Chapter 3

A beautiful evening. A pretty girl. The scent of lemons.

And all that time she’d been carrying a grenade, just waiting to pull the pin. “And what the hell do you want?” Lucien said.

His stranger-for-the-evening stood very straight, that glossy auburn hair showing barely a hint of where his hand had been. Although his hand still felt its texture, and his lips still tasted sweet and tart.

Like she was going to shake the hell out of his life but keep hers completely untouched.

She closed her eyes tightly, then opened them and forced herself to meet his, holding herself with…the closest he could come to describing it was honor. Straight shoulders, a direct gaze. I have done this wrong thing. I am accepting your blame for it. “I’m sorry.”

Damn it. Even meeting that golden-brown gaze, his anger wanted to curl back down on itself already and quit blaming her.

He grabbed onto it. Anger could get you through all kinds of situations that were much more painful when the anger faded away.

He crossed his arms, as he did with his men when they got dragged in after fighting local police, and waited for her to say whatever the hell she was going to say in her defense.

Fuck, she was a hell of a lot more gorgeous than his men, though.

“I didn’t mean to…” Her fingers flickered to indicate the terrace, him, her glass of limoncello.

Well, that was something. He didn’t let go of his anger for it, but deep down it was nice to know that he’d tempted her into doing something she didn’t mean to. He knew better than to soften toward a legionnaire who had screwed up, though, and he just gazed at her, grimly.

Damn. Most objects of his grim gaze weren’t half his size. He felt mean, as if he shouldn’t be looking at her that way. And maybe he shouldn’t?

It wasn’t that he wasn’t used to women, exactly. Having her approach him just because he’d stood still for ten minutes watching a view was pretty much how women had behaved around him whenever he left base since he was twenty. He’d never expected to have to spend the nights of his solitary vacation alone. Not if he didn’t want to.

But in the daytime, for the past fifteen years, he dealt only with men. Hard men. Some of the hardest, roughest men in the world. She didn’t even start to belong in that tough crowd.

Unless she was one hell of a lot tougher than she looked.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Her gaze dropped to the limoncello in her hand, and for a second she looked…wistful? She touched that chipped glass heart pendant she wore, and then set the glass of limoncello on the table and straightened her shoulders.

Her manner became professional, in a way that pissed him off. He clung to that anger. The fine line of temper was about all that was keeping him from falling into the gaping black panic of a past come back to destroy all the solid ground he had built for himself.

“I got distracted,” she said. “I’m sorry.” A motion of her hand, pushing her distraction away, a twist of regret around her mouth, quickly suppressed. Clear brown eyes met his. “I was asked to find Lucien Rosier.”

He gazed at her, grim, not speaking.

“That’s you, isn’t it?”

He said nothing.

“I know it’s you.”

“What part of the Foreign Legion did you miss?” he said between his teeth. “We don’t have a past, if we don’t want one. We start over when we sign up.”

“Your family misses you.”

God damn it. What did she think he was supposed to do? Go back? Hurt them again? Expect them to forgive him? When he wasn’t even their real cousin, and he’d run off and left them?

“I made my own family.” He gestured toward the west. Where, far down the Mediterranean coast, lay Corsica and Camp Raffalli, the base of the 2e REP, the last airborne regiment of the Legion, one of the most elite fighting regiments in the world. Not so far from where he had been born and yet a world away. His world. The world he could belong to. That nobody could take away. That depended entirely on what he did, not who his father was. And where he’d been able to start from scratch and rebuild himself into a man even he could believe in.

“How the hell did you find me? Those records are impenetrable.” Or they were supposed to be. He was going to go find some fucking office-boy Legionnaire and kick his ass.

Elena stood very straight, her chin steady and her hands at her sides, loosely fisted. She could have made a good queen. On the scaffold, facing the crowd, making a valiant end as they cut her head off. Maybe she was tougher than she looked.

“That’s part of what I do,” she said. “I find people.”

“You must be pretty damn good at your job.”

She didn’t react to the bitter compliment. She had the damnedest brown eyes, a sunlit brown, with a golden clarity to them. And right now, solitude filled those eyes like a light in a peaceful autumn forest, far away from the world.

Expecting nothing of him or of anyone.

