Chapter 11

It was just as sexy as she had imagined it, to ride on that powerful motorbike behind Lucien Rosier, holding onto him as he guided the bike up into the hills. It was also oddly reassuring. It probably would have been better if he had been a jerk about it and tried to scare her, but he took it slow, just as he promised, careful on the tight turns and reaching back to pat her thigh a couple of times and signal thumb up or down. She laid her hand on his jeans-clad thigh and showed a thumb up.

He took them up above the valley, to where they could see far out to the moon shining on the sea. Twilight was deep enough when he reached the heights that she wasn’t immediately sure of the nature of the field on the edge of which he parked the bike.

But as she walked into it, she knew immediately. Lavender. Not yet in bloom, but the leaves out already, and the tiny green buds starting to form on spikes. She brushed them and straightened with the scent of lavender on her fingertips. “I’ve seen this from below, but I’ve never been up here. It’s unusual to have lavender this close to the sea.”

Lucien shrugged in the moonlight, but it was one of those shrugs that didn’t seem nearly as indifferent as it was meant to. “I pushed for us to try it. It was one of those experiments a teenager gets into.”

Only a teenager in an agricultural perfume family, she thought with a little smile.

“I’ve always liked lavender, and I was convinced this particular plateau had the right balance of exposure and sea breezes to work maybe as well as the plateaus back dans les terres. I don’t know if they were ever able to produce any worthwhile oils from it, though.” He bent to run his hand over the leaves.

“They still maintain it,” she said. “Fifteen years later.”

He pinched some leaves between his fingers and lifted those fingers to his nose to scent. “Yeah.” The expression on his face was so complex.

“Maybe they were hoping you’d come back for it,” Elena couldn’t help saying.

He didn’t say anything, rubbing the leaves between his fingers and breathing in the scent. His lips were soft, though. Wistful. Finally he sat between the rows, facing the sea in the distance, setting his helmet down for her to sit on.

She chose to sit on the dirt instead, by his upraised knee, also facing the sea. His knee would have made such a great resting place for her cheek while she gazed at that view, which always made her feel a little sad, but…

Elena. No.

She wrapped her arm around her own upraised knee instead and rested her head on it. A warm hand settled over her nape and rubbed it gently, flexing in her hair.

“Will it be yours?” she said. “One day?”

Lucien was silent for long enough that she wished she hadn’t asked a painful question and turned to look at him. “I don’t know how well you know inheritance laws, but since my grandfather had five sons, he has to pass on one-sixth each of what he has equally to his sons. Some of the stock in Rosier SA has already been distributed and is separate from my grandfather’s personal holdings, and he’s given usufruct to various parts of the land in advance of his death. He can decide that Matt gets the land and someone else gets stock in Rosier SA, but the portions he passes on to his sons—or a son’s heir, in Matt’s case—have to be legally equivalent. He can only control distribution of one-sixth himself—that’s the law. Now my…father. Michel Rosier. He has to pass on at least half of what he inherits to me. He doesn’t have a choice. It will kill him, but it’s the law. He can only dispose of half of it how he wants, provided no other heir appears out of the blue.”

His eyes flicked over her face at that, searching. What, did he think she had another Rosier heir in her pocket to bring out when they least expected?

“But I’m his only legally obligatory heir. So unlike my grandfather, he could, without detriment to any other child, sell the land he inherits and fritter all the income away—no law requires the inheritance to be unspent during his lifetime. And he might. That would be up to my grandfather, to dictate terms in his will that might prevent or allow that. Or to give him something other than land, or…whatever. Let’s just say that I’m not really sure anymore what my grandfather might think.” Lucien touched his T-shirt, feeling—oh, his dog tags. “But he certainly can't skip over his actual son for my sake, even if he wanted to. And I’m pretty damn sure Michel Rosier will do anything he can to not have to pass on his inheritance to me.”

