Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) (10 page)

“I need my knives.” She stalked off.

He followed. “Secondary wasn’t the right word.”

“Fuck you.”

“I mean, it all—it had nothing to do with you, okay! I just…happened to run into you and didn’t want you to call the police.”

“I will kill you,” she said, in a monotonous scary voice, like a relentless robot, striding out the hospital doors.

“Vi! Damn it.” She hailed a taxi. “I
can’t
talk about this. Just—can you trust me that I had nothing to do with the food poisoning thing?” Well, maybe
nothing
wasn’t quite the right word, but…but… “I never meant you to get hurt!”

A taxi pulled up.

Damn it. Ten taxis in a row would drive by him in this city, and she got one within five seconds? How could a man do a proper grovel in these conditions? Rain started to spit at his head again, and it was all he could do not to shoot a bird at the sky.

She yanked the door open and then grabbed the edge of it, locking her eyes with his. “You had
nothing
to do with it?”

Well…he shoved his hand through his hair. It still felt absurdly short to him since his shift to Europe. In Afghanistan, he’d had a beard and shaggy hair. “More or less nothing,” he said. “I mean—it wasn’t my
fault.
”

“You’re pathetic,” she said, and climbed into the taxi and slammed the door.

He stared after her as the heavens opened up and started pouring icy rain down on him again.

Pathetic
?

The next time he saw one of those movies about romantic, magical Paris, he was throwing popcorn at the damn screen.

Chapter 10

Anyone would think a woman who had frequently had to shower off with sliced fingers or second-degree burns on her hands could handle having a hand in a splint. Vi even had a variety of vinyl gloves and plastic bags around to keep a wounded hand dry, although the doctor had said that wasn’t necessary with this splint.

But somehow, standing under the water with her arm thrust out past the shower curtain and the pain from the fracture trying to eat its way through her brain, her head suddenly thumped against the dripping wall.

At least with the water pouring over her face, she couldn’t tell if she’d lost the battle against the stinging in her eyes. At least she’d broken down in private, not like some nineteen-year-old in a chef’s reality show, when everything went wrong and the top chef judges tore her work to pieces in front of everyone, and the video of her flushed cheeks and wobbling voice was on YouTube forever for the whole world to see.

Fucking YouTube. She’d drowned the clip with as many TV appearances and “how to make Vi Lenoir’s famous so-and-so” video clips as she could, but that old reality show clip still rose to the top.

This one would, too. Everything from today—her face when she learned her restaurant was being closed for salmonella, her getting arrested, probably her hitting Chase. It would take over the Wikipedia page on her. It would drown out all her accomplishments, everything she’d done.

Her eyes stung harder, and she stared up into the water to make sure that sting was coming from the shower and not inside her.

Idiot
. She kept her face turned up into the shower, until the water was cold, until it was icy, and finally she had to drag herself out from under it, shivering uncontrollably as she bundled herself in pajamas and bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. Normally she just blazed right through the chilly weather, barely noticing it, but this afternoon, the cold summer had seeped into her bones. She felt like ashes, trying to remember the glory of when she had been flame.

The knocking on the door made her brace. The code on the building door had so far kept out the media who had been lying in wait, but eventually some journalist would be enterprising enough to duck in after a legitimate resident, pretending to be someone’s friend.

And she couldn’t even call the police. Maybe she shouldn’t have thrown her phone away without having a landline.

She checked the peephole. Chase.

She hesitated. But then she did open it, mostly because it was hard to hit someone through a door, and braced it, ready to slam.

“I brought you something,” he said hopefully, drawing his hand out from behind his back. A pair of red boxing gloves dangled by a string from his finger.

Vi almost laughed. A little start of a laugh that got choked by pain and exhaustion and anger.

“That way, if you want to hit anything…” He held them out.

She closed the door immediately, before he could get to her again. Hadn’t she already let him ruin her life once?

She stood for a moment on the other side of the closed door, expecting another knock, expecting him to argue or plead or state his case.

But there was silence. She peeked through the peephole again.

He’d
gone
? Just like that? Not even
arguing
with her about it? The guy who could argue his way out of Château d’If, probably via hot sex with the prison warden’s wife?

She scowled and flung herself on the couch and stupidly started crying again.

Damn it.
She scrubbed her hands over her eyes and stared at the ceiling, taking deep breaths.

