding on as well as she could.

  Damn it.

  Joss stared at the sky. Shit, was she pitying him now? “You know what’s really hard?” he said suddenly. “Doing all that and coming back and realizing I’m still not your hero. I’m just the guy who screwed up with you when I was barely twenty-one.”

  Célie’s head shot up from his chest. He watched his words shock across her face, and then the shock slowly subside into something very serious as she stared at him.

  He made himself shrug. “But I’ve done plenty of hard things. I told you. I don’t really know how to quit just because it’s hard. You’re the only stop button I’ve got.”

  Célie’s forehead crinkled slowly, her fingers worrying at his chest. “I’m sorry, Joss. I think you’re amazing. I always have.”

  Frustration tightened in him. “But I’m different now. Can’t you tell that? I couldn’t be amazing then and now. The word doesn’t even mean anything, if you can use it for both men. You’re just patting me on the head.” The incredible frustration, to pack himself with so much power and accomplishment and come back and find himself patted on the head while she wished for the man he’d been before. To be blamed for it. Hell, the only person who’d seemed to recognize what he’d made of himself was Jaime Corey. And maybe, a little bit, the damn big- brother substitute Célie had replaced him with, Dom Richard.

  Couldn’t Célie even tell that the man she’d had a crush on at eighteen had been the raw version? That was the man who’d walked off on her. This man, the man he’d forged himself into, would never have to do that.

  Célie was silent for a moment. “Joss. Remember all those pastries I would give you, when I was training at the bakery? Did you think those were amazing?”

  Just the thought of them made his mouth water, all those warm, buttery, delicious things offered to him, her eyes so bright with the pleasure of giving him pleasure. There had
been times out on maneuvers with only rations when he’d missed those flaky, beautiful pastries and the look in her eyes so bad that if he’d been a dog he would have howled. “Oh, yeah,” he said softly.

  “And what about these?” Célie picked up his box of chocolates and pried off the metal lid. “Do you think these are amazing?”

  He looked at their exquisite, perfect delicacy. “Yeah.” His face softened into a smile. He touched the edge of a chocolate, almost the same tingle running through his thumb as when he touched her cheek. “You did good, Célie.”

  “But what I’m doing now is much higher quality than what I was doing then. From an average baker en banlieue to the top chocolatier in Paris—that’s a big climb, Joss.”

  He smiled at her, pressing his thumb now into her full lower lip. “You did very, very good, Célie.”

  Her face suffused with pride and pleasure just at the words from him. But she persisted: “So you thought I was amazing both times? As an eighteen-year-old apprentice and working as one of the top chocolatiers in Paris?”

  “Oh, hell, yeah.” He slid his hand behind her head to sink his fingers into that wild pixie hair. He was so damn glad he got to kiss her when he wanted now. Or at least half the times he wanted. Fine, maybe one-one-hundredth. He bent his head to do it.

  “Did you even think about what you just said at all?” Célie asked.

  “Yeah.” His mouth closed over all that warm sweetness of hers. “God, I miss those pastries, though. Do you think you could make me some more sometime, just for me?” He spoke against her lips, too hungry to back off, shifting his head to kiss from more angles. Now this was amazing. As much as he loved having her run out of her bakery or her chocolate shop with something special and delicious to offer him, he’d take the deliciousness of her mouth over any other option, if he had to choose.

  But knowing Célie, if she got in the habit of letting him have her mouth, she’d never make him choose just that, over all the other ways she liked to lavish pleasure on him.

  “Joss.” Célie pulled away enough to thunk her forehead against his. “That was supposed to make your brain wake up to an important moment of understanding.”