Chapter 27

“Most of you don’t know me anymore.” The deep, firm voice resonated across the open space and into Elena’s bones. She turned away from her conversation.

Lucien had taken the microphone. Tall and in command, even at ease, in this position, in charge of a crowd. A lone, tough soldier who…didn’t need a home. He knew how to make one.

“I’m Lucien Rosier.”

Wild cheers, as if every single person there wanted to prove they did know him, very well.

“Julien Fontaine.”

An uneasy shifting.

“I’ve been gone for fifteen years. And I’ve missed you all for every single day of them. When I left, Matt was still a scrawny teenager.”

A ripple of laughter as Lucien gestured at the big, muscular Matt, who had folded his arms in his discomfort at being the center of this attention, a stance that made him look even bigger and more dominant.

“So was Damien. Even Raoul. And Tristan, hell…he was just a kid.”

Tristan slipped his hands in his pockets, watching his cousin.

“I hate like hell that I missed those fifteen years of their lives. But I’m prouder than I can say of who they’ve become. Good men. Men who can attract good women.” He gestured to Layla as an example, and the bride squeezed Matt’s arm, eyes bright.

“Men who know how to build a family and to fight for it. There’s no more important knowledge than that.”

Applause.

“Some of you can fight for your country and maybe you should.” His gaze swept over the younger people in the crowd, and their parents frowned at him. “But only as long as you’re fighting, ultimately, for this.” He nodded at Matt and Layla again. “Glory and medals and being a badass—those are all distractions. Nice when you’re young. But don’t lose sight of what’s real.”

Soft applause again. Tristan was shifting in the background, doing something.

Lucien turned to Matt and Layla. “Congratulations on building such a good life. I’m sorry I missed the last fifteen years of it, but I want to see the next seventy.”

He handed the microphone back, and just at that moment, a photo flashed on the screen behind him that had been playing photos of the happy bride and groom.

A giant, vivid photo of five mostly naked young boys, each covered in a different color paint. Damien in blue, Tristan in purple…Lucien, one of the two tallest, in orange. Damien had genie briefs on and Matt had Superman, and four-year-old Tristan’s complete nakedness was covered with a photo edit of a big golden star and an arrow pointing to it with the words “Much bigger now.”

Everyone burst out laughing. Multiple Rosier cousins groaned and looked around to see who they should strangle. Tristan grinned.

Elena beamed at the title Tristan had put at the top of the photo: Together Again.

And at the bottom. Wouldn’t Miss It.

“That’s awesome,” Elena said wistfully. Happy childhoods must be so cool.

She glanced at Antoine. Who was looking at the photo of the painted, grinning cohort as if it hurt him. She laid her hand over his arm. Sometimes he found it harder to enjoy the Rosier happiness than she did. As if he still hadn’t come to terms with the fact that it wasn’t for him, too.

Amid the crowd of people around the Rosier cousins, Lucien was slowly working his way through kisses and hugs and handshakes. She watched him disappear beyond the mas. And not come back.

She squeezed Antoine’s arm again and went after him.

Behind her, Antoine sighed and rubbed his forehead. And looked up.

A tall, old, old man stood in front of him, gazing down at him with keen blue eyes. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” Jean-Jacques Rosier said.

Antoine stood so fast he nearly knocked his chair over, manners sweeping up as if one look from Jean-Jacques Rosier was all it took to wake them.

The old man held out his hand, and Antoine took it, absurdly conscious of his own handshake—not wanting it to come across as weak, but not wanting to make it seem as if he was trying to out-grip such a venerable old man. “Antoine Vallier, monsieur.”

The old man studied his face unhurriedly. “Tell me,” he said thoughtfully. “Do I know your father?”

***

Lucien sat alone behind the extraction plant, gazing out over the rose fields. Pink flowers were already popping out all over again after that morning’s harvest—which Lucien himself had helped handle for Matt so that the crazy romantic could get married among roses during his busiest season of the year. But fresh flowers were ready again to be harvested themselves tomorrow morning. The sun was just starting to set, a flush of rose hope across the valley. He’d always liked the sunset here. There was a gentleness to it, a hope of quiet, a promise that tomorrow would be a new day.

His life would change so much if he came back here. Gentler. Easier. So much harder. Would he even know what to do with himself?

A feminine figure appeared before him, and all his tension relaxed immediately, relief mingled with regret. He was glad she had come to him. But he’d still been regrouping, still trying to figure out what to do and say. He should have gone to her.

“Perforated with compassion?” he asked her.

“It’s a good story,” she said, and bent her head. “But I think I just miss you so much I can’t stand it. I try to pull away, but…it hurts.” Her mouth twisted in a pseudo-wry way, as if it really did hurt and she wished she could hide it. “You sucked me in so fast, and…I’m so stupid.”

He opened his arms to her and she took one tiny step forward, so that he could pull her down onto his knee.

