All for You (28 page)

“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.”

He rolled her under him on the grass, claiming her mouth again. Mmm, yes, the hot and the sweet of that … “Célie. I love everything you make. But God, I’d take this any day.”

Célie twisted her face away, about driving him crazy. “Take what?”

“You.” He sought her mouth again. “Just like this.”

“Just me,” Célie said against his lips. Damn, she liked to chatter at inopportune moments sometimes. He parted her lips with his, tasting her gently with his tongue. And she yielded, falling into the kiss. But as soon as he lifted his head for a breath, she got her next word in edgewise: “No accomplishments, just me. You think I’m amazing just like this.”

“Yeah.” He pressed his hands in the grass to keep from doing things in public he’d get arrested for. “Hell, yeah.” He sought her mouth again.

She locked her hands against his chest to hold him back, making his teeth snap together in frustration. “Joss. If you’re really so sex-starved that you still haven’t figured out what I’m saying, maybe we should work some of that starvation out so your brain can turn on again.”

“Oh, that sounds like a really, really good idea to me,” he said, just before his peripheral vision caught feet striding toward them.

He was on his feet between Célie and the man approaching, faster than a blink. The park guardian stopped in his tracks, rocking back on his heels.

Joss eased his stance, calming himself down.
There aren’t that many real threats here, you idiot. Just…easy, okay?
He tried to change his expression and posture into something that wouldn’t scare the park guardian even more, keeping his hands loose by his sides. “Yes?”

“There … there are children present,” the guardian said stiffly.

Oh, for God’s sake. Because he’d been kissing his girlfriend in the grass? Like he was the first man to ever do that in a Paris park. Joss reached down and caught Célie’s hand, pulling her to her feet. “You’re right,” he told the other man evenly. “We’ll take it indoors.”

It was all he could do to lead her straight past their new apartment to her own little one and not spoil the surprise. But he managed it. He had to save that for her, until it was the best it could be.

I wish you hadn’t
…
Célie stroked the thought down over biceps and sinewy forearm.
You never should have …
She traced her thumb over the strength of a wrist, over the hairs on the back of Joss’s hand and the scars across his knuckles that he hadn’t had before.
If only you had …
She caressed her fingers against the toughness of his palm, drawing her fingertips up the length of his, lingering on the calluses and the lines of the underside of his knuckles.

He shivered and grabbed at her pillow with his other arm, tightening his hold on it as his eyes closed.

I’m so mad at you for going.
Her hand teased through the curls of hair on his chest, pressed into the hard muscle of his shoulders.

But you are gorgeous.

Her warrior returned, who had done it all for her.

You are amazing.

The way his head tilted back at her touch, his throat exposed to her, the only vulnerable spot on that hard, unyielding body.

No. That wasn’t right. It might be the only vulnerable spot to anyone
else
, but every single place on that ruthless body seemed to be vulnerable to her. The tough skin at his elbow, from crouching in low cover or dragging himself through it on his forearms. He drew a rough rush of breath, when she stroked him there. The stubborn chin that had a small scar on it now, from sparring practice maybe, or a fall during training, or shrapnel. He licked his lips and bit into the lower one, when she stroked her fingers over that chin.

Why did you do it? Expose yourself to shrapnel, to explosives and bullets. You idiot. Why?
You don’t have to be this amazing for me. I loved you just the way you were.

Those words that she had to learn how to swallow and release from her heart unspoken. Because he had said it clearly to her: He had done something amazing, incredible, impossible, and she, instead of understanding and admiring, kept tearing it down.

And she couldn’t do that to him. She had to care for him for who he really was and what he’d chosen to do. Even if he thought he was doing it all for her when really, in great part, he had been doing it to fulfill a need in himself, she had to respect and understand that, too.

Such a profoundly incomprehensible need in him. She’d hero-worshiped him so much, and he’d gone off on an impossible quest to make her worship him even more? Without even quite understanding that the quest deprived her for five years of the hero himself?

Yet he’d done it. And he’d come back to lay all that incredible, brutal quest for glory at her feet.

“I love you,” she whispered and bit the rest of it back.
I always have. You never should have …

Breathed that away, turning it into a caress of those so hard-earned muscles.

“Célie.” He shivered, his eyes opening to stare at her in the late afternoon light filtering through her windows, his face half shadowed by the pillow he clutched. “What are you doing? I can’t …”

“You’re beautiful,” she said, and his face crinkled in incredulous confusion.

She caressed her fingers down his body, over the bone of his hip, to the muscled thigh.

“This is too much,” he whispered, squeezing the pillow almost anxiously. “I can’t handle the way you’re … touching me, Célie.” But he didn’t stop her. He didn’t grab her hand or roll them over on the mattress so he could take over. He swallowed and shoved the pillow over his face a second, his body lifting toward her touch.

“You’re incredible.” She kneaded her fingers into his thigh.

He pulled the pillow aside enough to show his face again. “I’m not
incredible
. I’m just—”

She put her fingers over his mouth. “You shut up. I get to be the judge of how incredible you are. You clearly have no freaking clue.”

