Chapter 17

He sat on her stone doorstep in front of her little blue door, the jasmine climbing up the stone wall around the door to frame him. He was looking at his phone, but he lifted his head as soon as she stepped into the end of the alley, and smiled.

And she felt as if all her world had just turned perfect.

Maybe she should pivot and run before this monster trust ate her alive.

“Did you get my text?” He smiled up at her as she reached him, as if all his world had just turned perfect, too. It reached in and squeezed at her heart.

“No.” She pulled out her phone. A text from him about twenty minutes before, letting her know he had arrived. “Sorry.”

She stood still in front of him, feeling suddenly shy. It was just so good to see him.

He patted his leg, and she just went and sat right down on it, dropping her purse on the stones by their feet. “It’s good to see you,” he said, heartfelt, and kissed her slow and sweet and long, as if he wanted to make up for a whole week right there but knew he couldn’t.

Feelings surged up in her and tried to overwhelm her, and the only thing that felt steady in her whole world was his thigh under her butt.

“Did you have fun with your friends?” he said, when the kiss finally broke, kneading his fingers into her lower back.

She nodded.

He smiled. “Did they steal your tongue?”

She shook her head.

So he kissed her again. Sweeter. Even familiar. “A picture is a lousy substitute for the real you.”

He pulled out his phone and stretched his arm up high to take a photo of them. “For next week,” he told her and texted it to her.

The two of them with lips full and flushed, her own eyes shining and a little shy, his blue and intense and smiling.

He put his phone away and stood and hugged her to his body a long moment. “I think you get more beautiful every day.”

“You’ve only known me about a week.”

“Yeah. It’s scary to think how beautiful you’re going to be by tomorrow.” He ran his hands up her back and down. “You might already be able to slay me with a look.”

“You’re silly,” she said, but she couldn’t help smiling, a surge of warmth from her middle up through her.

“No. You underestimate your power.”

She shook her head, but couldn’t stop smiling. “Did you calculate for my slaying glances in your battle tactics?”

“No. They blast through all my defenses, and now I just might have to suffer an epic defeat.” He leaned her back in the arch of her doorway to kiss her again, a curl of jasmine brushing his head.

“Do you…do you want to come upstairs?” she said. “Or is that not part of your tactics still?”

He pulled his head back and studied her, that way he did, as if he needed to see through her before he answered some of her questions.

“For a drink,” she said. “You must be tired.”

“After a sixty-minute plane trip? I’m not tired. But yes. I’d love to see your place.” He picked up a duffel sitting by the base of the steps.

She was very conscious of him following her up the narrow stair, and she liked the way her silky skirt brushed against her legs and slid across her butt as she climbed. Her apartment wasn’t huge, but it had a living space and a little kitchen and a decent-size bedroom, space enough to have her friends over and not space enough to feel as if she echoed in it.

She could feel Lucien looking around the living area, with its comfortable couch and bean bags so that friends could install themselves, as she opened the balcony shutters and went into the kitchen. “What would you like?”

“I brought you a present,” he said. She turned.

He unzipped his duffel enough to pull out a bag of lemons and a bottle of golden liquid. Limoncellu, the bottle said, the Corsican spelling.

He smiled at her. “Corsicans claim theirs is better than the Italians’.”

“It doesn’t bring back memories of the moment I destroyed your life?”

“I think I’ll call it ‘upended’.” He emptied the bag of Corsican lemons, with their bumpy, vivid yellow skins, into her nearly-empty fruit bowl, where they glowed like a promise of happiness right there in her kitchen. “Want some?”

She considered the bottle. They weren’t in Italy anymore. He was blurring her boundaries, between the real world and the world where it was okay to play at couples.

He did that all the freaking time. He made him seem like the real world. She picked up a lemon and pressed her nail into the skin to release a little spark of that bright, hopeful scent.

“Did you go see your family yet?”

He smiled and began opening the limoncellu bottle. “You know, bella, you claim I use you as a distraction from my family, but are you sure it’s not the other way around? Because you certainly do bring them up a lot whenever you’re feeling in over your head. Do you want to come with me to help them with the harvest tomorrow?”

Help with the roses? Her face lit. “Yes.”

Smiling, he opened cupboards to look for her glasses.

“And I do not feel in over my head.”

He laughed.

“Look, you might as well know that I’m not interested in a relationship.”

He began to laugh so hard that he had to set the thin glass down on the counter. “Oh, no, you don’t feel in over your head at all, do you?”

Elena folded her arms and gave him a very dirty look. She had to keep the dirty part up a while, because it took him a moment to stop laughing and appreciate it.

He bent and kissed her. Then kissed her again.

Then pulled her against him as he sank against the counter behind him and kissed her long and slow, making a little groaning sound like a man finally sinking into a rest after a long, hard day. His hands ran up her body and down, kneading her into him.

Trust and security rushed right back up through her, so charged and erotic. I like this spot.

Elena. Never get too attached to a certain spot. It’s never yours.

A shiver of old hurt ran through her body, as if someone had walked on her wounds, and she pulled back.

Lucien drew a lock of her hair through his fingers. “Maybe we should go out for drinks,” he murmured, gazing down at her with so much possessiveness that it confused the hell out of all those old wounds. They felt coddled. “Dinner on the place?”

“Could we invite Madame Colette?” Elena said. “I know she would be so happy to see you.”

An odd smile on Lucien’s face. Still possessive. A little rueful. A little tender. “That’s a very nice thought.” He stroked his thumb across her cheek as if he loved to touch it. “And so exactly like you to duck behind my family.”

Was it? Elena tried to think through her motivations but was only sure of one. “I love Madame Colette,” she said, stubbornly, as if someone had thought about trying to wrest that from her, too.

Lucien’s hand spread against her cheek, and his eyes were so warm.

“Anyway, getting you back with your family is the whole point of this. You need a home.” She was positive about it.

“Mmm. Tell me, Elena, why do you always think of family and home in the second and third person?”

“What?”

“As something that you make happen for other people. You’re not in it.”

Elena pulled back, all the way to the bar and the bowl of lemons. She focused on them long enough to regroup, curving her hand around their bumpy skin. “We should bring some lemons to Madame Colette. She would love them.”

Lucien sighed, studied her one moment more, and then went back into the living area to his duffel, pulling out another bag of bright yellow fruit. “I thought so, too.”

Elena broke into a delighted smile, on her own golden wave of possessiveness. You’re a good guy, Capitaine Fontaine.

And also—this whole restoring him to his family idea was working. His roots had found their soil again and were stretching out to sink themselves into it. She had done it.

She had given him a home.