Chapter 21

A rustling white bag of pains au chocolat. The scent of butter and yeast. A baguette he’d picked up because a home without a fresh baguette made a man feel insecure and like he might need to start a revolution. Now it lay slanted across the end of Elena’s kitchen bar, middle wrapped in a square of white paper, a reminder as it had been for generations that life was very good. It had its daily bread.

Intimacy. Lucien had built himself a big family in the Legion, first his paratrooper commando unit and now a company of over a hundred men. But an intimacy laced with the feminine and sunlight and jasmine and curtains and just-the-two-of-them, together in the morning light…that was an intimacy that was almost completely unfamiliar. It harkened back to his childhood days, but where the strained situation in his home had made that intimacy eggshell-tricky back then, here it seemed…still delicate, yes.

But delicate like a seed that was sprouting. Not like a dying plant you were trying desperately to keep alive.

“A man could get used to this,” he murmured, looking at Elena fresh from her shower, with her wet hair darkened until he could only catch hints of the auburn, clasped loosely atop her head.

Elena pushed flakes of her golden pain au chocolat around on her bar counter. “It’s dangerous to get used to things,” she warned him, as if she was watching him wade out among sharks.

She doesn’t mean that as the rejection it sounds. She’s talking about herself, not you, Lucien reminded himself.

It was profoundly taboo in the Legion to ask a man about his past. If he didn’t volunteer it, then the subject was off limits. So he didn’t ask her hers either.

But he could make guesses. At least eighty percent of his men had come from troubled childhoods. It took a special set of formative circumstances for a man to be ready to abandon his whole identity and everyone he had ever known and start over in the Legion.

Maybe his Legion experience led Lucien to make the wrong assumptions, when he saw the way Elena, who peppered her speech with casual literary references, had not a single book on her shelves. Just a tablet by her bed, which he guessed she used just like a military man did, keeping his entire library on a small item he could easily stuff in a duffel. She had twelve sets of every kind of dish—wine glasses, champagne glasses, anything she might want to better welcome friends into her home. She had cozy red bean bags in her living space and a nice big couch friends could sink into and feel welcome. But her bedroom held not a single personal item beyond clothes, a pretty bedspread, and a worn floppy-eared stuffed dog with whom he’d had to share a pillow.

And then there were the little things she said, like, A lot of people have taken care of my life.

And none of them she could trust with her heart? Really? What did that mean?

Maybe he leaped to conclusions. After all, he couldn’t really trust any other legionnaire with his heart either. His life, sure, but they treated each other’s hearts mostly with raucous callousness.

“How dangerous?” Lucien rested his forearms on the counter across from her. “You think I could get hurt?”

Elena looked up, startled. “You could get—oh.” She stared at him, and then a whole tangle of expressions crossed her face, fear and longing and not knowing what to do. She put her head in her hands suddenly, hiding her face.

Lucien came around the counter and caressed her nape, drying a bit of cold water that was trying to drip down it from her hair.

A relaxation of tension in her shoulders at his touch. He stroked her nape again, taking note of how much a touch just there softened her. She lifted her head and met his eyes. “You’ve never had this?”

He waited.

She gestured to the kitchen.

Ah. The intimacy. The warmth of bringing back pastries from the bakery to share pleasure with her on a lazy morning. The crackle and the scent and just the two of them together.

“I’ve had glimpses. Did you ever have a glimpse open out into a vision of something you want to keep?”

“Oh, all the time,” Elena said, darkly rueful.

Hmm.

Her eyes searched his. “What do you want to keep?”

“This.” He turned her on her bar stool and made a half-circle of his body around her, resting his hands on the counter behind her and bending his head to her. “This space with you.”

She drew a breath, and her fingers sank into his shirt, curling too tightly, like a child trying to squeeze water to keep it from slipping through her fingers.

Yes, he thought, as his forehead brushed against her wet hair and the lime-coconut scent of her shampoo teased him. This space, this ease, this thing that is so small and intimate that feels big enough to hold me entirely inside it.

