Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) (23 page)

“Because I could get hurt!”

He blanked. And then ice slipped over his soul. “You mean, being with me could make you a target? Did they say that was why those two came after Au-dessus?” He’d let hints of who he was slip out to Vi’s friends to stir the pot, to maybe shake something loose with some rumors, but had that made Vi the focus of retaliation?

“Not physically hurt! My emotions!”

He stared at her indignantly. “Good God, Vi, I can’t protect your
emotions
! How the hell do you expect me to do that?”

“I don’t expect you to protect me at all!” she retorted, equally indignant. “
I
fight for
myself.
All I’m saying is—oh, forget it.” She stared at the ceiling, exasperated.

Chase’s lips parted. “You still think I’m full of shit, don’t you?”

An ironic side glance.

“That I’m just some arrogant jock who hits on any woman he sees without thinking too much about the consequences.”

No comment. Just that ironic gaze.

He huffed out a breath. “
Fine.
Yes. I pretty much never saw a hot woman I didn’t go after. Monogamy is going to be a tiny bit of a switch for me. But Vi…you make me go Wow. Every single cell in my body lights up, every time the thought of you even crosses my mind.” He took her splinted hand and rubbed his chest with the two free fingers. “Understand?”

She looked dubious.

“Vi. It’s
not
as if you have a confidence problem. You’ve got to know you can beat out every other woman, as far as I’m concerned.”

She tilted her head. Apparently that angle worked quite well on her.

He smiled a little. “
Damn
, I love you.”

Her green eyes were skeptical, challenging. Wanting him to pick up the gauntlet and prove her wrong.

Well. He loved picking up gauntlets. He kissed her fingertips again. “I’m surprised I didn’t betray the whole mission when we took out Al-Mofti, I was glowing so much. It’s amazing your fellow Parisians even let a radioactive man walk around on the street like that. Maybe that explains some of the looks I get. I was beginning to think Parisians were just rude.”

She shook her head at him. But her eyes were crinkling with flattered laughter.

“So how could you get hurt?” His eyes flicked involuntarily over her hands and the thick bandages around her torso, and abruptly all the cocky persuasion went out of him. He just flattened, a balloon sucked free of helium.

Vi tried to grip her hair with exasperation and winced away from how much that hurt, pulling her gauzed hand free immediately. Chase winced, too, taking that sign of pain hard in the belly. “Because!” Vi said. “I only just met you and already…” She faltered. “Already, when I imagine you not alive, it’s as if this bright, hot power source that warms my whole life gets extinguished. Everything grows cold and dark. And I have a
good
life, Chase. I
made it
good. Nothing about it felt cold and dark before I met you. What’s going to happen to me if suddenly I need you as my power source?”

“Oh.” Chase could only look at her. “Oh.” Yeah, of course. This happened to his buddies all the time. Women just couldn’t take the thought of investing their emotions into someone whose job involved so much risk of death. “Oh.”

He didn’t know what else to say. How did a man respond to his dismissal from someone’s heart because he might
die
? That risk of death had always made every single living moment of his life seem that much more valuable to
him.
It was one of the reasons he loved the risk so much—how alive he felt. How valuable his life felt.

“You know I can’t
count
on you.”

Well, yeah. Yeah. Even if he stayed alive, he’d be deployed and shit, and she’d need help with a plumbing problem or something, and…actually, it was very hard to imagine Vi not able to handle a plumber. Maybe he was going off on the wrong tangent.

“That’s a terrible amount of power to give to someone who chases any blonde in leather he sees,” Vi tried to explain.

He’d thought she was going to say
to someone who might die.
His eyebrows flicked together. “But I don’t do that any more. You blew all the other hot blondes out of the water. Actually, I think you’re so hot that you boiled all the rest of the water dry and those other blondes just wilted and died, unable to take the heat.”

“You’ve only known me a few days, Chase! You started chasing me the instant you saw me.”

Wait. She was worried about something else entirely from what he had imagined. He could work with this. He couldn’t promise not to die, but he could definitely promise not to chase other hot blondes.

