Chapter 25

Lucien was pissed. His eyes glittered with it, over the heads of those attending the wedding. But Elena had timed it right, and he couldn’t break away from his cousins and his role in the wedding to confront her.

She stood close to Antoine.

“Elena.” Antoine looked as if he desperately needed a cigarette.

“Shh,” she whispered. They had managed to fit into the church, and the wedding was starting.

It was another beautiful wedding. Layla’s dress had a long lace train that spread around the steps up to the altar as she spoke her vows. Her exuberantly curly hair had not been restrained, just gently settled at the top by a crown of roses. She couldn’t stop grinning up at Matt during the ceremony, she was so happy. Matt looked as if the big growly bear was about to dissolve with emotion right before their eyes.

Lucien focused on them, too, and all that military training maybe helped his ability to look attentive and neutral. As Matt slipped the ring onto Layla’s finger, his face even relaxed into a smile.

So anyone would think that the rituals of the Catholic ceremony had helped channel Lucien’s emotions into calm, the way they had last time. But no sooner had they all finished showering the bride and groom with rose petals—which Elena should have been able to enjoy, because she loved that kind of thing—than Lucien broke from the circle of congratulations. The crowd parted for him like water—something in that military bearing, or the sense of anger that came through no matter how hard he held it in—as he strode through it and stopped in front of her.

He spared Antoine a cold, dangerous look. The look Antoine returned was icy and ironic.

Lucien wore his dress uniform, sand-colored and crisp, a row of medals on it. A striking choice. Although military weddings might be common in his milieu, nobody in civilian France favored them, and in fact uniforms were usually held in some suspicion. He was making a statement. About who he was now, and who he was proud to be.

And it wasn’t anything that had room for her. She looked at the yellow bars that indicated his rank. Now that she understood a little better what that rank meant.

“Let’s go have a talk,” Lucien said, with tight patience, as if every word had to be cut away from his temper with care. He seemed very big and imposing with anger coursing through his muscles. Twice as big as anyone around him. “Privately.”

“Don’t intimidate her,” Antoine said coldly.

Lucien took a slow breath. Through his teeth. “I’m not trying to.” But he did take a step back.

He always did that. Even when angry. Gave her space. Didn’t try to override her choices.

Her eyes prickled. “Okay,” she said, her throat rough, folding her arms. “Let’s get this over with.”

Lucien gave her a look that was first astonished and then furious, his jaw hardening if possible still further. “Over with?”

She angled her head away.

And met Antoine’s eyes.

He looked as if it hurt him to say this. But he said it anyway. “Elena. You’re still doing it.”

She frowned at him, so vulnerable right now that any hint of criticism hurt.

He closed his hands around her shoulders. Lucien made a small, sharp movement, quickly contained. “Letting those goddamn assholes in your past control whether you can be happy today. Don’t let the assholes win.”

He released her shoulders and stepped away. The two men’s gazes held a long moment. Then Antoine turned abruptly away.

“Come on.” Lucien took her arm and escorted her three steps with him before he seemed to realize what he was doing and scrupulously released her arm and let her walk beside him on her own speed. His jaw was set, and he wasn’t looking down at her, so she had time to try to crush her tears.

They bottled up with the whole rest of the mess inside her. The way they always did.

He led them to the only safe and quiet space in that whole village, when a crowd filled it—the little lavoir.

Stone and the flowing river, and the voices of the wedding receding to a warm murmur above them.

Lucien braced himself against the pillar and folded his arms, gazing at her grimly. Elena sat down on the bench and curled up her knees to hug them.

“Where did you spend the night?” Lucien asked abruptly. “You weren’t home last night, and you weren’t there this morning.”

Because she had known he would look for her. “At Antoine’s.”

Lucien made a sharp movement, anger swelling his whole presence like some thunder god about to strike. “He’s lucky I didn’t know that two minutes ago.”

“He’s like a brother! I told you that.”

“I really don’t think he sees you as a sister, Elena.”

He did too. If Antoine didn’t see her as a sister, then she had no one. No one she could count on in this whole world.

Lucien’s arms flexed, across his chest. “Why don’t you spit it out. I’m not appreciating the games.”

“I’m not playing games!” Was she playing games? She didn’t mean to.

“No? Wonderful weekend together. I was so fucking happy. I thought you were happy. And then you just refuse all my texts and calls? No warning, no explanation? There’s high maintenance and then there’s being a total jerk, Elena.”

A jerk.

She pressed her head to her knees. You did know you were behaving badly, Elena. He even sent a cousin he’s barely made re-acquaintance with to go check up on you, to make sure you were okay. That had to cost him.

