Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) (20 page)

“Shut up,” she said, and brought one of his hands around between her legs, pressing his touch to her, because she was desperate again by then, and she came again while he did, crushing her to him with the force of it.

Chapter 15

Careless, arrogant idiot!
Vi gripped her head, trying to focus the insult on Chase but feeling as if she was apostrophizing herself.

Of course he was gone this morning. Of course a man said
I love you
when he was in the middle of sex and then panicked at what the hell he had gotten himself into after the arousal faded.

She rolled out of bed and picked up the journal she had knocked to the floor when she woke precisely one minute before her alarm and flung out her hand to make sure it didn’t go off.

Aarrgh.
What the hell was wrong with her? Why did she keep letting him bring his B.S. into her life? A weakness for cocky guys and a belief that she could handle anything were
not
good excuses.
Just because a woman
can
handle bullshit doesn’t mean she
should.

She slammed the journal onto the nightstand and stood still for a moment with her head bent.

Actually, what the hell was wrong with him? The guy was completely inconsistent. Who showed up to stitch together leather and open his heart and then ran out before dawn?

An emotional coward, maybe. Somebody who scared himself by all the emotions he was pulling out.

Although he had locked his eyes with hers and said,
You wish
in a way that still vibrated in her bones like a challenge.

And she never really had seen a gauntlet thrown down that she could resist picking up.

She frowned at her leather jacket, stroking the sleeve. A worry woke up in her middle and started to stretch. What if there was some
reason
he had disappeared before dawn? Some reason to do with whatever his real reason for being here was?

Oh, shit, he wasn’t doing anything else to her restaurant, was he?

She yanked clothes on and hurried over there as fast as blasted public transport would allow, but the place was completely locked up and taped off. Nobody was around, though, so she went ahead and ripped the yellow tape and went in. Darkness and LED lights. Nobody there.

She went through the walk-ins, in deep mourning for all the food spoiling. Damn it, they needed to let her back in here.

The sight just fed her frustration and unreasonable anxiety, and she went out into the street again.

Where two military-looking “health inspectors” were just climbing out of an unmarked car. “
Mademoiselle Lenoir.
We need to ask you to respect our request that you stay off the premises. You could compromise the investigation.”

Vi scowled at them. “It’s my restaurant!”

“Nevertheless.”

She narrowed her eyes at them. “Have you seen Chase this morning?”

“Who?”

She glared at them and stomped off. Getting arrested, she had learned, was a huge hassle.

But she didn’t really start to worry until one a.m., when no one had shown up at her door with boxing gloves or leather stitching materials or just a big shit-eating grin on his face.

Also he didn’t show up by two a.m.

And by three she knew he really wasn’t going to show up that night, and that it was incredibly demeaning that she didn’t even have his telephone number, and she was pissed at herself, and she managed to fall asleep.

More or less.

***

“Wow,” Célie said five days later. “Wow. I never would have pegged him for someone who would just disappear like that.”

“Well, you know how guys are.” Vi kicked the pavement. They were waiting in line to get into a favorite comedian’s show. Vi could only scout new restaurant locations and fight with bureaucrats so long during the day, and while Au-dessus remained closed, she’d decided to take advantage of the miracle of having evenings free. She’d far rather be going out with friends than waiting in her apartment wondering if Chase would finally show up again. “They say
I love you, I want to marry you
when they want hot sex, but then they scare themselves and run off. Or I scare them,” she said sullenly.

“You do scare most men, Vi,” Lina agreed. “But…he didn’t seem that easy to scare.”

Vi shrugged, trying not to think about it. This comedian had better by
really
funny.

“I think you’re choosing the wrong men,” Célie’s boyfriend Joss said. “Maybe you need to select the good guys. Or at least someone with guts.”

Vi glared at him. Tall, hot, strong, quiet Joss Castel had come back from five years in the Foreign Legion only a month ago, apparently having been in love with and faithful to Célie all that time. He was pure salt in the wounds of every other woman trying to handle the dating scene. “Maybe the good guys are all gone.”