“Well, that’s true,” he allowed. “
I
know the difference in how I feel, but obviously you weren’t around for the previous feelings, so you have no basis for comparison. It’s probably a lot to take on trust.” He nodded briskly. “How much time do you need? I’m on leave, obviously, until I heal, but it sure would be nice to get this straightened out before they ship me off somewhere again.”

Green eyes just stared at him. What, did he sound crazy or something?

“It’s okay,” he said, what he hoped was reassuringly. “The bluebonnets don’t bloom until April. And Grandma is healthy as a horse. So we don’t have to make any hasty decisions.”

Pretty much his entire being reared up in rebellion at the idea of slow patience to get what he wanted. There might have been more than one reason he’d done so lousy at sniper training.

Vi just kept staring at him.

Oh. He probably shouldn’t have mentioned… “You forgot I’d be deployed again somewhere else, didn’t you? I knew that civilian thing would come back to bite me in the butt. I know I should have warned you before you fell crazy in love with me and all, but you don’t have a security clearance, and I guess I was thinking that you seem to have a pretty full life and could probably handle it, when I was away.”

“Of course I could handle it!” Vi said indignantly. “I can handle anything!”

His face softened into a smile. “Damn, I love you.”

She flushed from her chin right up to her hairline. It was astonishing and fascinating. He’d told her multiple times that he loved her.
Now
she blushed?

What did that mean, exactly? That it had never even occurred to her until this last time that he might be telling the truth?

“I’m supposed to be here five more months,” he said. “Of course, now I’m wounded, so I’d normally be shipped home, but I told them I wanted to stay with you. Next tour, maybe I could put in for something longer term with SOCEUR. Something that would at least put me in Europe more. Not to complain or anything, but I am getting really, really sick of the Middle East.”

Vi’s eyes were so large and intense. They made him feel like he needed to keep floundering to stay afloat.

“That’s if I stay in,” he said. “I might not forever. You know, long-term, and—”

“Don’t get out on my account,” Vi said firmly. “Don’t you
ever
do less than you want to do on my account. And I won’t do less than I want to do on yours.”

She warmed his whole middle. “I love you.” He just liked saying it. It made him feel whole.

And her flush deepened.

Hunh. “Is this the first time you’ve actually listened to me when I’ve said that?” He felt rather indignant.

“It’s the blood loss,” she said. “It’s weakening my brain.”

How she almost made him laugh about the fact that she had nearly gotten killed he did not know. His brothers in arms managed that kind of humor all the time, but somehow he hadn’t expected it here. “You are so damn perfect for me,” he said. “I’m sorry if I’m not perfect for you.”

She shrugged. Awkwardly, careful of her wound. “Well, I’ve only known you a couple of weeks. Even I can’t get a man in shape that fast.”

Hey. He narrowed his eyes at her.

She gave a little smug smile that showed those dimples.

“I know you think the last thing you need in your life is a cocky, arrogant man who thinks he is the shit,” Chase began.

Her dimples deepened. Such an odd, beautiful look on her pale face, surrounded by limp hair. The beauty of courage, of life. “But you really are the shit. So I might have to make an exception.”

He blinked a second. “You really think so?”

“Yeah.” Even with the dimples, she looked tired. Of course. When her dimples faded, there was a little hint of sadness, or maybe an awareness of the existence of sadness, that she hadn’t had before. But there was a softness around her mouth, a curve of…well, it kind of looked like
love
. “Yeah, I really do. I was thinking about it, once I got them to stop drugging me so I could think. How you keep so much laughter in a world where a lot of men would go dark, and how you’re still such a damn good guy, too. You sew up my leather jacket. You try to say you’re sorry. You know that being a hero is more than facing bullets. In fact, I think you take the facing bullets part for granted, and you work harder on the other stuff. The cuddles.”

Now
he
was starting to blush. He rubbed the back of his head, overcome and afraid he would stutter or something if he even tried to open his mouth. “
You’re
the one who got wounded,” he finally managed.

“You did, too,” she pointed out.

Oh, yeah.

“You
forgot
?”

“Only for a second,” he said hurriedly.