“Bastard.” Elena scowled down into the valley at an invisible Michel Rosier. She could see the sparkles of light from the old mas and pavilion, but they were too high up to make out people.

“I’m not his son,” Lucien said, so excessively neutrally that she gave up and wrapped her arm around his leg, leaning her body against it and resting her head on his knee.

“I hate him,” Elena said fiercely.

“Yeah?” Lucien rubbed her hair against her nape again. “I like you, Elena Lyon.”

Please stop feeling so ridiculously happy around him, Elena. Stop it right now!

“All perforated with compassion,” Lucien said gently, and picked her up and re-settled her between his legs, back against his chest. “There.” Was it her, or did his voice grow more possessive with her all the time? “Warmer?”

She hadn’t been cold. But…yes. It was warmer. The view of the water didn’t even make her feel sad anymore.

“Can I tell you something?” she whispered suddenly.

“Of course you can, chérie.”

No, she really shouldn’t. “It might ruin the mood.”

“What mood? We’re just up here taking a break where it’s quiet and there’s a nice view.”

Oh. He wasn’t going to try for sex next? Really? Because what she for some damn reason wanted to say was a real mood dampener, she knew that in advance. And you’d kind of have to hate a man who pushed for sex right after you told him something like that.

She hesitated against the warmth and strength of his body, wondering if she really wanted to douse all erotic undertones with a great big bucket of water.

His arm squeezed her. “Go ahead.”

She petted the leg of his jeans. Traced down to the hem. Traced over the seam work. “My grandmother, when she decided to…quit life. She went to the top of a cliff by the water, and…they found her body in the sea later, being pushed against the cliffs by the waves.”

Lucien’s arm tightened around her, pulling her snug against him. His other hand petted the back of her head. “I’m sorry, bella. Were you very little?”

“I wasn’t born yet.”

Lucien didn’t say anything, and he didn’t stop stroking her head, so maybe it was her imagination that she could feel his puzzlement as to why something that had happened to someone she had never known should be preying on her mind.

“Anyway, sometimes I think of her when I look at the water at night. And it makes me…sad.”

“Okay.” Lucien’s hand stroked her hair.

She sounded like an idiot, didn’t she? He must think she was some kind of perennial victim, dragging something like that out to play for sympathy. She should never have brought this up.

“Were you sad in Italy?” he said.

“No, it was Italy. It’s a different sea.”

It was the same Mediterranean, but Lucien didn’t challenge the compartment she had set up in her brain to make Italy a safe, magic place.

Elena sighed a long sigh and rested her head against his biceps. She should probably finish this story. Only it never finished. Still no one in her family had ever reached happily ever after. “You know that famous photo of the little Jewish girl asleep in rose petals in the back of a wagon?” she asked very quietly.

“The little girl my grandparents and Tante Colette saved? Of course I know it.”

She swallowed against a lump in her throat that never, ever went away when she thought about this. “That was my grandmother.”

A long, hissing breath from Lucien. His arm tightened around her as if he’d like to pull her entirely into his body. The wall of his chest pressed against her at the force of his hug.

“I love your grandparents. I love Madame Colette. They did everything they could. They got her to Switzerland.” And that border had been hard to cross. German guards on one side and Swiss on the other. Lucien’s mountain-born grandmother was the one who had known the ways through. “They made sure she got to a family that promised not to turn her back over to the Germans and to hide her from any sweeps. They’re my heroes, even more than you.”

A tiny, surprised flex of his arm there, but she was focused on her story and didn’t really notice.

“But…she was only five. And everyone else in her family was killed. And…I guess she just struggled so hard with depression, later. I think she tried having a baby, to make her own new family, with my mother. But it didn’t heal her. And when she thought my mother was old enough that she didn’t need her anymore”—her mother had been thirteen—“or maybe when she just decided that my mother, too, would be safer sent away from her, the way her own parents had to send her away, she, um…yeah.” She rested her head very wearily against his arm. Elena, why, why, why did you have to talk about this?