Joss just looked at her with steady, faintly challenging, hazel eyes. “Since you attract essentially every man alive, just by walking by, I’m going to go ahead and insist it’s a selection issue.”

Vi scowled at him.

“Are you sure nothing is wrong?” Célie asked. “Did you call him?”

Vi’s stomach clenched around that worry, that had woken so small and innocent in her only five days before but had long since stretched its cute little tentacles out in her belly, planted them, and started to feed. It was a monster worry now.

She infinitely preferred to believe that she’d been dumped by an emotional coward than to focus on that worry.

If she concentrated really hard on all her past history with men and not Chase himself, that dumped-by-a-coward scenario almost seemed
likely.

“I don’t have his number,” she said.

Célie’s lips rounded.

Vi flushed. Yes. That made her seem like nothing but a booty call.

“Does he have
yours
?” Lina asked. With her glossy, loose curls and pretty face, Lina looked as sweet and delicate as her desserts, and she’d learned from childhood to have a sure, tough inner core, therefore. Perception, balance, and sense, to Vi’s energy and flamboyance. They worked well together at Au-dessus.

“I threw my phone into the river.” Vi had ended up getting a disposable phone so she could argue with health inspectors and harass them every hour for results, but she was trying to put off having a new smartphone until the ugliest chatter about her had died down on Twitter.

Chase didn’t have the disposable phone’s number, though. She’d bought it after he disappeared. She’d called that embassy number yesterday, but they’d acted as if they’d never even heard of a Chase Smith.

She slanted a glance at Lina. “Your cousin hasn’t been doing anything weird, has he? Receiving strange guests from Belgium?”

Lina glanced around to make sure no one else in line could overhear them and shook her head. Lina had a cousin who was the despair of their mutual grandparents, a weaselly jerk who had grown more and more weaselly through high school—at seventeen, he’d once grabbed sixteen-year-old Vi’s breasts in the stairwell of Lina’s building and tried to trap her against the wall, and she’d kneed him and shoved him down the stairs—and who had ended up in gangs, then fallen under the sway of some weirdo imam and started spouting pseudo-religious nonsense that sure as hell didn’t correspond to anything Lina or her parents believed, and then run off to Syria and come back fairly soon after, with his tail between his legs.

Everybody in the family worried about him, and Lina personally hated him, but the police did nothing at all. So apparently he was just a misogynist jerk who liked to fantasize about killing people.

Right.

Vi gave her shoulders a flick as if to rid herself of uncleanness just thinking about him and focused on the shrinking line. She would
really
like to be in a dark theater with a very funny comedian making her laugh, already.

Lina’s weaselly wannabe cousin is the very last person who would actually know if something was going down right now. Something big enough that American special ops would be involved, inside France.

She couldn’t even imagine anything big enough that the French would allow Americans a hand in it, on their soil. The guy responsible for the Christmas flight, maybe. Al-Mofti. She really had no idea whatsoever how countries cooperated on this kind of thing, but she could see them wanting that to be a joint operation. Maybe the Americans would say,
We’ve got some information, but we want to be in on the kill.

A vision of Chase, big and easy and grinning and doing his puppy eyes, flashed through her, and all the hair on her arms lifted. She shivered, rubbing her arms.

The wounds of the last attacks in Paris had been immediate. She’d seen with her own eyes the blood on the street only a couple of blocks away, the bullet holes in the walls, she’d laid flowers in memorial. She’d opened her doors to people stranded, fed them in her restaurant for free that night, gone out the next night when so many people were huddling inside, and, along with Célie and Lina and her team and Célie’s boyfriend Joss and her boss Dom and his wife and just so many, many people, been part of those Parisians who surged onto the terraces again, saying,
Fuck you. We might be afraid, and we might be wounded, but we won’t hide and we won’t give in. We’re still Paris.

So she knew plenty of people fighting terrorists emotionally, by refusing to give in to discrimination or by going out into the streets and celebrating life and being together.