“Chase.” She rested her splinted hand on his chest and closed her eyes a moment. As if
she
was overwhelmed.

“When I said I was the shit, I really only meant I was a badass,” he confided in a whisper.

A little smile curled her mouth while her eyes stayed closed. “I’m sure you are,” she said soothingly. “I mean
I’m
the one who has to beat terrorists up with pots while you have a gun, but you’re not too bad.”

That was a little bit of a sore point with him right that second, actually. It had taken years off his life when he came out of that office to realize what was happening. Still, she
had
been magnificent. “God, Vi.”

“Lina’s squirmy cousin. Do you know I once had to push him down the stairs in their building when I was a teenager?”

“He’s the same kind of guy who would throw acid in a little girl’s face for going to school in some other part of the world and pretend it was for God, when it was really because he had a putrid soul.”

“Is Lina going to have a hard time? Be questioned?”

“She’ll certainly be
questioned
, but since she was clearly fighting him and her own parents had several times reached out to the police about their worries about him, I don’t think she’ll have to deal with any suspicion. Just an attempt to find out as much as they can. You should ask Elias and Brandon. I help gather intel on missions, but I’m not an analyst.”

“Who was the other guy? Are there any other attacks planned?”

“I don’t do interrogation, honey. But I’m pretty sure they’ll find that out. You did good, capturing him alive.”

“His gun jammed, didn’t it?”

Chase nodded, all the hairs on the back of his neck rising yet again. He couldn’t talk about it. His throat and lungs shrank into tiny balls when his brain even ghosted close to what would have happened if Abed’s gun hadn’t jammed.

He’d stayed behind in the office ten seconds to take a deep breath and calm down, and that might have been two seconds too long.

But even if he had followed her immediately, without that stroke of luck with the gun of the first man in, he might not have been able to make a difference. If Abed’s gun hadn’t jammed…he couldn’t draw a gun faster than bullets sprayed from an AK-47.

Vi’s face was very somber. “Damn it. You should have told me.”

“Vi. If any of us believed you were still in danger, we would have kept that restaurant shut down.”

She glared at him.

“Well, we would have, Vi. I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell you, because I was already messing up the
covert
part of my mission enough as it was. We wanted to shake Al-Mofti loose, not scare him into deep hiding. Vi…for as long as I stay in, there will be plenty of times when I can’t tell you what I’m doing until long after it’s done.”

“I understand that. But this was
my
restaurant.
My
people.”

He couldn’t say anything. He understood exactly why it bothered her so much.

She rested her splinted hand over his, curling the finger and thumb around the edge of his palm insofar as she could. Acceptance. He liked it so much. It just uncurled in him like a flower opening, which was the silliest image for a man in his profession, but he liked it way the hell better than all his death and dying metaphors.
I can disagree with you and be mad at you and still accept and love you and be glad that you’re alive
, that touch said.

See? He always felt that Vi went straight to his heart. Or maybe it was that their hearts beat in the same way.

“I know it’s stupid that you light up my life so much,” Vi said, and those words
light up my life
just kind of shot through him, sparkling, “because I only met you a few days ago and we fight half the time. But…I like fighting with you. It’s got zing.” She made a wiggling motion of her fingers into the air, apparently indicative of his zing.

He settled his own hand over her wrist, holding that since they couldn’t hold hands. “Everything about you has zing, Vi. You make me feel as if I’m going snap-crackle-pop all the time.”

“Except sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes you’re like old pajamas.”

Wait, what? “Uh—”

“Like I can be comfortable with you. No matter how tired, or how battered, or how wounded I feel.”

He ran his fingers from her shoulder to her wrist. Being so wounded you couldn’t even do a proper cuddle was shitty. Maybe he was getting ready for a career that didn’t involve so many bullets.

Hard to let go, though. To leave the safety of the world in other hands while he sat on his own.

“It’s a powerful combination,” she said. “That much zing, and that much peace.”

Yeah.

“Hey, Vi?” he said, low.

She angled her head.

He’d noticed that before. When his voice dropped, when he had to say something vulnerable and intimate, she listened to him better.