He’d liked calling her every evening. It made him feel as if he had a reason for living that day that wasn’t just for everyone else, for one hundred twenty-six men, for an army, for a country, but was just for him. Them.

The sense of them that let even such emotional complications as his family settle out on the far edges of his consciousness when he was with her.

The sense that he was the right man for her. A powerful arrogance, he knew, the kind of arrogance that had made him take that captaincy because he trusted himself more than anyone else with the lives of all those men. But he didn’t trust any other man to do right by her, now that he thought about it. It clearly was his job.

She’d even picked him out for it. Just walked right up to him in Italy and chosen him, whether she knew how to trust her own choice or not.

There’d been a rightness, that evening in Italy. As if the beauty of the evening had called a truce in the middle of life and let two people crawl out of their foxholes and see each other. She carried the clarity of that evening in her eyes all the time, but of course she couldn’t see her own eyes. She could only see his. Did they not look clear to her?

“Do you worry you can’t?” she said to his chest. “Keep this?”

“I worry it could slip through my fingers.” Because if you couldn’t hold water in your grasp, even less could you hold sunlight on forest leaves. He could chase her, but only she could let him catch her.

And she’d only do that if she trusted him.

From the way she curled her fingers around her little lionheart so often when she looked at him, trusting him was going to take all her courage.

“You’re worried you could get hurt,” she said again on a note of discovery. As if she’d thought, up until now, that he was invulnerable in all of this.

“I don’t worry about that, no. I just accept that it could happen.” A man could always get hurt, doing anything worthwhile.

But, like a traumatized soldier, she seemed far more convinced she would get hurt than he was.

He supposed the record he had left behind him here—of a young man who ran out on his family when the going got tough—didn’t help. She knew he had risen to captain in the Legion, but how much did a civilian really understand about what that meant? About how steadfast he had grown under pressure, how he never shirked his responsibilities ever?

“What you remember of me, from when I was a teenager—is it good or bad?” he asked.

“Well, you ran off to join the Foreign Legion. It’s not that that was bad, exactly, but—you were such a fantastic person, and we lost you.”

Lucien drew back to study her, bemused. “I was such a fantastic person?”

He remembered himself, as a teenager, as being kind of a high-strung mess.

“One of the good guys. You know. Strong. Tough. Willing to stand up against the jerks and keep an eye out for the weaker kids.”

He’d done that? “Must have been an automatism. My grandparents and my aunt didn’t believe in taking it for granted that we would grow up right if they didn’t make the effort. They’d seen too many people they knew take the easy way out and just keep their heads down during the Occupation, I guess. So they really drilled us. Plus…it’s easier to stand up for people when you actually are one of the tallest and strongest people around.”

He’d always been big for his age. And again, his grandparents and aunt had raised him and his cousins to be ready for anything, mentally and physically. Able to fight, hunt, hike, climb, work. Resist.

“Don’t dismiss it,” Elena said. “It was important.” She lifted her chin and held his eyes challengingly, even while a flush climbed up her cheeks. “You saved me once.”

“What?” Lucien stared at her in astonishment.

“I was thirteen. I was starting to get…” She gestured to her chest. “And a jerk in your grade cornered me up behind a building after school and started grabbing my—” She broke off, hunching her shoulders even at the memory, as if that could hide her full breasts.

“And I beat the fucking crap out of him,” Lucien finished for her, because her shame in the story was so obvious, and because it did come back to him. Mostly. He couldn’t really remember the face of the girl, just unkempt red hair and that she’d been a damn kid, and the way she had been cringing in fear and shame as that fucking asshole grabbed her new little breasts and said who knew what to her. He kind of remembered the surge of cold rage—but it was fifteen years ago and he’d kicked plenty of asses since then. He definitely remembered his grandfather’s icy handling of the director who had wanted to expel him from school for it.

They should never have built the high school just down the street from the middle school.

