Chapter 5

Lucien had faced plenty of tough days in his life. The day he’d learned he wasn’t actually one of the cousins. The brutal training of La Ferme in Castelnaudary. And the even more brutal training when he’d opted for the 2e REP. Brutality that had all turned out to be nothing but a warm-up for when the shit really hit the fan, in Mali. Afghanistan. Syria.

But this day made him feel all hollow. As if everything at his center had gone translucent and then been blown away by a careless breath.

He kept his shoulders straight, of course.

After all, every battle a soldier went into put his entire life on the line.

No exception here.

Usually he cooled down for a fight, way, way down, into a deep place of calm. But now he couldn’t lower his pulse.

As in any battle, he started pulling in every single detail around him, the utter familiarity of this place in the village where he and his cousins had grabbed penny candy or pains au chocolat after school each day before running or biking the couple of kilometers down the road and through the fields to the big house where their grandmother was, where they could pretend they didn’t have a stock of penny candy in their backpacks and get her to feed them baguettes and Nutella and milk.

The plane trees that shaded its cobblestones, the ripples of the stream, the little mairie with its French flag, catty-cornered from that same school. The café with its red awning. The bakery. The jasmine climbing up stone walls. Shutters that were the wrong color. Someone had painted them blue.

Odd details stood out sharply.

She was there, for one. Her hand on some man’s arm. She was watching him. Pulling a step back toward the man who shifted his hand to rest it on her shoulder.

For a second, his thoughts got arrested on the man, who looked like someone one of his cousins might have grown into, except for the wrong hair color. In his fifteen-year absence had one of his cousins decided to bleach his hair blond?

But no, Raoul and Matt and Tristan were there. He recognized them as soon as he saw them, a shot through the heart.

God, they were grown. Men. He’d missed all of it. He’d thrown fifteen years of knowing them away. A hurt boy, a wounded boy who’d been so goddamn dumb.

Jesus, Tristan was so tall. As tall as any of them now, no longer the kid who’d trailed around after them and always got into so much trouble but never once got blamed for it. Matt had finally fulfilled his dream to be one of the biggest of them.

And that was Damien, hell. Sweeping out onto the top of the steps, with a woman Lucien didn’t know on his arm, but she looked pretty. More important, she looked radiantly happy, soft with it, and Damien…damn, Damien was elegant. Was that just for the wedding? And had the over-controlled teenager he remembered really grown into someone that capable of showing so much emotion in front of a crowd? Because his eyes were burning with it, so much happiness he was clearly overwhelmed.

The Damien he remembered didn’t get overwhelmed.

Lucien had no idea who his cousins even were now. Of course, they weren’t really his cousins. Not by blood…and not by the fifteen years he’d lost with them when he…cut and ran.

Popping noises sounded all around him, and he flinched and caught himself as he made his brain grasp that they were confetti cannons. Fluttering colors soared into the air and rained down around the happy couple and everyone else, even him.

Damien hugged his bride to him, so damn proud, and Tristan—that was Tristan, right?—was looking straight at…Lucien.

Lucien stared back across the crowd, caught. Guilty. Emotions ripping inside him as if he himself was paper and they were shredding him for cannon-fodder.

Tristan shoved the cousins on either side of him, Matt and Raoul. They looked in his direction, too.

Lucien stood paralyzed. He wanted to run again. There had only been one thing he’d ever run from in his life: this. The family that wasn’t his.

Oh, fuck, how had he let a small gold ring and a pair of challenging brown eyes force him back here?

“It’s Lucien!” Tristan shouted, his face suddenly…alight. The youngest cousin leapt off the stairs with the same enthusiasm and inability to stay still that he’d had as a child—oh, yes, it was Tristan—and ran toward him, pushing through the crowd.

There were gasps and exclamations from the crowd as people turned, and—then Tristan landed on him.

Pretty much literally. Lucien braced at the impact and still staggered under it, as Tristan wrapped his arms around him. “Lucien, merde.” Tristan was shaking him and squeezing him, hard muscle, way the hell stronger than he’d been fifteen years ago, when he was only fourteen.

Before Lucien could recover or even come out of the embrace, there were hands grabbing his shoulders and—that hand was Raoul. Gripping hard. Their eyes met, Raoul’s so glad and so—sympathetic, too, a bracing, I know how hard this is, don’t run away.

He and Raoul had been so damn tight back then, only a few months apart in age, and…

Matt. Looking burly and flustered, overcome with his emotions, the same way he always got when he didn’t know how to express them, as if he wanted to hug Lucien and punch him both. Matt folded big arms, then suddenly unfolded them and grabbed Lucien and hit him and hugged him and then kissed him on both cheeks, hard.

