Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) (11 page)

Well…it wasn’t that it didn’t
count
, exactly. It seemed terribly…wrong, at the minimum, to say that a man’s willingness to
die
for you didn’t
count.
But…but…she thrust her hand through her wet hair, frustrated. How was it that a man could die to save your life and still not respect that life? How did they
do that
in their screwed up heads?

“Honey—I mean Mademoiselle Gorgeous—I can’t tell you what’s going on. I was brought in to test security, that’s all. The rest was just an excuse to keep flirting with you. But I will say that I’m pretty damn sure that
nobody
, not even the stupidest idiot on the planet, weighed your life against
one
other life, even the President’s, and thought it wasn’t worth as much. Now they might—and I’m just theorizing here—have weighed an ignorant little lie they didn’t realize would affect you against a few thousand other lives and, yeah, sold you out. But I couldn’t say for sure, because I’m just inventing all this off the top of my head and have no idea of anything.”

“A few thousand?” she said numbly.

He shook his head, his lips pressing together until just for a second he looked like that grim, lethal man she’d glimpsed when he heard about Quentin. He stuck his lilies in the glass, saying nothing.

“Was someone going to blow the restaurant up?”

He said nothing. The firm line of his lips changed him radically. He looked trustworthy, even, and…scary. Like someone even she might not want to mess with.

Well, that would explain why they would want to clear the restaurant. It might even explain why her career had been sacrificed to do it. But…this was Paris. Why would Americans have been involved in stopping a terrorist attack here? In
warning
of one, yeah, sure, but French special police would have been the ones to take action.

“Was it some kind of sting? You caught somebody? Some kind of arms-trader or bomb-maker or financial handler for al Qaeda or ISIS or something?”

He said nothing.

He looked different, with that tough, tight expression on his face. Her fingers touched her mouth. “Have you
killed
anybody in the past twenty-four hours?”

A flat, blank glance. “I’m just in private security, honey.”

Private security for whom? The CIA?

“Mademoiselle Gorgeous,” Chase corrected himself.

“Did your president ever plan to come to my restaurant at all? Or was that all just part of some sting?”

Chase said nothing.

“
Putain de merde.
” She beat the pillow against the back of the couch, slamming it multiple times. “I can’t believe my whole career was ruined over some fucking—stupid—
cover-up
.” She slammed the pillow again. “Americans don’t have the right to intervene here. I should take this to the media.”

“Take what? Sounds like a pretty wild-eyed story to me. The kind of thing a woman chef who bit off more than she could chew and then failed would come up with to try to cover for her own inability to handle a man’s job.”

“
Merde
, I hate you,” she said viciously, her hand fisting in the pillow.

“Yeah.” He sighed, and just for a second, both the cockiness and the grim lethalness slid off him, and he looked…sad? Not the puppy-eyes sad thing he did when he was playing her, but real emotion. “You’ve mentioned.”

Vi slumped down onto the couch. It took a lot to make her slump. She’d thought she’d gotten it out of her system in the shower. But her day sank on her, the weight and the frustration of having her whole life randomly ruined just when she’d thought she was reaching the stars, so heavy and so dark a weight that sometimes even her anger couldn’t fight it, and it settled on her like unending despair.

Her butt slid slowly off the couch, because she just couldn’t bear to sit that high up, and she slumped on the floor against it, burying her head in her hands. Well, in one hand, and in one chunky splint.

“I hate this,” he said. “I really hate it. It
does
matter to me, Vi.”

Not enough to tell her the truth or anything, though. “Go to hell.”

A knock sounded. Vi lifted her head and gazed wearily at the door, and after a second Chase went to it himself. He gazed through the peephole. “Do you have a friend who’s Middle Eastern? A girl? Shorter than you. Pretty. She’s with another woman with dyed red hair who’s kind of curvy and cute and is carrying a metal box that has DR marked on it.” His face had gone grim. That expression he had when he forgot to keep joking, that always raised the hairs on her arms. As if a superhero had dropped his genial secret identity and suddenly she was in the presence of lethal force.

The kind of lethal force that let her throw knives at him because he thought it was kind of funny.

Damn it. Had he found it
cute
?