“That fucking asshole.” Remembering the girl, and layering that cringing shame over the Elena sitting before him, surged fury through him all over again. “That fucking pathetic asshole.”

“You know what’s terrible?” Elena said. “When they are pathetic, but they’re still stronger than you.”

“You were thirteen, Elena.” And men would always be stronger than she was, and that was just a fact. He had a very clear knowledge of his own abilities—they’d been tested and pushed to their absolute limit, over and over again—and it was inconceivable she could ever match him physically. “Fuck. Thirteen. That fucking creep.”

“He wasn’t so unusual,” Elena said dryly, even bitterly.

Lucien’s mouth pressed into a grim line.

“I guess you could say that was the story of my teenage years, learning how to deal with creeps. Learning how not to absorb the blame for their behavior into me—learning that it wasn’t really my fault that I had a body.” That dark twist to her mouth. She shrugged. “Insofar as a woman ever is able to learn that it’s not her fault that she has a body.”

Lucien stared at her. As captain, he had to deal with sexist pigs all the time. They were his men. They were big, they were physically powerful, they were often horny as hell, and it was his job to make sure they didn’t hassle to death civilian women when they were out. Or worse.

He intervened to help women in bars all the time. With his men, it rarely took more than a look, not after he’d had them under his command for more than a couple of weeks. With other men, it could take physical intervention.

He’d called men into line and given them hell more times than he could count. But he almost never heard the woman’s perspective on those men’s actions.

Would have been a sad flip on that story to make it a girl ugly duckling and see what happened to her when she started growing attractive.

The ugly duckling who had been raised in a family to which she didn’t really belong. “Did you ever have to deal with any issues from—stepbrothers, maybe?” Hell. “Stepfathers?”

Elena gave him a long, steady look. He didn’t think she would answer him. He was way out of line to ask her. The past was taboo, unless a person volunteered it. He covered her hand, so she would know it was okay, if she talked, or if she didn’t.

Her hand turned upward under his, her fingers curving around the edge of his palm, and she gazed down at their joined hands. “I was in and out of foster care quite a lot,” she said abruptly. “That guy you beat the crap out of—he was the real son in the family that was fostering me at the time. I’d been trying not to tell anyone, because I hated having to move families so much, but after that, the state found out and they did move me.”

“And that was better for you, right?” Lucien said, worry knotting dark in his stomach. Because he might have saved her, but then he’d gone off to join the Foreign Legion. And she’d kept dealing with her life.

She gave a minimal shrug of one shoulder. “Let’s just say it stayed a problem. There was always somebody—the dad, the uncle, the brother-in-law. I was pretty happy to turn eighteen and be on my own. I waited tables to help pay the rent while I was going to university, and another waitress there taught me a lot about how to keep control of men, to not show any of that weakness they like to prey on.”

“Not all men are predators,” Lucien said, as gently as he could manage over his surge of rage. He felt like punching someone. And he had absolutely no one to punch. This was her past.

Elena made a moue. “Not all men are predators against women, you’re right. But I’m pretty sure all men are predators by definition. Apex ones.”

As a former commando and the leader of a legendarily tough and lethal company of men, he could hardly argue he was a herbivore, could he?

“Your friend Antoine. Was he a predator?”

One of Elena’s eyebrows went up. “Well, I wouldn’t advise anyone to mess with him, that’s for sure. He looked after me a lot, when we were in the same family. Even after we got split up again, we stayed close at school. We stick together.”

Okay, so at least the man who looked so much as if he should have had Lucien’s childhood instead of Lucien had a sense of decency. Enough for Elena, who trusted few people, to trust him.

He pushed the problem of Antoine out of his head. That could wait.

“How did you end up in foster care?” He tried to make his voice gentle, but he was afraid it came out harsh. She was going to think he was blaming her and shut up, if he wasn’t careful.

But she searched his face. And didn’t seem to decide that was what he was doing. “I think my mother had me because she was so desperate to have someone. Sometimes, when she was kind of…fuzzy, she would talk about how lonely she was and how much she wanted someone of her very own. After her own mother…left her. You know.” Her face went grim. “Those fucking Nazis.”

