Chapter 28

The lavender was just starting to bloom, the first tiny flowers opening on some of the sprigs. If bees had found those tiny purple flowers, they had all gone back to their hive with the setting sun or hunkered down somewhere to wait until morning.

Lucien settled between rows and pulled her down to her spot between his knees with a sigh, as if every tension in his body had flowed away. She nestled there, his presence siphoning away her fear. The dusk had deepened enough that the lights sparkled in the valley and on the hills and way out there, that faint glint of Corsica. The moon which had been full at Damien’s wedding shone three-quarters full again.

They were all alone in the world here. And it was lovely.

“I used to think of you as a loner,” she said. “Who went off to join the Foreign Legion. Even in Italy I thought that. I thought you needed me to give you a home, and it was a thing I could do for you, to say thank you for helping me fifteen years ago. A thing I could do for your grandfather and your Tante Colette, to thank them. But you’ve always been intensely social, haven’t you?” His cousins. His very close working conditions with all those men.

“I like this,” he said. “More than I know how to tell you. Being alone with you.”

“Yeah.” She sighed wistfully and rested her cheek against his knee, her arm curved around his thigh, turned mostly away from him even though nestled in the shape of his body. She would like having him in her alone space, too. Saying sleep tight, bella in person.

His hand stroked her hair. “Nobody ever did anything hard for you, did they? Not ever.”

“My mom.” She felt a little indignant. “She pulled herself together so many times. It’s hard to stop an opiate addiction, even for a while.”

Lucien was silent a moment behind her. Then he sighed, too. “Succeeded at anything hard for you, then, let’s say.”

Elena was quiet. She wished still so much that she could fix her poor mom. Right now her mom was successfully handling rehab, even though Elena couldn’t go see her often because it woke all her mother’s guilt about her childhood and that was the kind of thing that might drive her back toward drugs. She’d done well in rehab a few times before, then lapsed later, but this time was a longer program, and Elena…well, she knew better than to have much hope. But she did have some anyway.

Kind of like she did sitting here, surrounded by Lucien, gazing at that distant glint of Corsica.

“I’m sorry I overreacted,” she began.

His hand moved over her hair with just the right degree of heaviness, as if the stroking could sink all through her body. “I didn’t think you overreacted. I thought you should have maintained communication about your reaction and not just cut to radio silence like that.”

Maybe. But it had hurt so much. And every time anyone had ever explained to her why they were saying good-bye, it hadn’t made her feel better.

“I don’t even know if you wanted something long-term, yourself,” she said. Stupid dreams of permanence, sneaking up on her again. It was his fault. He seemed so damn permanent.

“I do.” Lucien’s voice, deep and firm behind her, resonating through her bones.

She loved that resonance. She would miss it so much, if she lost it.

“Lots of couples can only see each other on weekends,” she said. She didn’t know a single one, but she’d heard of that kind of thing. There had been her friend Suzanne, who tried maintaining a relationship with her boyfriend after she got a job in Paris, until they both started cheating on each other.

Lucien kept petting her hair. “If I re-up, the contract they’re trying to get me to sign is for five years. Can you see yourself doing weekends for five years?”

No. Her heart twisted. She had not, ever, dreamed of a five-year weekend-maybe relationship. She didn’t dream too much for herself—she didn’t believe in it. But if she had, it would have been something more like what Layla and Jess and Allegra and Malorie had.

Someone they could count on.

Never drink limoncello with a stranger in Italy.

“So you need me to quit.” His voice was thoughtful and matter-of-fact, as it so often was. This is the situation. This is my objective. Now I choose how to get to it.

But Elena shivered in horror. “No. No, I can’t ask you to do that.”

“I know you can’t ask. You think I’d say no.”

“It’s not just that!” Although…of course he would say no. “I don’t want you to have to give up a family again.” It was too enormous—to ask him to give up everything he had become for her.