Where did it come from, this will to drive oneself past all limits, to never believe you were good enough unless you were the absolute best any human being could ever be? She knew it very well. Dom had it, too, after all—the man who had driven himself to be the best chocolatier in Paris, and who, whenever he showed up on some random list written by an idiot with no proper understanding of chocolate as only the
second
best or the
third
best in the whole entire world, ripped the paper and went to the gym to box to the point of exhaustion or threw himself on his motorcycle to cut through traffic in suicidal aggressiveness. (Although he’d calmed down about the motorcycle business now that he had Jaime, as if the desire to keep his happiness had trumped his aggressive recklessness.)

She even had it, the little pastry apprentice from the
banlieue
who had come to work for the rising star chocolatier in Paris and made herself into his right-hand woman, someone who could produce that best of the best of the best. When
she
saw their chocolates appear as only second or third best in the world instead of
the
best, she drew faces of the guilty journalists on craft sticks and gave them yarn hair and suspended them over her chocolate as if she was going to drown them in it—and then left them there, just shy of actually tasting that chocolate, like Tantalus. Okay, fine, she’d only done that once, in great ceremony in the middle of the
laboratoire
for a particularly idiotic critic who had put them all the way down at number
six
, but it had made even Dom laugh.

Célie Clément did not do second best.

Striving for the best was kind of her way of being worthy of herself. And of Joss.

Too proud to be small, Joss. Too proud to give her a cheap diamond ring.

And I was too proud to be just a little baker
en banlieue
if you were going to be a glorious Legionnaire.

His dad had been a decent dad when Joss was little, based on the things Joss used to let slip in their easy conversations as teenagers. Then he had gone rapidly downhill after he lost his job when Joss was twelve, descending into alcohol, no longer there for his son. Had that been part of what pushed Joss? His mom was a bitter woman, blaming her husband, blaming her son, blaming even Célie after Joss left, claiming it must have been her fault.

Was that part of why he’d never given Célie a chance to have a say? He’d been afraid she would try to reduce him, just like his mother did?

Was a refusal to be his father part of what drove him?

Was it nature or nurture, really, that kind of drive? Or both? All these circumstances and choices that had fused Joss into the hardened, determined warrior who was now shivering under her hand.

He stuffed the pillow back over his face.

“Hey.” She pulled it off. “Don’t make me throw this one out of the window, too. It’s the last one. Your chest might make a great pillow in fantasies, but in real life, it’s actually pretty hard to punch into just that right shape under my ear.” She smiled at him.

“Célie. I just—I need the pillow.” He reached for it again.

She dropped it on the floor. “No, you don’t.” She framed his face in her hands as if he was a fragile chocolate she had to touch just right and lowered her head toward his. “You’re just fine, Joss,” she whispered between his lips and let her own close gently over his and then slide away, stroking him with her lips, lingering at the corners of his, exploring the bow of his upper lip, the way she could make that firm line relax and yield to her. “You’re just about perfect.”

“‘About’?” he asked, like a man ready to jump down and do a few more push-ups right then to fix any possible flaw.

“Well, you’ve got this.” She caressed her fingertips over that square jaw and followed with her mouth, lingering over the tiny scar. “That’s not perfect. It’s too stubborn. So stubborn you’ll let it get hurt, rather than give up or give in.”

“Célie.” The corners of his lips trembled in such a vulnerable start to a smile. “You—”

“And this.” She brought his big hand to her lips and turned it over to kiss all along the thick calluses at the base of his fingers. “Look at this hand. You’ve been getting it into trouble. You need cocoa butter.”

He shook his head. “I need the calluses. Soft skin just gets ripped to shreds when you want to do anything.”

“Oh.” She considered her own hands, kept soft by constant exposure to cocoa butter. She’d taken to weight training when Joss had shown her as a teenager how to get started—taken to it at first because of the erotic sweetness of having him adjust her arms or hover ready to catch a weight—and she was extremely proud of herself to be able to do a pull-up, these days, but she wore gloves for that and hadn’t a single callus to her name. “So soft hands aren’t perfect?” She ran her palm slowly down his arm.

He shivered. “They’re perfect. Célie—”

“Are they
both
perfect?” she asked in pretend surprise. “Yours and mine? But they’re so different.” She drew his hand over her own arm, rubbing his calluses against her skin, and a shiver chased through her, too, her eyes closing into the pleasure of it. “Oh, yeah. I think, after all, yours are definitely perfect.”

“You like them?” He caressed her bare back, rubbing those calluses up her sensitive skin to her bra strap.

She arched into the touch, erotic delight spreading out from it all through her body.
“Yes.”

He smiled a little, watching her, playing with the textures he could bring to her back, stroking his callused fingertips up her spine and down, then walking them out in little pressures that made her muscles flinch and her back arch and relax again into the pleasure.

“Remember when I was teaching you how to lift weights?” he asked suddenly. Sometimes Joss picked thoughts straight out of her brain, she swore. “God, that killed me. Your little muscles straining, and the sheen of sweat on your skin, and me just barely touching you to adjust your form and not ever being able to touch you for real. The way you would strain so hard to get strong.”

“You wouldn’t go dancing with me back then. So I had to do something physical around you.”