Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) (12 page)

“I’ve been doing that. He enjoys it.”

“I can call Joss if you want me to,” Célie said.

Lina and Vi frowned at her.

Célie held up her hands. “You’re right. You’re right. We can handle him ourselves.”

Damn straight they could.

“Who’s Joss?” Chase asked.

“My boyfriend,” Célie said.

Chase nodded politely. Like a man who might be willing to let another man get in a punch in order not to make him look bad in front of his girlfriend.

Célie frowned. “Foreign Legion,” she said menacingly.

Chase cocked his head. “Really? Some of those Foreign Legion guys…what regiment?”

“2e REP.” Célie held his eyes. “Commando.”

Chase’s eyes lit. “Real-ly. Now
that
might be fun.”

Vi sighed.

“Not that you aren’t fun, honey,” Chase said quickly. “It’s just a…different kind of challenge.”

“Will you
go away
?” Vi said.

“No,” Chase said indignantly. “When I got here, your eyes were red and puffy. Now look at you. You’re breathing fire again. I barely know your friends. How do I know they’re not going to coddle you and cry over you and let you sink back into despair again?”

Célie and Lina stared at him, outraged.

Vi wanted to kill him. He’d
seen
she had been crying? And he’d had to go and
tell the whole world about it
?

He hid behind upraised arms. “Okay, don’t
everyone
start throwing things at me at once. I might not be able to duck all of it.”

Célie pointed a finger at him. “You need to be quiet.”

“Good luck with that,” Vi muttered.

“And you need to tell me all the details.” Célie pointed at Vi.

“He broke into my kitchens, I threw a few knives at him to teach him the error of his ways, he got scared—”

“I
what
?”

“—and asked me to call the embassy. They swore he was just part of their advanced security check, and you know…I
really
wanted the president to come next week, so I…well, I fell for it. Like an idiot. But I did watch him like a hawk the entire time. And made sure he couldn’t go back to the kitchens after I got him out of there.”

“Oh, is
that
what you were doing,” Chase murmured idly. “Watching me like a hawk.” A little smile curved his mouth as he inspected a long lily and finally gave it a glass by itself.

Vi shot him a bird. He slipped his middle finger into his mouth and sucked the tip of it absently, studying the flower.

Grrrr. She needed more things to throw.

“And this morning I woke up to the food poisoning story.”

“There are rumors on some of the Arabic language channels that American special ops are moving on extremist groups here,” Lina said.

Chase gave her a quick, assessing look. “Are there.”

“You know, you can read Arabic without being a terrorist,” Lina told him darkly.

Chase said something Vi couldn’t follow, but it sounded vaguely like the Arabic she heard in the Métro often enough and occasionally when around Lina’s grandparents.

Lina looked at him blankly for a moment, then raised one eyebrow. “Your pronunciation is terrible.”

Chase sighed deeply and gave the flowers a look that begged them for sympathy.

“You speak three languages?” Vi said, impressed despite herself. To master French and English seemed pretty normal to her, but Arabic was a whole other level.

“Apparently not,” Chase said dryly. “Apparently I only read them.”

“Are you really from Texas?” Because nothing she had ever heard about Texas indicated that its denizens did anything but wear cowboy hats and guns, ride horses, and act macho. Oh, and there was the oil thing. They definitely didn’t interest themselves in other languages or in anything outside Texas, she was pretty sure of that. Unless Spanish? “Do you speak Spanish, too?”

Chase smiled at her and said nothing.

Hunh.

Vi contemplated that a moment. “Say something in Spanish,” she said suspiciously.

“
Toda la noche soñé con las cosas que te podría hacer con la lengua
,” Chase said promptly.

Vi frowned at him.
Lengua
, the only word she could guess at in the sentence, either meant language, which would be a perfectly normal subject of conversation right then, or…tongue.

He smiled at her beatifically.

Vi slumped deeply and stared at her bunny slippers. Energy tried to defy the slump. She was starting to get the urge to leap up and start pacing around again.

“So,” Chase said. “How hard is it going to be to recoup your reputation as a chef?”

And there went her spirits again, down, down, down into the depths of a dirty river. “Impossible.”

He held her eyes, raising his eyebrows just a little. “How hard is it going to be if you give up?”