Those brown eyes looked at him as if she and he stood on two different mountaintops and the one narrow wisp of a bridge had fallen down. And it was okay with her, because she had never really counted on that bridge anyway.

Restlessness stirred in him. I can climb a mountain pretty damn fast. I can leap across gaps.

Hell, he could build a bridge if he needed to. He’d built a few in the past fifteen years.

And why the hell did he want to prove that to her suddenly?

Putain, but she was pretty.

“Lucien,” she began carefully, and all the hairs on his body tried to lift to the name.

“God damn it,” he interrupted, furious. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me who you were right away? What was this all about? Trying to soften me up?”

She looked toward the sea. A wave of color swept up that composed face. She didn’t lose control of her expression, but she couldn’t stop the blush. “No.”

Just that. No. Her willingness to come up to his apartment hadn’t had anything to do with a desire to soften him up.

It had just been…him. Her.

The fundamentals. His gaze traced over her pretty, so-alone body involuntarily, and a hot desire ran through him to turn back time, forget his birth name, and get back to fundamentals.

“I’ve apologized already for my lapse in professional judgment,” she said, her chin up. “I shouldn’t have let that happen.”

Okay, now he was really pissed off. Unreasonably so, and he couldn’t even put his finger on why. Let it happen? He'd orchestrated the whole thing. Easy, careful, a big, dangerous man scattering seeds in the snow before him and then sitting very still with his palm upturned and full of seeds, until the bird came to eat out of his hand.

Well. That was what he’d thought he was doing. Finding out the bird had had a “professional motive” was a shock.

Finding out that professional motive was his family…hell.

“Are you sure you aren’t regretting having let your real purpose slip out that soon?” he asked cruelly.

Her eyes flickered.

His anger faltered. What an interesting reaction.

Physically interesting. His dick stirred and begged, Can we forget about this ghastly family history and go back to what we were doing?

She met his gaze assertively, making respect stir in him again. He’d always admired a person who could still meet his eyes when he was mad. First time he’d had the experience with a woman since he’d left his Tante Colette behind, but then, when in the past fifteen years had he gotten mad at a woman?

“I was hired by your aunt, Colette Delatour, to help track down missing members of her family. I’ve been working with Antoine Vallier to put her in touch with her heirs.”

Who the hell was Antoine Vallier?

His slim stranger knit her eyebrows, gazing at him as if he was some baffling creature. “All this time, you’ve been so close to your family. Just an island away. And you never even go to see them.”

“It’s the Legion. I’ve spent most of my time overseas.”

“It was a shorter drive to Pont-le-Loup from the Nice ferry dock than to here,” she pointed out unanswerably.

He looked away. Not that this is any of your fucking business, he wanted to tell her. What the hell did she know about how it felt, to realize that everything you loved about your life, your entire sense of belonging, wasn’t true? “They’re not my real family,” he said flatly.

When he was eighteen, he’d vomited in the pines in the hills at what he’d learned—what they’d all learned. That he wasn’t a Rosier. Now…shit.

After fifteen years of making his own solid brotherhood around him to replace them, you’d think he could handle it. But it still felt like a knife in his stomach.

No, worse. He’d actually had a knife in his stomach once, and a man could heal from that.

“My client, who refers to you as her nephew, would like to see you.”

He flinched, and his fingers curled into his arms. Did she? Still refer to him as her nephew?

She would, wouldn’t she?

Didn’t mean his grandfather still thought of him as his grandson, though. The man he’d wanted to live up to all his damn life, right up until he found out it was impossible. He wasn’t that man’s grandson.

Plus, when the going got tough, he’d cut and run, and he knew damn well what Jean-Jacques Rosier thought about men who cut and run. A nineteen-year-old had thought running off to join the Legion was brave. A man who had learned the skills and discipline and responsibility to become captain knew better.

“Her definition of family might be more inclusive than yours,” Elena said, and for one second a swirl of things showed in those clear sunlit-brown eyes. Longing, wonder…anger.

Anger at him? She barely even knew him. His younger cousins, now, they’d probably never forgive him for leaving. Never understand why he couldn’t stay. Did they still even think about him? Surely not.

“She’s very old,” Elena said.

