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all.”
    He blinked. Because he had been so solidly present wherever he was, it had never occurred to him that where he wasn’t would leave much of a void.
    She yanked away from him. His arms didn’t relax fast enough, and she started squirming before he managed to release her, just as she shoved at him, bouncing herself back. She thrust a hand through her pixie hair. “I hate you. So, yes, I’m happy to see you.”
    “Ah.” He closed his hand around his wrist behind his back, bracing himself in the position with which an engagé volontaire stood while being yelled at by some random corporal during basic training, and gazed at her.
    Those happy, kissable, supple lips twisted unhappily and she looked away over the water. Over her head, he checked all their surroundings again. Still no trouble except the one he was in.
    “Sorry,” she said, low and rough. “I don’t have the right to be so mad. I just, you know … never mind.”
    He waited.
    She shrugged, bitterly. “I know I was just Ludo’s stupid kid sister who insisted on trailing around after you guys. I just, you know—I hero-worshiped you, I guess.” She kicked the bottom of the bridge barrier.
    Hero-worshiped him? His heart crinkled funnily, this embarrassed, puzzled, awkwardly crushed pleasure, like a butterfly squeezing out of a cocoon. How could she have hero-worshiped him back then? He’d gone away to learn how to be her hero.
    To come back and rescue her, build a new life for her.
    Around her stretched the beautiful Canal St. Martin, the buildings and old streetlamps and shady trees of this part of Paris. A vision flashed through him of her gorgeous salon de chocolat , of the luminous kitchens to which she had fled when she ran away from him. She seemed to have a pretty nice life already.
    One she had built herself.
    Without him.
    “I don’t remember treating you as a stupid kid,” he said.
    She looked up at him, brown eyes solemn and searching.
    “As Ludo’s sister, yes, granted. Since you were his sister. Still are, I guess.” He’d kind of been done with Ludo well before Ludo finally got arrested. Maybe his desire to not be Ludo had helped fuel his enlistment in the Foreign Legion, too.
    “Last I checked,” she said dryly.
    He sought words, filtering out swearing, trying to find a way he could say what he wanted to say. It was hard to tell someone something when you weren’t sure you wanted her to know. “I’m not really Ludo’s friend anymore.” You’re nobody’s little sister now.
    Fuck, that sounded alone and friendless, put like that. Unprotected. What he really wanted to say was: I came back for you. Nothing to do with Ludo at all.
    “Yeah, well, you’re not really my friend anymore either, are you?” Célie said.
    Shock. This white-noise, buzzing, strange thing mind and body did when the hurt was too much to bear.
    “If you ever were.” She shrugged, flippant and dark.
    Fuck.
    His heart surely couldn’t take much more pain?
    “You just put up with me, I guess.” Another shrug. He wanted to lay his arm over her shoulders and forcibly block them from shrugging.
    “Célie, please stop now.” I changed my mind about you talking.
    Célie glanced up at him, her lips parting to say something else, to strike again, and then her gaze caught on his face and slid over it, then slid over it again. Her expression shifted. “I just meant—”
    He shook his head and held up a hand to stop her, focusing on the water. His body felt suddenly utterly heavy and tired, a tired that went deep down into the soul, that wasn’t a physical tired—it was hard to physically tire a man who had survived the paratroopers’ Corsica march—but heart-worn weariness. He wanted to slump down onto the bridge with his back against the barrier, slump like at the end of that march and close his eyes and sleep for days.
    If he was ever her friend?
    Meaning, he’d never been a good enough friend to her for her to know it. And he’d tried so fucking