“That sounds like Lina and Célie.” His wariness and racial profiling reinforced her idea about some kind of terrorist sting. And pissed her off on Lina’s behalf. Lina was always getting this kind of crap. Sometimes she ignored it, sometimes she made ironic comments, but there were days, Vi knew, when it wore her down, and days when it made her really mad. “You know, her family has lived in France for two generations now.”

But she was still “Arab”, while Vi, with her blond hair, was “French.” Even though Vi was no “Frencher” than Lina, of course. Her father was of old French peasant stock—farmers for centuries—but her mother was Polish.

Chase gave a shrug of acknowledgement—not too much guilt about profiling on
his
shoulders. “What about the box?”

“Célie is chef chocolatière for Dominique Richard. It sounds as if she brought chocolates.” She stared at Chase. “Do you think—wait a minute. If you think it’s a bomb, why the hell are you still standing so close to the door?”

“To keep an eye on them,” Chase said flatly.

“They’re my friends! Are you
paranoid
or what?”

Chase glanced at her briefly. Vi had a brief, echoing sense of a vast distance between them, as if they came from two alien worlds.
Caution isn’t paranoia if people genuinely are trying to kill you most of the time.

Her lips parted, and fear wrapped a fist around her. Not for herself. For him. “They’re my friends,” she said very quietly. “Lina’s my pastry chef. I’ve known them for years.”

Also, if you think someone might have explosives…couldn’t you come hide behind the couch or something?

Chase gave her a rueful smile, as if his excess of caution was just an amusing quirk, and that hard
I-could-kill-anyone
expression vanished so completely she could almost forget it had been there. He opened the door, a friendly smile on his face.

Célie and Lina pushed inside, frowning at him as they passed him. “Who are you?” Célie asked bluntly. She was trying to grow her winged pixie cut out, wanting to reach shoulder length, but all her attempts at styling the burgundy-red hair at the current length left her looking like a pixie who’d gone savage and been living in a thorn bush.

“A friend of Vi’s,” Chase said at the same time as Vi said, “A jerk.”

Célie looked back and forth between them, her eyebrows going up and her lips quirking a little. “Ah.” And then, the flicker of humor disappearing, “
Merde
, Vi, are you okay?”

“Super.” Vi kicked her coffee table.

“The team is in an uproar,” Lina said. “But you’re their hero right now, getting arrested like that on behalf of the restaurant. Also, I think Mikhail and Amar might be single-handedly waging a Twitter war in defense of the restaurant. You know how those two get.”

Vi smiled a little. Explosive. Emotional. Arrogant. Easily insulted. Damn, she loved her team. “I’ll take everybody out tomorrow. All the drinks are on me.” She gestured as she spoke, forgetting her splint.

“What happened to your hand?” Lina took three long steps toward her. Her thick black hair bounced in a ponytail of glossy curls. “Did you hit somebody or something?”

“You know me too well.” Vi stared morosely at her hand. Her right hand, too. She didn’t mind throwing knives left-handed, but if she tried to fillet a fish that way, she was going to end up stabbing herself.

“You didn’t pick a fight at the Commissariat, did you?” Lina asked warily. “No, that can’t be right, they let you out.”

Chase returned to the flowers, gazed at them a moment, then tried shifting tall flowers for short ones to see if that improved the look of the makeshift array.

“Where did you get that scratch?” Lina asked Chase coldly.

“A kitten,” Chase said, with an attempt at that woeful look he’d given Vi the night before.

“I’m not a fucking kitten!” Vi yelled, kicking the coffee table extra hard.

“Oh.” Chase touched his cheek, discovering the scratch her nail had left when she’d tried to gouge his eyes. “That one.” He felt it a moment. “I forgot about that.”

Vi thumped her head back against the couch. “I hate you.” Even fists, knives, scratches didn’t make an impact on him. Okay, she hadn’t actually tried, with the knives—she hit what she aimed at—but still. She could probably shoot him, and the bullet would bounce off. So how could she expect
herself
to make an impact?

“Who the hell is this guy?” Célie handed the box of DR chocolates to Vi and stood between her and Chase, her hands on her hips. “
Oh, purée
, Vi, did you fall for one of the police officers who arrested you? I saw that video. They looked pretty rough with you to me.”