“I admit that it’s tough,” he said, “but—”

“And I only have me to give up,” she said. “Just me. So it wouldn’t—matter as much.” A tiny hiccup in her voice, but she suppressed it. She never had mattered as much, but—do you want to give up the way he looks at you? No. So tough it the hell up, just like he said.

His eyes tightened as he searched her face. He lifted a hand to her hair. “Elena—”

She turned back around to face the sea. “I could finish up my PhD.”

“What?”

“That is—this is premature, obviously. But if we get sick of the weekend-only relationship”—hell, she was already sick of it, just in her imagination—“I could go back for my PhD. I can do most of that long distance. I might have to take a couple of new courses, but mostly all that I have left to do is write it. I could go back to my research into the fates of children lost in the war.”

“Elena. You told me you hated doing that. It tore you up.”

“It needs doing.”

“Yes, but…Elena, if you find that a healing thing to do, then by all means, I’ll support you. But I thought you needed to move on. Focus on flowers and perfumes and something hopeful. You told me so yourself.”

She closed her eyes tight a moment. “Fine. I’ll keep thinking. Maybe I could change my thesis, although I would probably have to do more coursework, which I’d have to do on the mainland. I just—” She broke off. God, it was going to be so lonely living on that base. All that alien hierarchy, all the women’s worth predicated on the men’s. Maybe if she’d had a father or a grandfather, maybe if the women in her family had had a habit of forming themselves around a patriarch, it might seem more doable now. But everything in her rejected the gender roles on that base. The tiny, tiny dependent space left for the women.

“And what would you do after you finished your dissertation?” Lucien said. “If we’re thinking long term. Because I was thinking longer than just the next four or five years.”

Four or five years of themselves was so much more than anyone had ever given Elena. Wouldn’t it be wonderful? To let the thought of him stretch out all the way to the horizon, as if she would never reach the end of him, as if he would always hold her tight.

But what would she do, after she finished her PhD, if he was still in the Legion? Maybe she couldn’t cobble together a forever out of short-term solutions.

“I’m still thinking,” she said, rather hopelessly. “I have no idea.” I think I was happy, before I met you. And I got tempted by you into a world where all that old misery could come back.

Because he was just that tempting.

Be brave, Elena. You can’t be a lionheart if you’re afraid of breaking yourself.

Why did she always have to be brave?

Lucien closed his hand around her shoulder and turned her around to face him. “Elena. Did you hear what I said before? I love you.”

Elena looked down. So many people had told her they loved her. The word was as insubstantial as a wisp of fog.

Ephemeral. Easy to feel in the moment. Hard to keep.

Lucien curved his hand over her cheek and under her jaw, lifting her face so he could meet her eyes. “I love that you think Tinuviel is a reasonable girl’s name. I love the way you are so freaking irrational sometimes that you make me want to kiss you…and how I have to figure out that, deep down, there is a reason, but you have to trust me to tell me. I love your red hair and your resilience and the fact that, even though you were afraid to accumulate anything for yourself in your apartment, you still bought a dozen place settings and a dozen wine glasses and even a dozen champagne glasses, so you could make the home for your friends that you were afraid of for yourself. I love the way your eyes look into me as if you’ve never in your life met a man you could believe in—but you’re going to believe in me. Yes, you are, Elena. I’m still working on it.”

Her lips trembled, and she drove the edges down to try to steady them. He made her heart all mushy with hope and love. But he was wrong. I’m not going to believe in you. I don’t know how.

“I love how happy you are for other people at weddings, even when you’re afraid to be happy for yourself. I love how hard you tried to say the right thing to my fellow officers and my colonel, even though it hadn’t occurred to me that you might need help and so you were feeling abandoned under fire. I love how much you like the taste of lemon, and the feel of roses, and the scent of lavender. I love how pretty you are, because I guess I am that shallow. I love your lionheart.” He laid his big hand over the glass heart and her own heart at the same time, so that her heart thumped as if it was trying to jump out and nestle itself in his hand.

“The heart that’s been broken so many times,” he said. “And yet, you still worried about me more than you. And came to find me to make sure I was okay. Because you’re perforated with compassion.”