Shit, Tante Colette must be so old. She’d been eighty-two when he left. Fifteen years.

Hell.

“Seeing you again is very important to her.” Elena gestured to herself. “As you can tell.”

“How much are you charging her?” he said bitterly. “What do you do, prey on an old woman’s sentimentality to drum up business?”

Hurt slashed across her face. And then it was gone, her expression schooled. She moved to the farthest railing of the little terrace. “I think my rates are reasonable. But if you want to get involved in your elderly aunt’s decisions and protect her from predators, you might be better placed to do that if you actually see her from time to time.”

He folded his arms against the accuracy of that hit. It was too late. A boy couldn’t run away and leave a family and then expect them to take him back in when he was a man. Especially if he’d never been a real part of that family in the first place, just a trick played on them by his mother.

“Your cousin Damien is getting married tomorrow,” she said. “And Matt at the end of May.”

Fuck.

They were that old?

Of course they were. Grown men now. He’d missed fifteen years he could never get back, never make up for. He’d made sure of it, that he could never pretend to fit in the family to which he had never belonged in the first place.

He and the Rosiers were separate now. That past was buried.

Sickness rose up in him again at the thought. Damn her to hell for dragging him back through this.

“They’d like you there,” Elena said, and so much pain stirred in him he wanted to howl. What did she know about it, damn it? How dare she?

“Perhaps you would like to witness the weddings?” Elena said.

Just show up for the vows and the parties? As if he’d never run away, never failed to be the son, grandson, cousin he was supposed to be, never become a man with a different name? She was out of her mind. “You don’t know anything about family, do you?”

A shock of hurt again. It took her a second longer to conceal.

He reined himself back in. She was a civilian and a woman and no match for his destructive abilities whatsoever. No matter how much he was seething, he couldn’t let his anger slip. That was basic military training. It was up to him to control himself, to protect weaker, smaller, less well-defended people from him. He was those people’s defense.

“I’m not related to them,” he said tightly, through his teeth. Still, to this day, that hurt like hell to say. This feeling of being lost in a vast void, his whole world gone to chaos and quicksand just where he thought it was his bedrock, so that he’d had to scramble to build another world for himself, one of a brotherhood that could never be stolen from him. The blood that bound his Legion brotherhood together was their own to spill. “Didn’t Tante Colette tell you?”

Elena looked at him as if he’d said something offensive as hell. “You were born in that family and spent your first nineteen years part of it. They were there for you. They kept you. By my definition, they did a hell of a lot more to give you life and to be your family than a lot of biological families do. And you just dumped that in the trash.”

His teeth ground. Yes. He knew. He was the one in the wrong. Going back to see his family was that simple of a choice—stepping from a world in which he was right into a world in which he was wrong.

“If I want to discuss my sins with a stranger, I’m sure I could find a priest right there.” He gestured at the little village church below, its bell tower lit gently against the night.

Elena set her jaw, glaring at him. Yes, I got it. You think I’m an asshole. That was a fast turnaround.

Of course, maybe he was acting like an asshole.

She reached into her little purse and pulled out a folded, sealed envelope. “Madame Colette said to give you this even if you wouldn’t come back. No matter what, she wanted you to have it.”

He took it more reluctantly than if it had been a pit viper. Venomous snakes were easy, as he’d learned on more than one deployment. You just grabbed the machete by the door and cut their heads off.

This envelope, though…the shape inside was small, hard, round. A ring?

Elena stood watching him as if he was a child in a temper tantrum and she was going to smack his hand if he tried to throw this in the trash.

He grimaced. His aunt had been very smart to send a young woman after him. He couldn't fight her, as he could have a man. And he couldn’t be a coward in front of her either. Hell. He must look bad enough to her already.

Like a spoiled brat, apparently.

Like fifteen years had been sheered away from him and he was right back being that desperate, wounded boy again.

He ripped the envelope open and shook the ring into his palm.

A gold ring, simple, no jewels, only a twining rose symbol on it. He frowned over it. Very soft, pure gold with many tiny nicks, it looked as if it had seen a great deal of battering over time. He held it up, examining it, and spotted an inscription on the inside. He angled it. J’y suis, j’y reste.

Shock ran through him.

Niccolò Rosario’s ring.