This was way the fuck more than Lucien knew how to handle. He’d left them. How could he possibly, possibly deserve this?

And then the groom was there, Damien, dark-haired, intense, and brilliant like a diamond. Good God. Damien was crying? Was that what getting married did to a man?

“Lucien,” Damien said. “It’s about damn time.”

Lucien had no idea what to say. Feelings jumbled in him, too jagged, as if his cousins’ happiness to see him was some kind of bomb, only instead of an IED that left men burning and broken, it did something else to his insides, something he couldn’t master and didn’t know how to recover from.

He felt eighteen again, all his pride and confidence destroyed until he was once again that frantic, hurt boy who had to run away to become a man.

I thought they’d be mad. Or distant. Or over me. Or—I didn’t think they’d cry.

Don’t they remember I’m not really one of them? Wasn’t fifteen years away enough to confirm that? How could they forgive him that? He couldn’t. It was unforgivable.

The male mass parted a little. Lucien froze deep to his marrow at who was revealed.

When Lucien was a kid, his mother always talked about how Lucien was the only cousin who had inherited Pépé’s blue eyes. She harped on it, that similarity between Lucien and Pépé. Lucien had been so proud of it, this special link that he had with his hero grandfather that none of the other cousins shared.

And his mother knew. All that time. Knew he wasn’t related to Jean-Jacques Rosier at all.

Shit.

It had taken fifteen years of combat experience to teach him the toughness he needed to walk back into this.

And now those blue eyes were meeting his. Measuring him. Pépé was so damn old. Seventy-six when Lucien left. Now he was ninety-one. Still straight, though.

“You must have some stories to tell.” That time-roughened old voice squeezed Lucien’s heart. Hell, he’d loved his grandfather. Pretended to be him in war games with his cousins all through these hills.

Loved him more than his own father, really. Which probably made sense, considering that it had turned out Michel Rosier wasn’t his own father.

“Oui.” Fifteen years of military life squeezed his tongue. The oui needed something after it. Oui, colonel, oui, adjudant. Whether speaking to a commanding officer or someone far down the hierarchy, you added that respect of a title. But with his grandfather, when they were in trouble, when they were supposed to show respect, it was oui, grand-père. And now he had to make a choice between that and oui, monsieur. He couldn’t. His tongue ground to a halt, and all that old tearing started inside him, the tearing he had left for military solidity. He’d thought back then that it would be easier to be torn by bullets than torn by his family.

He’d been nineteen years old. The age when a man really did think it was better to charge into a bullet-ridden sunset and die a romantic, glorious death because he didn’t belong.

“I guess we’ve got some walking to do then,” that old voice said.

Lucien’s breath hurt in his chest. His eyes wanted to sting. The last thing he could allow them to do in front of his grand—Jean-Jacques Rosier. But walking was what they had always done. He and his grandfather, walking through the fields or the hills. Long expanses of silence out in the roses or the maquis until Lucien started talking, about why he was having so much trouble with a teacher at school or why he’d gotten in that fight. And they’d figure out, somehow, by the end, whether Lucien was doing what a man should do to handle a tough circumstance or whether maybe he might have better strategies if he took a step back and analyzed the situation.

Lucien knew his grandfather had had similar walks with all his cousins, one on one. But his times with his grandfather always felt unique. Focused on him. Teaching him to be a man.

“Oui,” Lucien’s voice was too clipped, the one word too rude. Oui, grand-père. Monsieur. Grand-père. Fuck, why couldn’t he just have a sir in his language, like the American Army guys got to use?

Time-faded blue eyes studied him a moment longer. “It’s good to have you back, mon grand.”

Lucien’s breath stuck in his chest. As if a balloon had gotten lodged in his air pipe and now someone was pumping it full of helium. “It is?” His grandfather thought so?

“God damn it, Lucien, of course it is,” Jean-Jacques Rosier snapped abruptly, like an old colonel out of all patience.

Beside him appeared Tante Colette. She, too, was still as straight as ever. Her arrival a relief. He’d never had any trouble with what to call Tante Colette after the revelations about his true parentage. She had never been related to him by blood anyway. With her, family was always about something else than biology. He’d always felt she understood.

Niccolò Rosario’s ring burned against his chest under his T-shirt. He’d had no idea what to do with it to keep it as safe as it needed to be. So finally he had strung it on the same chain as the one thing he owned that was conceived to stick with a man in all circumstances and not get carelessly lost—his dog tags. Which held the name FONTAINE, Julien.

Tante Colette smiled just a little, old eyes profoundly contented. “For once, I agree with your grandfather,” she said.

Damien grabbed him. “You’re just in time,” he said, his eyes brilliant. “To be a witness at my wedding.”