She looked down, and her lashes caught the tears swelling in her eyes and lifted them into the moonlight. “I also just like you,” she whispered. “When I’m with you, and you’re holding me, it makes me feel as if everything in the world is just right.”

“Easy,” he said gently, catching a tear, then drying it by tracing her eyebrow. “But Elena…a smart man might be willing to do very hard things, to keep something that feels so right and so easy.”

She sniffled and tried to pull herself together. “Well, yes, but I never suspected you had brains.”

He laughed, and two more tears spilled over her eyelashes.

“That’s right, they always promote the idiots to be superior officers,” Lucien said. “That’s what I thought when I was a corporal, anyway. And they do say that in the army, a man always gets promoted to one rank higher than where he’s actually any good. So maybe I should quit before that happens.”

She shook her head rapidly, violently, so much that it trembled through her whole body. “You should never give up a home and family.”

“You had all those families, and not a single one ever chose you, did they?” The heel of his palm rubbed her little glass heart against her real heart, beating so stubbornly. “I can see why it makes you a little angry, that I have an embarrassment of riches, when it comes to families.” His blue eyes still had that crinkle of warmth for her, but they were very serious. “Elena. Even with both those strong families, the one I choose…is you.”

He pulled his dog tags over his head and gazed at them in his hard palm a moment. His thumb ran over the raised words FONTAINE Julien. Touched his blood type. He stirred the twin tags to reveal the ring underneath them.

A smile twisted his mouth. “I wonder how hard it was for a penniless mercenary out of Italy to convince a competent, successful glove-maker with a perfectly good life to let him have all that power over hers.” He pushed his pinky finger against the ring, and could barely get it on the tip. “We don’t know much about either of them, but we know enough about the time period to know that an economically secure widow was far better off staying that way than marrying an arrogant stranger with a violent past. How the hell did Niccolò ever manage to get Laurianne to trust him enough to let him slip this ring on her finger?”

“He probably had good biceps,” Elena said, resigned, and Lucien laughed a little again.

“You are so damn kissable.” He slipped the dog tag chain over her head, settling the tags and the ring over her lionheart.

Elena started, as if he’d just tipped her over the edge of a sandy slope and she was sliding down, down, down into she wasn’t sure what. Hopefully not somewhere she would be slowly digested over a thousand years. “Don’t you need these?”

“I’ve spent the last fifteen years focused on my needs. The Legion’s needs. My men’s needs. Now, I’m going to go after my wants.”

She stared at him, her hand clutching such a mess of wishes—dog tags and ring and lionheart, all of them tangled together.

He touched her nose. “That’s you. My want. You look as if that’s still not clear to you.”

Elena covered her face. Dog tags, ring, and heart pressed against her cheek.

“You’re not the only one who can remake herself to have love,” Lucien said. “I can do it, too.”

Her eyebrows flexed in profound confusion. She parted her fingers enough to stare at him.

“Raoul wants me to help take on the overseas security of Rosier SA.” A slight shrug of those broad shoulders that very clearly belied how much that offer meant to him. “It might be something I would be good at.”

“Of course you would be good at it,” Elena said, so confused now she was starting to panic. Too much was at stake for her not to understand a word he was saying. “You’d be good at anything. But—”

He kissed her, swift and short. “You’re such a sweetheart.”

“No, I’m not,” she said, baffled. “It’s just true.”

He hugged her into him and kissed the top of her head, then eased his hold so he could see her face again. “I know how to do that, work with people all over the world. Keep supply lines open even in difficult situations. I could get to know all those small farmers Rosier SA relies on, and maybe help teach them that we’re not just some modern day manifestation of colonialism, like the Legion is. That we won’t cut and run and leave them with no funds the instant their situation gets tricky, that we’re on their side.”

Yeah. He probably really would be good at that. Elena sat blinking at him, wondering how in the world she had gotten such an incredible man interested in her.

“It would be a relief to have control of the situations I got us into, after fifteen years of being sent wherever the government chose, whether or not I thought the government was right.”