Lucien waited. One of the things his grandfather had taught him was that the Nazis were actually very ordinary people and the person who resisted exceptionally rare. That a man had to be vigilant, intensely vigilant, to not let himself be that kind of ordinary. But he didn’t think it would help Elena to think about how she was surrounded by a mass of humanity entirely capable of embracing or at least allowing genocide. He suspected she knew it far too well.

“They broke all those happy families. Just broke them, the bastards. And a little five-year-old girl had to try to pick up the pieces of her life, and she couldn’t manage it. She killed herself. And so then her broken bits got passed to her daughter. My mom got into drugs so young, before she even had me. And what the hell do doctors mean by prescribing those damn opioids so easily? I hate drug companies. She did the best she could. She was always trying to get clean when I was a kid, so she could get me back.” Elena’s expression flickered on that, and Lucien thought, So whenever you started to get installed with a new family, your mother would get you back. For a little while. And you could never really have a home, could you? “And she’s in recovery again now and doing pretty well.”

Her jaw set stubbornly.

Loyal.

Loving.

Determined.

Lucien reached out and took both her hands, squeezing them too hard and making himself ease his hold. “I go see my mom, too.” He didn’t know why he had to say it right then. Just…all that love and loyalty and determination to be a strong person…he wanted her to know he had love and loyalty, too.

Elena’s mouth opened and then closed. Her expression went carefully blank.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Lucien realized abruptly. “My mom. She’s how you found me.” She’d moved to Brittany, well away from the Rosiers and a bitter past, but of course, anyone could catch a train to Brittany.

“Well…I still see my mom. Antoine still sees his mom. I kind of thought…well, I just thought I would check.”

And of course his mom had not been able to keep her mouth shut. Lucien ground his jaw. There was something about having spent your first nine months part of a woman’s body that made her think you were still some part of her, forever after, and she could make all your damn choices for you. It was the same sense of ownership that had let her strike out wildly and destroy his life, back when he was a teenager. After all, it had been her life she was destroying, his life being part of hers. And yet she still had not learned her lesson.

Elena squeezed his hands. “You’re not going to get mad at her, are you?”

He thought he could be excused for being a little pissed. But…he looked at Elena. His mom might have been right, for once. In helping Elena find him, she might have made a better choice for him than the one he was making for himself.

“I can’t get too mad at my mom,” he said finally. “She beats herself up enough about having caused me so much harm when she lost her temper back then, and every time I get sent into a war zone, she just kind of…rakes emotional claws down herself. I can’t add to that.”

“Yeah.” Elena’s fingertips stroked his palms. A little of that sunlight showed in her eyes, special and kind of gentle, as if it was there just for him. “That’s how it works with my mom, too. When I see her, I have to try not to blame her, you know? Try not to let her see that I’m not always all right.”

Aren’t you, bella? And here? He circled his arms around her. Are you all right here?

He loved this. Not making something right with hard demands and responsibilities, the way he straightened out those roughed-up souls that ended up in the Legion, but making things right with warmth and intimacy. Just the two of them.

I would love to give you a home. You think you’d want to let me keep you?

“Will you come visit me next weekend?” he asked. “I’ll be pretty busy Saturday, but I’ll have Sunday morning free. It would mean a lot to me.”

She looked both befuddled and enticed in a way that made him want to just curve his body all around her and kiss her in greedy hunger. Mine. “You really want to see me that much?”

“Yes. And I want you to see me. I want to invite you into my home, too.” It would be a good place for her, his home. She would turn it into so much more than a place to sleep.

She looked up at him a long moment. Her hand curled around her lionheart. She lifted her head and straightened her shoulders, and her brown eyes shone with so much sunlight. “Okay.”

He cupped the back of her head and kissed her, taking his time, doing it right. He didn’t want there to be any confusion about what that kiss said. Mine. Yours.