“It hurt to explain,” she whispered. It still hurt.

“Well, tough it the fuck up,” said the man who had, presumably, toughed his way through pretty much every hurt or limit of exhaustion possible.

She was tough. She might not have any dreams of hauling a hundred pounds of gear on thirty-kilometer speed marches, and she might be more squeamish about blood, but she’d toughed her way through far more betrayals than he had ever known, and she hadn’t run off to join the Foreign Legion. She’d…toughed it out. Become her own person. A decent person. Sane. Mostly okay. She lifted her chin off her knees, but she still had to hug them. “I don’t fit.”

Her voice still barely sounded above a whisper. She tried to clear the hoarseness away.

“You don’t fit?”

“Long term!” Her voice rose. “I’m not going to fit! And there’s no point convincing myself I will. I can see it.”

Silence. Lucien peeled himself away from the pillar and moved across to go down on one knee on the stone floor of the lavoir in front of her. “Elena. What the hell are you even talking about?”

“You have a family. Hell, you have two families now. You have a career you’ve literally devoted your whole life to. Your actual whole life. You have men who need you. And they’re in Corsica, or maybe sometimes who knows where in the world, when you’re deployed.”

He was gazing at her very grimly.

She dropped her knees into a cross-legged position on the bench and struck her chest. “And I have a career. I maybe didn’t devote my actual blood to it, but I put a lot of me into it. It’s who I am. And I can’t and I won’t give it up in the hope that I could have a family, too. I just can’t do it. I can’t.” Too much pain and fear was rising up too fast, as her own words wrenched through her. “You think you needed to run off and create a family and identity that was all yours and didn’t depend on anything else? You had the Rosiers, Lucien! What the hell do you think I needed? I never had anybody. Never lived with a single family for longer than a couple of years. So fuck you.”

She was crying.

Lucien’s had gone blank with shock. All the sun lines around his eyes showed, pale against the tan.

“Once I started to develop breasts, I couldn’t even always trust the people in the places I lived not to attack me. If Antoine hadn’t been there to help block the bastard foster father we had when I was fourteen, I—” She broke off, mostly because she strangled on all that mess of grief and pain that was pouring out. She shook her head, so violently she hurt herself. She always did hurt herself, didn’t she? On her own fucking hopes. “You need to be who you’ve made yourself to be. But I need to be who I’ve made myself to be. I need to know that who I am doesn’t depend on someone else loving me. So how do you think I’ll fit?”

Lucien knelt there as if she had turned him to stone. “I thought you needed a home. Security. Someone you could trust. I thought that was what you wanted.”

“And do I have to give up everything I am to get a chance at one? Is that really still to this day my only option?” She buried her face in her hands, overcome by all that old pain.

A long silence beyond her hands.

“Elena.” Lucien was very quiet. “You’re a smart, warm, very beautiful woman. Of course I am not your only option. I was hoping you would consider me your best option. But certainly not for lack of others.”

“I don’t need a home,” she said into her tear-wet hands. “I have one.” She lifted her head. “I guess I’m just like you, Lucien. I need to keep the home I made myself.”

They stared at each other, Lucien’s expression tense and pleated.

“Could you do it?” she said. “Give up everything you are to be my little space when I came home stressed and tired, raise my kids, say the right things to my colleagues’ husbands so that you didn’t mess up my career?”

She could see every line that time and war had made on Lucien’s face. His blue eyes held no brilliance. “No,” he said, as if it was pulling the pin on a hand grenade and he only realized he was pulling it as he held it in his hand. “No, I couldn’t.”

Yeah. Of course he couldn’t. She dropped her weight onto her forearms against her knees, staring down at her hands. Her tears dried. She’d never really cried much, back when her family situation was changing all the time. She guessed tears were in their own way a kind of hope. For a solution, for healing.

“Sorry,” she said wearily. “That was a bit much for someone you’ve only known a month. I guess this is why I’m so bad at relationships. If I know there’s no possibility for long term, I just don’t want to mess with it at all. I’ve had enough of temporary.”

She rose and stood looking down at him a moment. He didn’t try to get up off his knee, and for a moment, as he looked up at her with his face so intense, the position was so like a fairy-tale marriage proposal that she thought her heart would break in two.

“You were right about the easy,” she managed. “I’ve never met a man easier to fall too hard for in my entire life.”

Wrapping her hand around her lionheart, she turned and walked away briskly, dashing the last of the tears away as she climbed the steps. At least it was a wedding. She always cried from happiness at weddings. No one would think a thing.