Chapter 26

Lucien sat still on the bench of the lavoir. The river ran a cool green-brown before him. The stone was quiet. The murmurs of the wedding above and beyond it beckoned like a promise.

He pulled the chain out from under his uniform and gazed at the dog tags and the ring in his hand.

FONTAINE Julien.

That blood type that should have been an early clue he wasn’t a Rosier by blood, but it had never even occurred to him.

Captain. The rank that held in it everything that he had ever done or could ever become.

No, not everything. Everything you’ve done in the past fifteen years. What you could become is really always up to you to decide.

He rolled the gold ring with his thumb. Niccolò Rosario, hardened mercenary. Riding out of Italy and the wars to marry a glove-maker and create a life full of roses.

He’d made Elena cry.

Woke a whole life of hurt in her.

It squeezed his guts, made him bury his head in his hands.

Easy. She’d felt so easy. As if everything with her was just exactly right. He knew what to do, he knew how to build a bridge to her, he had a home he could give her, the things she needed, the things he wanted.

That was what he had thought.

And she’d been right all along, to try to keep hold of her lionheart. She’d known that falling in love might feel easy, but that being in love required you to wrench yourself out by the roots and re-form who you were.

He’d thought he’d already done that for her. Come back home, faced a whole past of his own hurt because she asked him to, with those sunlit brown eyes and the taste of limoncello on her lips.

But all she had really done in Italy was ask him to face his past for his own sake. For her sake, she needed him to deal with his future.

And no one had ever done that for her.

He had so much love in his family that they’d left a space for him, even after he disappeared for fifteen years and came back with a different name. Even after they learned he wasn’t even really related to them at all. They could get mad and growl and hug him at the same time, like Matt, and still make their inheritance into a trust to ensure he could stay part of this family.

She’d been in family after family that couldn’t make a space for her even as long as she was there.

She had only ever known and loved people who found her easy. As soon as she grew too hard for them, they abandoned her again.

A scrape of a foot on stone. Lucien looked up, on a quick spark of hope that Elena was already over it. Coming back to solve his problem for him. Being easy.

Fuck.

His father.

Impossible emotions thronged around him like a crowd of raging fucking zombies, and Camp Raffalli rose up in his mind like a vision of order and certainty. I know exactly who I am there.

And I don’t have to deal with all this shit.

(But Elena doesn’t know who she is there. When she’s there, she’s lost and small and only has you. You asshole, thinking “you” would be all she could need.)

Michel Rosier stood just under the eave of the lavoir, not approaching. Lucien braced his forearms on his thighs and gazed at him grimly, refusing to give the man the respect of standing.

Michel Rosier looked up the river toward the rose fields, then back at Lucien. While Lucien had been growing and thriving, the older man really had been fading, hadn’t he? Hell, didn’t he turn sixty this year?

“I always regretted it, you know,” Michel Rosier said abruptly.

Lucien stared at him, while his guts just knotted up and tried to escape to his toes. Putain de bordel. Was he going to have to forgive his father now?

“Losing you,” the older man said.

Lucien closed his eyes. Shit. He forced them open again. He didn’t close his eyes in front of enemies.

“It was a pretty hard thing to swallow, when your mother threw it in my face like that.”

“Fuck. You.” The words cut from Lucien before he even realized he was going to say them.

Michel Rosier’s lips pressed tight for a moment. “I’m sorry she ever said it. I’m sorry I lost a son.”

Lucien came to his feet. He let all the power he had acquired in fifteen years unfurl and fill this small space. He needed it. It had been one of his driving motivations fifteen years ago—to become so strong that even his world falling down around his head couldn’t destroy him. “You didn’t lose a son because she said it. You lost a son because you rejected me.”

Not even talked to him. When Lucien’s whole world had been thrown into a frantic whirlpool of lost place and lost identity at his mother’s bombshell, his father had just left. Walked out, got an apartment in Paris, and never even spoke to Lucien about it.

Fuck, and Lucien had gone on to repeat that pattern when he ran off to join the Legion.

Michel tightened his jaw, making himself meet Lucien’s cold anger. “It was a vicious divorce, and she got a lot of joy out of stealing even that from me—my son. But I was sorry I let her, later.”

Jesus Christ. Lucien brought his head back to the stone behind him, pressing it hard enough to feel as if he was going to flatten his own head. “God damn it.” The words exploded out of him. “What do you want me to say? That’s okay?”

If he forgave himself, did he have to forgive his father too?

Michel Rosier looked away. His eyes gleamed with pain. “I don’t expect you to say anything. I know those bridges were burned. I just wanted to let you know.”