She stared at him. Her eyes narrowed. “Really impossible.”

He grinned at her. “So ‘impossible’ is a pretty flexible word.”

“Can I have my knife roll?” Vi asked.

His grin widened. “Only if you can get past me to get it.”

She came to her feet.

He looked delighted. “Don’t mess up the flowers, okay? I’m just getting them to look right.”

Everyone in the room looked at his flowers. Stems of mismatched length flopped in random ways in wide-mouthed glasses.

“What?” he said defensively.

Célie and Lina bit down on their lower lips. Vi put her hands on her hips. Energy was starting to course through her, now that she was on her feet again. She kind of missed her boots. “This isn’t the kind of thing a chef can come back from, Chase.” Well…
she
was planning to, one way or another, but that didn’t mean he should make light of how hard it would be. “Think about it like if you were to shoot the wrong guy. Maybe it’s the same.”

“Not quite,” Chase said quietly and evenly. His eyes met hers, and for just a second she had one of those disorienting glimpses of depth and seriousness. “Because when I shoot the wrong guy, he’s dead. And he never comes back from that.”

Oh.

For a second, all three women were still, this little shock wave at the hint of a job they could barely begin to imagine.

“That’s why I went into private security,” Chase said blandly. “No actual shooting ever comes up, and the pay is much better.” He smiled at them, full wattage. “You girls hungry? When’s the last time you ate, hon—Ms. Lenoir?”

“Yesterday,” Célie said when Vi didn’t answer. “Come on, we all know that. That’s why we’re here.”

Chase reached into the basket of brown eggs Vi had on her counter and started cracking them into a bowl.

“Being a top chef is all about reputation,” Vi said, still trying to get the degree of damage done to her through his thick head. “You build your reputation on your abilities, but if people can get hold of anything to destroy that reputation—something like this—then it’s gone. This would knock even a top male chef all the way back down the ladder, but as a woman, people have been looking for me to fail from the start.” Since she was born, in fact.

Célie folded her arms across her belly, protecting her guts in visceral sympathy for the blow Vi had taken to hers, nodding. Lina looked grim. As pastry chef, the blame didn’t stop with her the same way it did with Vi—her name didn’t front the restaurant—but she still felt the responsibility, and it could even quite easily turn out to come from the pastry side of the kitchen. The eggs, the custards, the sauces.

Chase nodded, too, matter-of-factly. And held Vi’s eyes. “So you’re going to quit?”

Vi stared back at him. Her lips pressed. “Do you have a
death wish
or something?”
Quit!

“Why is he still alive?” Lina asked Vi curiously. She shook her head in some wonder. “Either this whole food poisoning thing is slowing your reflexes, or you must really like him.”

Hey!
Shut up, Lina.

Chase perked up, giving Lina a hopeful look and then eyeing Vi again, like a puppy starved for affection.

“I feel sorry for him,” Vi said. “He’s a civilian. Easily scared by a few thrown pots.”

A little crease showed in Chase’s left cheek. He smoothed it out. “I should have tucked my tail between my legs and run right then.” He met Vi’s eyes. “But I didn’t have it in me.”

Vi’s teeth snapped. “If you don’t quit implying that
I
might have it in me if you don’t give me this little pep talk, I might have to kill you.”

“Seriously, you hooked up with this guy?” Lina said.

Vi flushed. She hadn’t realized it was quite that obvious that she’d actually hooked up with him.

“He’s worse than Joss!” Célie said. “About deciding he knows all about your life and what’s good for you. How is that even possible?”

“Do you have some kind of
radar
that pings the most arrogant guy in the city for you, every time?” Lina said. “How do you even find these guys? Now you know why I like geeky, shy guys.”

A tiny flicker of Chase’s blue eyes toward Lina, just this hint of a narrowing of his eyes as if he was filing away information. But it was over so quickly Vi might have imagined it.

“I’m shy,” he said to Vi.

Oh, for God’s sake.

Chase tried to look bashful.

Vi clapped her hand to her forehead, and, once again forgetting her splint, bonked herself in her own eye.
Aïe
.

“Have you ever thought about opening a restaurant in Texas?” Chase asked hopefully.

“
Texas?
” Vi recoiled. “Nobody can catch stars in Texas.”