She was a crazy person. What a way to ruin a beautiful evening with a hot guy. Was it subconscious self-destruction? Still following that pattern the bastard Nazis had started, no matter how hard she tried to resist it consciously?

“Putain d’enfoirés,” Lucien said softly and bitterly.

“Yeah.” The Nazis had been assholes. Elena rubbed her face against his arm with her nod and realized she had smeared a little wetness there. Damn it. This was why she had had to shift her focus from unidentified fates after her master’s thesis. She couldn’t turn her emotions off when she worked on it, ever.

“Was your mother okay?” Lucien said.

“Not really.” Elena rubbed her cheek against her own arm this time, to spare him the stupid tears. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I—can we talk about something else now?”

“Of course we can.” He hugged her back against him. “Or maybe just not talk, would you like that?” His breath brushed warm over her hair.

“I told you it was a mood killer,” she said after a while, tired. Why had she brought it up? You need to call that therapist and see if you can move your appointment up.

“Good thing I had resolved not to jump your bones tonight, then.”

She straightened her spine at that, twisting to give him a look.

His smile was wry and warm and…supportive, somehow. He was helping her by changing the subject to something provocative. “Not that I don’t want to, bella, but your expectations are so low that sometimes it’s a real pleasure to defy them. I figure it’s good for you.”

She stared at him, distracted by a rising sense of—was that outrage?—at him plotting something like that.

He shrugged a little. “I’m not saying you might not have been able to override my convictions if you started dragging my clothes off in a crazy passion or anything, but you don’t seem to be getting drunk on the moonlight up here, so I’m thinking I’ll stick with my original plan.”

“I thought you just wanted a break from your family,” she said slowly. “What do you mean, ‘plan’?”

“Tactics, remember? No one says one action has to accomplish only one goal.”

She stared at him, completely baffled by her own situation. “Have you ever heard of just flirting? And if you don’t get the response you want, moving on to the next person?”

He shrugged again. “Always tended to favor chess over checkers, anyway. I think you really misunderstand what I mean when I say you make me feel easy. I don’t mean lazy.”

Okay, this man was a total mystery to her. Which was ironic, because the main reason he was so puzzling was because he seemed so damn straightforward. “Will you stop acting as if I matter to you?”

He laughed. “You’re really funny, Elena.”

How was that funny? Because it was ridiculous to misinterpret his actions to such a degree as to think she mattered?

His hand shaped her chin. “And beautiful by moonlight.” He leaned forward enough to kiss her.

But when she started to sink into the kiss—all its warmth and passion and comfort—he pulled back and settled her head against his shoulder again. “Let’s just watch the moonlight and smell the lavender, shall we?”

Oh, for crying out loud, was he carrying out his battle plan?

He picked a sprig of the lavender and handed it to her, and somehow that quietened any urge to try to fight her corner. She didn’t know why. But she nestled in the hardness of his body, twirling the sprig under her nose, a little twist of lavender wrapped up in warmth and the indefinable scent of him.

“This is pathetic,” she said very glumly.

He raised his eyebrows as he looked down at her, amused. “Well, you know…I have been in the Legion for fifteen years. Maybe I’ll take whatever physical contact I can get.”

Yeah, right. She’d seen the way pretty tourists flocked to those bars around Calvi, looking for a hot fling with a legionnaire. “Not you, me. I need to call that therapist and see if she has an appointment tomorrow,” she muttered. Although by tomorrow he’d probably be gone, so problem solved.

Lucien was biting back a grin. “What’s this therapist going to help you with here?”

“I clearly have some kind of weakness for strong men who know how to take control of themselves and their situations.”

Lucien’s eyes were crinkled at the corners in that way that filled her belly with warm fuzzies. “You’re going to go see a therapist to get him to teach you how to prefer weak men who have no self-control?”

She frowned at him.

“That’s going to be an interesting session,” he said, and kissed her—on the forehead. “Shh. Let’s just enjoy the view for a while.”