Lucien folded his arms. “I’m not your son anymore. I’m Julien Fontaine.”

Michel Rosier folded his own arms. With a small shock, Lucien realized that still to this day, he had some of his father’s gestures. Nature, nurture. The two men gazed at each other grimly. “I guess you can choose whoever you want to be,” the older man said abruptly. “But I can choose who I am, too. I’m proud I raised you. Proud I got a chance to be your father. Proud I named you Lucien Michel, after myself and my best friend. And sorry I screwed it all up.”

Lucien wanted to be back on Corsica so badly he was starting to wish he wore fucking sparkly red slippers. Except, merde, who the hell knew where they’d take him if he clicked them together and wished himself home? The damn things might land him right here.

The home Elena had tried to give him.

Nobody ever faced the hard things for her. Not ever.

Her whole life, when love got hard, it died.

“Shit.” He let out a great expulsion of air. “Okay. Okay.” He shoved his hands over his face. “I—do I have to absorb all this right now?”

The man who had once been his father shook his head. “I just wanted you to know. Also, in case it matters to you—you’re my only heir. Legally, I mean. Whatever I’ve earned, and whatever comes to me from your grandfather, goes to you. I updated the will last week, to make sure to cover both your possible legal names.”

Lucien could only stare at him. “God damn it, Papa,” he said helplessly, and only realized what word he’d used when he saw the sheen in his father’s eyes.

“Well, anyway.” Michel Rosier stepped back. Half turned toward the stair. Looked back at him. “I was proud to have you as my son. That was part of why it hurt so much—I really thought you were the best thing I’d ever done, and she took that away from me. And I was stupid enough to let her. Even if you don’t think of yourself as my son anymore, I’m proud of who you are now.”

The older man climbed quickly out of sight.

Leaving Lucien with so many emotions in him, he thought he’d rather go berserk and charge a hail of bullets than handle his damn family.

***

Above the lavoir, everyone was still climbing into beribboned cars for the parade of honking vehicles through the valley to celebrate the new couple, the ultimate destination the great mas, where this time there was no pavilion, because they had known well in advance they wouldn’t have rain, but an open dance floor.

Lucien couldn’t see Elena. But he did find Antoine. Cool green eyes, blond hair, but that bone structure—again, Lucien wanted to just grab the man and shake it out of him. Who are you? What do you mean for this family? Are you going to hurt them? And don’t you fucking dare try to catch Elena on a rebound.

“She’s still here then?” Lucien said, swallowing it all to try to speak moderately.

“I knew you’d hurt her,” Antoine said flatly.

“Did you? Are you where she got her habit of jumping to negative conclusions, then?”

“No, she learned that one the hard way.”

Yeah. She had, at that. Lucien looked around the crowd for her again.

“I think you’re supposed to be at the front of the line,” Antoine said. “Up there with your cousins.”

Lucien looked at Antoine. Whose face was so exceptionally devoid of expression, he could have been on guard duty. “Where are you going to be?”

Green eyes were cool and indifferent. “Back here with the distant friends of the family.”

Okay, shit, Lucien might be used to running a company, including during battle, but there was only so much even he could handle at one time. “You and I have things to talk about,” he told Antoine, and strode forward to catch up with Tristan.

The bride and groom were riding in an old 1920s convertible at the front of the line, the car that his grandparents had ridden in on their wedding day, which his grandfather had kept in shape for seventy more years. Lucien could remember putting some muscle into the preservation efforts whenever his grandfather touched it up. Learning early mechanics as a six-year-old on the simple engines of the times.

His grandfather and aunt and Layla’s mother rode in another old car just behind them. The rest of Matt and Layla’s wedding party followed next, which meant all the cousins.

“Where’s Elena?” Tristan asked, from the wheel of his silver convertible.

“Don’t start,” Lucien said and climbed in the back. Where he literally did not fit.

With lots of honking and cheering from the crowd, the bridal car pulled away and Tristan cranked their engine. Lucien sat in the middle, bracing his forearms on the front seat between Tristan and Malorie. He eyed Tristan’s black head. As a boy, Tristan had been by far the most perceptive about some things. “Didn’t you go to school with Antoine?”

“Old friend.” Tristan slanted a smile Lucien didn’t understand at Malorie. “The three of us even worked on a project together. Although for some strange reason, Antoine stood us up.”

And Tristan hadn’t noticed anything? Not everyone had the experience at distinguishing between a hundred-plus men with freshly shaved heads. Then again, Lucien might be losing his mind.