“A relief?” Elena challenged. Was that how he was going to spin such a wrenching new uprooting? “You love your men.”

“Yes,” he said very simply. “That part’s going to be very hard.”

And her heart tightened into such a knot of fear.

“But I love you, too, Elena. I love my cousins. I love the rose harvest, and I’d love to be here for the jasmine harvest, too. I would love to see my nephews and nieces born. Hell, Elena, maybe I’m ready to have some of my own kids, too, if you are.”

“You can do that on base.”

“Elena. I can be happy on base. But you can’t. And I can be happy here, too, if I choose to. If you’re with me, happier. That’s why we’re talking about this.”

She couldn’t understand what was happening. He made it almost seem, if she held her breath just one minute more, that her dreams could come true.

“I would lose a world, but I would gain a whole new one. I like to travel, and you might like to travel with me when it’s feasible, which you wouldn’t be able to do when I was deployed. Think of the exhibits you could make from the ideas you got learning more about fragrance production and history in other countries. And at the same time I could be in Grasse most of the time. I will miss my men and my life in the Legion like hell. But I missed this life like hell. Elena, it’s not on you to change. It’s on me. I’m the one who created this dichotomy in my life when I was nineteen years old.”

She bit the knuckles that closed so tightly still around the dog tags, ring, and lionheart.

He smoothed her hands off her face to frame it with his hands instead, holding her eyes. “Out of all the ways I can be torn between choices now, you feel like the center that I need to protect no matter what.”

This makes no sense, Elena thought. That she would be the center. That she would be the heart of something, what he wanted to keep even if everything else fell apart.

That was never, ever true. She clutched the tangle of dog tags, ring, and heart, the enormity of what he was willing to do for her overwhelming her.

Lucien pulled her snugly into his arms. “So if we name her Tinuviel, can we call her Tintin for short? Because that would be kind of awesome.”

“I don’t understand,” Elena said helplessly.

He was so gentle. “I know you don’t. I know you thought I’d ditch you as soon as it got hard. I know you never expected me to change my life for you, even though I threw my ordered life into a tailspin for you within a few hours of meeting you in Italy. I know that in ten years, twenty years, when we hit some kind of rough patch or even just have a bad fight, some part of you will still be ready for me to ditch you. But I won’t, Elena. I’ll see those rough patches through, I’ll make up with you after fights. I’ll still love you, bella.” He took the wedding ring and fit it over her pinky, chain and all. “I am here and here I’ll stay.”

Elena started to cry in earnest, pressing her face into his throat. “I fell a little bit in love with you when I was thirteen years old, and I didn’t even know you. I just knew you were willing to fight for me when no one else was.”

“That’s a good first lesson.” Lucien kissed her head. “Let’s build from there.”

She touched her lionheart. That, if it got one more chip, might shatter. But you can’t be a lionheart if you’re afraid of breaking yourself.

Maybe Niccolò was a lionheart. Escaping out of Italy without even a pair of gloves to his name and starting over. Maybe Laurianne was. Safely widowed and independent, but willing to risk vulnerability again.

You’re a lionheart not because you know you’ll win but because you try even if you might lose.

Her grandmother had tried. Her mother had tried, was still trying, over and over, to beat that addiction, no matter how often she had failed. No matter how much the guilt and shame must weigh on her.

I should give my mother her own lionheart, Elena realized suddenly. Her mother, who still floated lost at sea, as if the family destroyed in the Holocaust had been her mother and grandmother’s Lusitania, the survivors left grasping for debris in the middle of the ocean after that ship was blown from the waters.

She clutched that ring and those dog tags and her lionheart hard, and lifted her head to kiss Lucien. “I’ll fight for you, too,” she promised fiercely. “Even if I have to fight myself. I will.”

“I know you will, bella.” He lay his hand over hers against her breastbone. “You’re a lionheart.”

And after that it felt easy. There on the slope of lavender high under the night stars. Easy and quiet and perfect, as if, in the space their two bodies made, everything was just right. They were home.