“Okay, you know what? I’m going to take you out on my grandparents’ ranch in the middle of the night, and then you try to tell me that again.”

Vi rolled her eyes. She’d seen real stars once in a while. Weak things in a gray sky. They weren’t that impressive. “What do they eat there, rattlesnake?”

Actually, what if she did a dish with rattlesnake and—

“We eat good beef,” Chase told her, eyes narrowing. “And I don’t think someone who thinks snails and frogs are food has room to cast aspersions.”

“Do they eat cactus?” Vi’s head tilted. “What does that taste like? You could do something kind of fun with cactus and—” She broke off.

Chase grinned, looking very pleased with himself. “And if these idiots in Paris don’t know how to appreciate you, people in Texas would find it hilarious that you food poisoned the President.”

“I did
not
—damn it, he hadn’t even arrived yet!”

Chase continued as if she hadn’t spoken. Kind of like the Internet. “Don’t chefs of your standing usually start opening second and third restaurants about now? No, seriously, this is a good idea, Vi. You could spin this in your favor. In fact, if you named the restaurant something like
Potus’ Last Meal
, you’d probably draw a crowd just because they’d respect your balls.” He paused, and his eyes lit with fervor. “Actually, you need to open it with that name in
Washington.
Oh, hell, that would be hilarious. People would
love
you. Plus, it’s a lot shorter commute to where I’m stati—where my house is, in the U.S.”

Vi could almost start getting a vision there. It would be kind of fun to take her career international. Be crisscrossing the globe, building herself into…this heady glimpse of herself ten years down the road, one of the most influential female chefs in the world. Hell, drop the
female
. One of the most influential
chefs
.

“Balls,” Vi said, instead of admitting his pep talk was working. “Always has to be something inherently male to show you have nerve, doesn’t it?”

Chase sighed. “Are you ladies going to cut me any slack at all?”

“No,” Vi said. “It doesn’t matter how little rope we give you, you still manage to hang yourself. In fact, I’m starting to think that if the only rope you had was the one tying your wrists tight to something, you’d still manage to hang yourself.” Oops. Had she just let it slip that she had multiple times imagined tying his wrists to something so he’d be at her mercy?

Chase grinned, as if he’d read right into the depths of her dirty mind. “Not that I’ve never had a fantasy about three women tying me up, I admit, but she’s got a boyfriend in the Foreign Legion”—he nodded to Célie—“and I’m monogamous now.”

“Since when?” Vi said very, very dryly.

Chase gaped at her. “Since last night! You never listen to a word I say, do you?” He scowled. “If I dismissed everything
you
said, I’d be taking flack about sexism again.”

Vi pressed her splint and her bare hand to her face a long moment. “I think I need to go fix my hair,” she finally told Célie and Lina. “I really wasn’t expecting company.”

“I’ve got some aspirin, if you need it,” Lina said sympathetically.

“You know, I’ve got to give you credit, Vi,” Célie said, as Violette headed toward her shower. “I thought your last guy set the record, but you have finally found the most impossible guy in the universe.”

Chase beamed and patted himself on the back.

Vi slammed the bathroom door.

Chapter 11

Chase was having a hard time holding steady. Humor had gotten him through some tough shit in the past, so he clung to it, like he always did, but Vi was messing with his ability to compartmentalize, waking up
emotions
. And not fun, happy, adrenaline-charged, she’s-so-damn-hot emotions either. Those made him feel as if he’d finally fallen into one of those Hollywood action films about men like him.

No, these were the scary kind of emotions. They were
vulnerable
, and even though they seemed to reside in his middle and his head, he couldn’t figure out how to fit body armor and a helmet on them no matter what he did.

The swelling sense of failure—
I didn’t protect her, a civilian hit by my own unit’s friendly fire
—the powerful desire to fix it, this morass of other emotions that he didn’t even have names for but that swelled up at the sight of her in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, like someone who wasn’t a Bond girl right that minute but who needed a man who could sweep her up close and warm and hold her tight until all the bad went away.

He’d mentioned it, that he could try the cuddle. But she clearly realized that wasn’t in his normal skill set. She’d gone for the option he was good at—taking flack. It was such cute flack, too—slippers and pillows and a bouquet of flowers. Adorable, when compared to AK-47s.