He sure as hell felt like he was close to losing it, right this moment.

“Where’s Elena?” Tristan said again.

“Please just shut up.”

“Still having trouble communicating?” Tristan, the great communicator, looked disapproving.

“Can we just concentrate on the damn wedding?”

Tristan honked his horn obediently, and smiled at the road. “Have I mentioned it’s good to have you back?”

Lucien looked at his cousin’s black head again, a small part of the knot inside him easing. “Yeah. You’ve mentioned that.”

Tristan slanted a grin over his shoulder. “It’s just so familiar, driving you crazy.”

Lucien knuckled that tousled head. Hell, he hadn’t done that in fifteen years.

Tristan laughed. He sounded very happy. Malorie turned enough in her seat to smile at Lucien, as if she approved of anyone who made Tristan that happy. Trust Tristan to turn a generations-old family feud between the Monsards and the Rosiers into romantic bliss.

“What would you have done if Malorie decided to pursue her career in New York instead of coming back here?” Lucien said. “Would you have gone with her?”

Tristan’s face went blank. As if Lucien had just forced him to imagine his worst nightmare. Well, okay—at least he only had to imagine it. Lucien was in his.

Malorie gave Lucien a look of reproach, as if he had said something bad. “I couldn’t do that to Tristan. Ask him to give up his family. It would destroy who he is.”

It would destroy who Lucien was, too, to end his career for Elena and come back here. But he’d done it once before—immolated who he had been in a dramatic gesture, risen from the ashes.

A vision of Elena’s auburn hair. She’s risen from the ashes, too. And she never chose to burn herself up. She just had to rebirth herself the best she could when others tossed her in the fire.

Not an ugly duckling, not a swan. A phoenix.

A lionheart.

“We’d have had to work it out,” Tristan said and reached out a hand to close over Malorie’s. “But this is where Malorie belongs, too. She just had to reclaim it.”

Lucien sat back in the ridiculously small seat and gazed at the hills rising around the valley, his old lavender field up there that they still kept, the limestone cliffs, the roses. His dog tags still lay on his uniform. He traced a thumb over the raised lettering of the word FONTAINE, then found the ring that could not fit on any of his fingers. J’y suis, j’y reste.

I am here, and here I’ll stay.

He could see himself saying it to Elena, feel her hair in his hand as he stroked it back from her face, see the wanting and hope and happiness in her face. It would feel incredible to be the man who gave her that much happiness. The moonlight would be falling over them, and he would—

With a great cacophony of honks, the cars pulled up to park along the drive to the mas, and Tristan jumped out and went around for Malorie. Who got out all by herself before he could get there, and the two of them exchanged exasperated looks.

Lucien found himself smiling a little. He liked Malorie. He liked seeing all his cousins in such damn happy couples.

He stood off to the side of the road to look back down the line of cars, and finally, way at the end, spotted Elena’s red head with Antoine.

She’s hurt and unhappy and she’s going to have to smile her way through this wedding anyway, isn’t she?

Had she been hurting that whole weekend with him, and smiled her way through it? As officers’ wives often had to do, smile and be strong when things hurt and their husbands were away and everything was on their shoulders. Men chose the military life because they thrived on it. He had never thought as much about the wives, but it occurred to him that perhaps some of the women married to those men never did thrive. They just managed.

He turned and caught up with Tristan, who was holding Malorie’s hand as they walked toward Matt and Layla. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Tristan looked at him, startled.

“I’m proud of who I’ve become,” Lucien said. “But I’m sorry I left you without a word. I’m sorry I missed fifteen years of your life. I regret it.”

Tristan stood very still.

“I’m proud of who you’ve become, too,” Lucien said.

Tristan’s face crinkled up as if he was still a boy and struggling not to let all those eye-stinging emotions show to his older cousins. Malorie slipped an arm around his waist, and Tristan wrapped his own arm immediately around her like a security blanket.

“I just wanted to tell you,” Lucien said.

Because maybe it was true he had burned a lot of bridges.

But he knew how to build a fucking bridge.

Especially given that the stone foundations of the old one were still there, still strong. They’d saved those foundations for him, all this time.

He went to find Damien. Raoul. Matt.

One by one. To tell them the same thing.

He felt a million years lighter, with each apology. And after, he went and found his father. He didn’t say anything. But he held out his hand. His father shook it. And they looked each other in the eyes a long moment.

Then…oh, hell. He was a leader of men. He knew when he had to stand in front of them and say the right thing. And it was a wedding, and everyone was giving speeches again.

His turn.