All for You by Laura Florand Read Free Book Online

hard.
    He turned suddenly and sat down on the top step of the bridge. He shouldn’t do that. His big body now blocked most of the passage across the bridge. But he did it anyway. Bracing his arms on his thighs, he let his face drop into his hands. He had killed two people in a nighttime combat mission in the Uzbin Valley, no deaths on his conscience ever and then all of a sudden two, and he felt now as he had then—not during the kill-or-die adrenaline of the moment, but afterward, the night afterward, when the adrenaline was all gone and all that was left were thoughts. Images.
    God, he wanted to sleep. For years.
    And then a small body shifted down on the step below his. Célie slipped her head between the bend of his arm and his torso, resting it against his leg. She wrapped one arm around his thigh, holding on to him as tightly as she could. And she started to cry again, these tremblings of her body, this slow soaking of his jeans. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” she whispered. “Damn you.”
    Slowly, very slowly, he unfolded one of his arms and settled it gently around her back instead. Slowly, very slowly, his other arm abandoned support of his face and dropped to her hair. It prickled faintly, from the gel or whatever she must use to give it that tufted-fairy look. His fingers sank a little deeper, down to the back of her skull, where her hair softened, gentle against her head.
    His hand looked so big there. His thumb cheated and snuck out to trace over the curve of her ear, down to the two piercings, that dramatic one and that more discreet little jewel. If he kept going, his thumb would trace the line of her jaw, down over her throat.
    But he didn’t. He kept his hand on that quirky, attention-grabbing hair, on those earrings, all the ways Célie tried to assert more space in her world. Cheerful, sparkling, happy ways.
    “Me, too,” he whispered. “I’m glad you’re okay, too.”

Chapter 5
    La Ferme, Castelnaudary, four years and eleven months before
    Failure.
    It slammed at him from every direction, boots in the ribs, driving Joss down into the mud. The adjudant grabbed him by the back of the head and shoved his face into that mud. “Abandonne!”
    No. I won’t give up, you fucking bastard.
    He’d joined the Legion so he wouldn’t be a failure.
    But if he failed, he could leave . Take back this stupid decision he had made, go back to a life in which failure now seemed by far the most comfortable option. He could go wait for Célie outside her bakery, and see her run across the street to him, with her face alight and something delicious held up in her hands. See that look on her face as she pressed her hands to his chest and said …
    “ Tu es nul! ” the adjudant-chef shouted in his ear. Joss’s muscles had long since turned to limp spaghetti, his will crushed like an earthworm under weeks of abuse and no sleep and tasks no man could do. Somewhere in his head he knew they were just trying to break him, and he had to fight through it, but he still felt broken. “Worthless! Weak! De la merde! No good!”
    God, the man sounded like his mother , whenever she exploded at his father after the job loss and the alcohol took him. The way she even, as the bitterness grew and Joss kept bringing home crappy grades, exploded at Joss. Not good enough! What’s wrong with you? You’re just like your father! You won’t even try! If Joss turned his head, he’d probably find that same lobster-red rage on the adjudant ’s face.
    “Give up!” the man screamed in his ear, spittle adding to mud. “Abandonne!”
    Give up. After only one month. Give in. Go back to that girl who put her hands on his chest and said …
    You can do anything.
    Brown eyes, rich and true in a way this mud could never be. Thank God he hadn’t told her what he was going to do. Thank God she couldn’t see him like this, ground down to nothing, already failing.
    Goal. Focus on the goal. Brown eyes, bright smile.
    “Give up!” the