Ah, there. There. That felt so much better. “I love you,” he whispered to her hair as her face pressed into his neck.

A jolt all through her body.

“You were right,” he murmured, stroking that beautiful silky hair over her back. “You’re really easy to love.”

“I never said th—”

“Must have been so painful for you, when all those people who like easy things turned back when the going got hard.”

She said nothing at all.

And still, this felt so easy, to hold her in his arms, on his thigh, cradled against him. As if everything in the world was right, as long as he had her here. Trusting him. Willing to let him hold her.

Ease and quiet and the pink shade all along the horizon and over the hills.

“You’re a lousy swan, Elena.”

“What?”

“I bet phoenix fledglings look pretty patchy and ugly to ducks, too, when they’re growing up in the wrong family.”

She lifted her head and gazed at him, her eyes damp and her face crinkled up.

He followed her chain down to her lionheart, lifted it, and kissed it, then tucked it carefully back away.

She hid her face in the join of his shoulder again. Not so much as if she was hiding from him, but as if it made her feel safe. He tightened his arms just a little. You are, in fact, safe.

“It was the second time I went into foster care,” she whispered. “But the first time I was just a baby, so I didn’t remember. This was the first time I knew. I was terrified and crying and clinging to my mother. She was crying, too. That was when she gave me the heart. So I could be un coeur de lion.”

God, what a story to twist a man’s heart out. He’d never felt so fucking helpless in his life as against this, the things that had happened to a little girl he hadn’t even known. At least when his mother had exploded his life around his ears, he’d been eighteen, old enough to be a man.

“They were a really good family,” she said. “They were really happy to be given a little girl to care for, I was just what they had wanted, and they were very gentle with me about how hard it was for me to adjust, and the mom liked to buy me pretty clothes. I loved them. But my mom got better, and I loved her, too, and she got me back, and then the next family after that…they didn’t really like me. They were older, and it was their first time being foster parents, and I guess it just wasn’t what they had expected. They’d send me to bed at seven and then talk about how impossible I was, so rude I didn’t even know to offer to pour everyone’s water when I got my own, that kind of thing. I think it was only this past year or so that I realized I wasn’t actually a terrible person at the age of eight, that they were just…not cut out to be foster parents. And I still have to tell myself that. I don’t feel as if I wasn’t to blame.”

Assholes. The salary for fostering counted toward the years of work a French citizen needed to accumulate in order to qualify for retirement. Sometimes that meant people took the job who only imagined they liked children and who couldn’t find another job and thought fostering would be an easy one.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you that,” she said. “I’m sorry. I always tell you the most downer things.”

No. He thought that when a whole continent participated in genocide and therefore eradicated all possible extension of a family support network that a little five-year-old girl could have, the consequences might last a really long time. He thought she was telling him because, deep down, she knew he needed to know. That if she kept hiding all of this inside herself and didn’t trust him with it, they would never have a chance.

“I think,” he said very slowly, tracing her exposed necklace chain up and down, “that you hold on to this one so much because it’s the only one that hasn’t gotten broken yet. So you think if you hold tight enough, you can pretend your real heart isn’t broken either.”

Her eyes filled, as if maybe that truth had cut more cruelly through her self-protections than he had intended it to. He tightened his arms around her again. Stroked her head back onto his shoulder.

There. Again, that utter sense of rightness when she was tucked against him like this.

He gazed across the rose fields at the first star.

It wasn’t going to war that was so hard to give up with the Legion. It wasn’t his ambition. He thought he could even handle the loss of certainty in who he was, the years it might take him to re-form his identity as a civilian.

But his men…it would break his heart to leave his men.

So that would make two times in your life your heart was broken. As opposed to how many in hers?

He found her lionheart again, as if it had become his talisman, too, rubbing his thumb over the chips.

And if you leave the Legion, you get things in return. Your cousins back. A new place in this family. She would lose everything she ever managed to become, and what would she get in exchange?

She’d have no new place to grow. But you—you’d be able to take everything you once were, and everything you’ve become, and try to synthesize those into the man you need to be now. A man who knows how to build a family and to fight for it.

“I love you,” he told her again. What did she hear when he said that? Not something rare and special that he’d never told anyone before, he was pretty sure. He wondered what love meant to her. He didn’t think it meant security. She buried her face in his neck, and she wrapped her arms around him this time, but she didn’t answer.

“Go for a ride with me?” he said.

“You can’t leave your cousin’s wedding!”

“It will go on all night. We’ll come back. I know how much you like dancing.” He twined her hair around his finger, tweaked it gently. He liked dancing, too. But he didn’t want her to dance with her heart broken. He wanted her to dance happy and whole.

She looked at him, as if she was wondering if he was just a creature formed out of shadow and sunset or if he might actually be true.

But after fifteen years of challenge and war, of being part of a unit and of leading men in life and death, he knew some things about himself. I am true.

His hand curved against her face. His thumb stroked her cheekbone. “We’ll take it slow,” he promised.