“They did?” Chase’s eyes narrowed. He scanned Vi’s body.

“I’m fine,” Vi said. She was mostly extremely pissed that the police had been able to handle her body as if it was their right to control it. But she hadn’t resisted arrest, just tried to force her way into her own restaurant. “And he’s American, Célie. Clearly he’s not police here.”

“Well, where did you meet him? Why is he still in your apartment if you hate him and think he’s a jerk? Since when do you go for military men?”

“Civilian.” Chase tried to slouch his shoulders. “I swear.” He didn’t seem that intent on convincing them, though. He seemed more amused by the pretense than anything, except for a tiny second when his eyes flicked to Lina and there was something narrow and cool in them, assessing her reaction.

Célie looked at him a moment. Her eyes narrowed, and her head tilted. “Since when?”

“What makes you think I was ever in?” Chase said.

“I recognize macho military when I see it.” Since her boyfriend had just gotten out of the Foreign Legion, she certainly should recognize it. “It’s a whole different look and swagger from macho non-military.” Another look Célie should recognize, given her boss, Dom Richard.

“I used to be in the military,” Chase said firmly. “But now I’m a civilian.”

“How long ago did you get out?” Vi asked. “Forty-eight hours ago?” Just in time for a black ops mission in an allied sovereign country that would be illegal if he was still in the U.S. military?

He gave her a bland look.

“Why don’t you bring one of those glasses over here, so I can see the pretty flowers?” Vi asked tightly.

“No. Then you’d just throw it at me, I’d have to clean up glass shards, I’d miss a tiny shard, and sometime in the night when you came to get a drink, you’d forget your little slippers and you’d cut your foot. And think how guilty I would feel.”

Vi took off a slipper and threw it at him.

He caught it and gazed at the cute brown bunny face on the toe for a second bemusedly.

“You see how damn
patronizing
he is?” Vi asked her friends between her teeth.

“Oh, yeah.” Both other women folded their arms to gaze at him, and Vi felt an instant’s relief.

Because Célie and Lina
got it.
They had worked their way up through macho kitchens just like she had. They’d fought for the junior international title together, three women on a team who’d had to prove they weren’t some symbolic gesture to appease the media, that they hadn’t been “given” the place on the team at the expense of inherently more qualified men. Lina, with a double whammy, had had to face down the belief that she was symbolic diversity and a symbolic female and in no way
a real, high-achieving person
who could kick ass.

Lina and Célie knew exactly how infuriating it was to literally
hit
a man to try to get revenge for his destruction of your life…and end up with your own hand broken while he patted you gently on the head and tried to look after you.

And pretended all of this was too much for your pretty little head and wouldn’t even tell you
what the hell was going on.

“How am I patronizing?” Chase asked incredulously.

Célie and Lina rolled their eyes and looked empathetically pissed off.

“Nothing I do can even hurt you,” Vi said. “The little woman.”

Chase gazed at her a moment, and then walked over to her, a white flower still in his fingers. With her on the floor and him standing straight, his size loomed over her.

“That hurts me,” he said quietly, gesturing to her position on the floor and finishing with her splint. “That hurts me a lot.” He crouched, slipped her bunny slipper back on her foot with a gentle, callused touch of her ankle, laid the white flower carefully over her knees, and then straightened and moved away from her again.

Vi sighed and scrubbed her forehead with her good hand. What he had just done did not change the sexism here at all—in fact, it just underlined his inherent belief in his own strength versus her fragility—but…there was a sweetness to it, too, that just kind of wormed its way inside her anger and wiggled in there, in a troubling way.

“Also, this is kind of sore,” Chase said, from the counter, rubbing his jaw where her punch had landed. “How bad is the bruise?” He angled his jaw toward nearby Lina with a pitiful, anxious look.

Vi rolled her eyes, but in there with that wiggly, annoying sweetness there slipped his damn
humor
again, making her want to laugh.

And her
life
was shattered around her in utter
ruins.

He was so annoying.

“So what’s the deal?” Célie put her hands on her hips and stood, braced in a position so that Chase would have to get through her or jump over the coffee table if he wanted to touch Vi again. “Do you want me to hit him?”