But she had never known anyone fighting terrorists with bullets. Well, she knew some police officers, but more everyday riot police and traffic cops. Not RAID.

Not…she pushed her hand through her hair…not American black ops. Not outside of movies.

And a hundred scenes from Hollywood of men in black or camouflage with guns raised, going in, rose in her brain, and she tried to put Chase in the place of one of those men, and…

“You okay?” Célie said.

“Need a jacket?” Joss asked.

“I’m okay,” Vi lied. And, as the line shifted forward, “Oh, thank God, we finally get to go in. This guy had better be hilarious.”

He was, but not enough to take Vi’s mind off the utter bizarreness of receiving a call from the health inspectors right at intermission. It was nine o’clock at night. “We just wanted to inform you as early as possible that the test results came back negative, and the salmonella in your clients was traced to spinach they purchased at the grocery store. Your restaurant is cleared, and you can return to operations.”

Vi hung up and went back to her seat, staring at the comedian as he came back out on stage. She needed to call her publicist and try to get the vindication of Au-dessus and Violette Lenoir out as far and wide as possible, even if it would never have the same reach as the story that she had poisoned the president. She needed to call the U.S. embassy and see if the president would still come on his visit the day after tomorrow. She needed to get up early for the market tomorrow and figure out a menu that would absolutely knock everyone’s socks off.

But she couldn’t shake the conviction that her restaurant had been caught up in the throes of something she knew nothing about, that Chase was at the center of it…and that something might have happened that very day and she had no idea what.

The comedian might have been funny, his second half. But she didn’t hear anything he said at all.

Chapter 16

Chase bounced into the kitchens of Au-dessus like he was about to bounce right through the ceiling. He felt like one of those men on the moon—if he wasn’t careful, he’d bounce himself into space.

Au-dessus must be busy—what was it, eight p.m.?—because scents and sounds filled the kitchen, heady and clashing and warm. Color splashed across plates in ardent drama. There was motion everywhere and Vi was in full swing, precise and graceful like a whip cracking, pivoting between one station and another, checking food, confirming orders were coming up, calling for waiters.

Aww, look at her in her white coat and with her hair piled up on the back of her head and her skin glowing with perspiration, making everybody do what she wanted. She moved as if this whole kitchen was her orchestra, only they didn’t line up in front of her where she could see them, they were all around her, and her whole body was the conductor’s wand, jabbing, dancing, lifting, guiding, making sure everyone’s note came in at just the right moment, just the right way. Hell, she was hot.

As soon as he saw her, all that energy in him figured out exactly what it wanted to do with itself.

He sprang across the kitchens, so happy to see her and so full of himself he could barely stand it, caught her by the waist just as she pivoted toward him, lifted her up, and swung her around.

All around them, every single motion stopped for five full seconds. Any threat making the gazelles here freeze? No. They were just staring at him and Vi. So he dismissed them from his attention.

“Miss me?” He grinned up at her, set her down, swept her into his arms to squeeze her, and kissed her hard.

Damn that felt good.

He tried to do it again, and Vi shoved him, ducked, squirmed and…wait, what? He loosened his arms, staring at her in confused hurt.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked between her teeth.

Returning as a conquering hero? Ready to celebrate? Happy to see her? Okay, she didn’t know about the conquering hero part because it was really better she not, but…wasn’t the rest obvious? “Damn, I missed you,” he said, and started to reach for her again.

She shoved him back from her. “I’m
working
.”

Well…yeah, but…he’d been gone for more than a week. And he had ten stitches up his shoulder from a shrapnel wound for
his
job, and he and his team had just taken out one of the most wanted terrorists in the world.

A little kiss might be nice.

“I just got in,” he said. “Didn’t you miss me?”

Vi stared at him, and a muscle in her jaw flexed. She spun suddenly toward her staff. “Get back to work. I don’t need to remind you how perfect everything needs to be today. Adrien.” She jerked her chin at a young man and then jerked her chin at Chase in a very similar way but with more disfavor and strode into her office.