Niccolò Rosario. The legendary founder of their house, an Italian mercenary who had shown up with nothing more than the scars on his knuckles in Grasse, married the glove-maker Laurianne, and started the Rosier line.

How many times as children and young teens had he and his cousins snuck into Tante Colette’s house, trying to find this ring and the other treasures Pépé swore she had hidden during the war? Hell, Lucien had broken his arm once, climbing over the old medieval walls of her garden, boosted on Matt’s or Raoul’s shoulders, and tried to claim he’d just been trying to steal her raiponce.

The ring barely fit onto the tip of his pinky. He glanced involuntarily at Elena’s slim hands. It would have been intended for a hand like hers, this ring. Niccolò had had it made for his wife.

J’y suis, j’y reste. The Rosier family motto. His grandfather—not his grandfather, Jean-Jacques Rosier—had carved the same words on the limestone cliffs at the end of their valley during the Italian and German Occupations.

I am here and here I’ll stay.

Exactly what Lucien hadn't done. Stayed.

His fist clenched around it. “There’s some mistake. She can’t give this to me.” The ring stayed locked inside his fist as he said it. After fifteen years of climbing cliffs with fifty kilos on his back, of hauling himself out of rough seas into helicopters via a rope ladder dragged across the water, of fast-roping from helicopters, his grip didn’t break until he himself lost consciousness. Not if he wanted to hold onto something.

Elena clasped her hands behind her back. “You’ll have to take that up with her.”

“It belonged to the founder of our—of the Rosier—house. It’s one of our most precious—it’s one of their most precious family heirlooms.”

“Niccolò Rosario,” Elena said quietly, looking out to sea. “The Italian mercenary who came from a lost war in Italy to seek peace. Roses. A family life.” An odd, wistful smile flickered across her face. “That’s very sweet.”

It was? He’d thought of his—their—great-great-great-great-etc.-grandfather as tough, dangerous, adventurous. Powerfully willed, taking his circumstances and forcing them into something good.

But…sweet?

His grip which no force could break relaxed around the ring, and he touched it with a finger it couldn’t fit onto.

“It’s kind of perfect to give it to you,” Elena said. Her butt was pressed against the opposite railing as she spoke, the farthest she could get from him. Absolute separation, a clear message: We do not belong together.

The ring hadn’t belonged to Niccolò, Lucien remembered, with an odd tremor inside. He made it. But it really belonged to Laurianne.

Who had given Niccolò a home. A hard man who had spent all his life fighting, defeated, exiled, gone forth to forge his way in a strange country. Alone. And he’d found someone who made him feel as if he could be part of a together.

Or maybe he’d just seen Laurianne as a financial step up the ladder, hell. A successful businesswoman with a business the laws of the time would allow any male to take over if he could get her to marry him. Family legend probably over-romanticized the motivations of a mercenary soldier…

Lucien frowned down at his soldier’s callused hand. Some people called Legionnaires mercenaries. It wasn’t true. They were part of the French army. But the slur got under a man’s skin.

“I wonder if he was anything like you,” Elena said.

“I don’t even share a gene pool with him,” Lucien said harshly.

Elena’s eyebrows knit again. “I’m pretty sure you do.”

“No,” he said grimly, snapping his fist closed around the ring again. “I don’t.”

“How many generations is it, exactly? Fifteen or so? Around four hundred years since Niccolò arrived in Grasse? Anyone born in the Grasse region is likely to have as much DNA in common with Niccolò Rosario as your cousins do at this point.”

Lucien stared at her.

“I know being the heir to an unbroken line of kings is a really romantic story when Aragorn does it.” She shrugged. “But in real life it’s total bull shit. That’s not how genetics work. Anyway, it doesn’t matter where you came from. It matters who you are.” She put her chin up when she said it.

“Tell that to my grandfather,” he said dryly, and then cursed himself for the my again.

She stared at him. “He fought in the Resistance during a brutal, terrifying Occupation. He saved Jewish children from genocide. And you think I need to tell him that what a person does matters more than who his ancestors were? You tell him yourself, if you think he’s such an idiot. I’ve met Jean-Jacques Rosier, and frankly, I’d rather not insult him to his face.”

She turned and walked out.