All for You (Paris Nights #1)(11)
“I was looking for you,” he said, and her brown gaze lifted and caught with his. He reached for her arm and pulled her out of the way of an elderly lady with a grocery trolley bag.
She jerked away and then had to apologize to the older woman for bumping into the groceries.
“Ludo got out two years ago,” Célie said tightly, once the woman had moved on. “But he went to America. He said it was better than staying here. He didn’t have a visa, but he didn’t come back, so I guess …” She shrugged, in an aggressive display of indifference.
“So you’ve been on your own?”
She looked a little confused. “Well, my mom.” She shrugged again. “Cousins.”
Célie’s mother and extended family were not exactly the rock on which a woman built a castle. “You’ve been on your own.”
She shook her head firmly. “I’ve had work. Dom.”
Dom. Joss frowned.
“Me.” She lifted her chin.
Her. Yes. He realized that his hand had reached for hers only when his palm grazed over the knuckles of a fist tightened to ward off his touch.
He shoved his hand into his pocket to get it to behave. “You.” He held her eyes. “That’s a lot to have.”
She blinked and her lips parted. She stared at him a second and then turned hastily to climb the steps of one of the footbridges arching over the canal, stopping in the middle of it to gaze at the water. As she stared down at it, not looking at him, a slow flush started to climb her cheekbones. She dashed at her eyes again.
He closed his much bigger hands around the railing, next to hers, but he made sure to leave enough space between them that she wouldn’t jerk away again.
It hurt like hell when she jerked away. Like electric shocks or something, maybe it would train him to quit reaching for her.
The dark water gave him something to focus on. Its quiet, its stillness, its ability to adapt and survive, its depth. He could gaze into it like a mirror, catch blurred glimpses of her face in it, as if he was still looking at her in his memories from the distance of another life.
“You’re mad at me,” he said finally.
She shook her head, and then shrugged, and didn’t look at him.
“Or upset.”
She shook her head, and then gave that exact same shrug. And still didn’t look at him.
He squinted over the canal, the banks to either side, the windows of the buildings, the rooftops—automatically checking everything in sight for possible trouble. But the only possible trouble he saw was the one he was already in. The one he hadn’t predicted and didn’t understand.
“I’m not very good at talking anymore,” he said at last. Most of his vocabulary these days consisted of swearwords. Not that either he or Célie had exactly had clean mouths back in their banlieue days, but still. Maybe he needed to take up reading Racine or something, now that he was back. Give himself a vocabulary beyond putain de bordel de merde and worse. “You were always the one who was good at talking.”
Laughing at him, teasing him, pushing for his attention. Saucy and amused and full of so much life that it had been all he could do not to grab her and pull her into his lap time and again as she laughed down at him while he was sitting on some graffiti-stained wall and she was bouncing around, too full of energy to sit. The number of times his palm had itched for that sassy butt as she glanced back over her shoulder, alight with mirth at some wicked, twitting comment she’d sent his way. But he’d known how a pretend swat of her butt would end. With his palm settling over that curve, taking possession of it, pulling her in.
His semi-friend’s little sister. Who deserved to have an older guy in the vicinity who looked after her, who didn’t harass her like every other damn bastard in their cité.
So he hadn’t harassed her. He’d looked after her. He’d looked after her so well that he’d left, so he could turn into the man who could look after her properly.
And now Célie didn’t say anything.
His hands tightened on the rail. “Are you not happy to see me?” The hurt of his own words sank deeper than any physical wound he’d ever had. No anesthesia for it, no way to get the bullet out, to stitch it up and help it heal.
Célie whipped around and launched herself so hard and fast at him that he barely caught her. He rocked back a step and seized her, and she seized him, this clawing embrace where her nails sank hard into his lower back, like she was going to rip his skin off. “You bastard,” she said into his chest. “Ton putain de Légion étrangère, va.”
“Célie.” He tightened his arms around her. God, she felt good against him. Even angry or … or whatever she was, she felt good.
“How could you do that? Join the Foreign Fucking Legion? Just go and … be gone. Be gone. Nothing of you left here at all.”
He blinked. Because he had been so solidly present wherever he was, it had never occurred to him that where he wasn’t would leave much of a void.
She yanked away from him. His arms didn’t relax fast enough, and she started squirming before he managed to release her, just as she shoved at him, bouncing herself back. She thrust a hand through her pixie hair. “I hate you. So, yes, I’m happy to see you.”
“Ah.” He closed his hand around his wrist behind his back, bracing himself in the position with which an engagé volontaire stood while being yelled at by some random corporal during basic training, and gazed at her.