After about ten minutes of trying not to contemplate the ruins of her reputation, she heard another knock.

Only masses of flowers were visible through the peephole. She hesitated.

But Lina or Célie might come by. In fact, she was kind of expecting—wanting? not wanting?—to have to deal with the sympathy and fury of her friends as soon as they could get to her.

So it might be them, right? She could tell herself that, anyway, as an excuse to open the door.

Boxing gloves bounced against it, where Chase must have left them dangling on the knob the last time.

This time, he shoved his foot in the door immediately, bracing it open as he lowered his arms to proffer the masses of flowers.

“What did you do, rob a florist?” she said.
I hate you.
But the cold and the tears must have defeated her, because she couldn’t get up the physical courage to break her other hand on him. And she’d be damned if she’d dull any more of her blades on him. She’d started her knife roll when she was fifteen. Buying her first precious blades, adding to it as she could, keeping everything carefully honed,
her
knives, her work, her life.

He sure as hell didn’t deserve to have any more of them dulled against the wall by his head.

“They didn’t have any bouquets I thought were worth you,” he said, so matter-of-factly it was confusing. It should have been a dorky attempt at a compliment. But it sounded as if he was just saying what he meant. “So I went for quantity to try to make up for it.” He thrust them at her.

She tried to close the door on him.

He blocked it with one big shoulder. “Hone—I mean, swee—I mean, Mademoiselle Gorgeous.”

She arched her neck and stared at the ceiling, counting to a dozen. The number of roses in one bouquet. The others were more creative—gorgeous combinations of flowers that she recognized from the display in front of the florist just down the street. Maybe she could stuff them all down his throat. “You can say
ma’moiselle
.”

“What?”

“You don’t have to pronounce the D if it’s too hard for you.” Although the careful four chunky consonants and drawled vowels of his attempt at
mademoiselle
were starting to grow on her somehow. If she didn’t hate him, they might be charming.

He stared at her a second. “I hate your damn language.” He thrust the flowers right into her chest, so that she had to either take them or drop them. “Except when you speak it. When you speak it, it’s beautiful.”

He let go of the flowers.

She dropped them.

“Damn it, Vi.” He bent to pick them up. “Now you’re just being rude.”

“
You ruined my life.
”

“I
sav
—” He bit the word off abruptly, turning his head away, jaw set.

“And on top of that, you used me!”

“I…
used you
?” For the first time since she’d met him, anger flared in those blue eyes. “Last I checked you had a really good time!”

She tried to slam the door on him again. It bounced off his shoulder.

“Look, nobody made you take me home last night! I would have been happy to take you out for a while first.”

She grabbed one of the bouquets from him and hit him over the head with it.

“You’re gorgeous!” He pulled the bouquet away, white petals from it clinging to his hair and on one cheek. “You’re so damn
fine.
Hell, you are fine. You’re so fine it makes my brain shrink little bitty and then explode.” He pressed his fingers into his forehead and then flared them out to indicate. “If you wanted to make me court you, you think I wouldn’t have done that? You chose to go fast. I did
not
use you.”

She glared at him, both insulted and stymied. Because she made all her own choices, and made them proudly. And it was true that she’d chosen him.

Knowing he was arrogant, cocky, uncrushable, stubborn, and doing
something
that was really out of line, knowing that he was challenging her and teasing her and deliberately misleading her, she had still taken him home. Because all the adrenaline in her just focused on him like he was where her energy could find its home. Because he was deliciously hot...and she was an idiot.

Plus, in her defense, she had watched way too many Hollywood films and halfway thought his behavior was normal for an American.

She made his brain shrink little bitty and then explode?

His blue gaze drifted over her, and all that hard energy slowly softened out of him. “You look like you could use a cuddle or a punching bag. I have more practice at the punching bag role, but I could definitely try the cuddle.”

“I hate you,” she said. “Go away.” But she didn’t try to close the door on him again, just turned around and trudged back into her apartment. Her slippers shuffled.

All her proud stride, with her clicking boots, reduced to a shuffle. Oh, hell, and were her eyes red? Could he tell she’d been crying?

She spun around, ready to attack him with flowers again to prove her strength.

He moved lithely past her and into the small kitchen area, setting the gloves on the bar and reaching up into her cabinets. Failing to find vases, he made do with some of the larger water glasses, making a mess of the bouquets as he tried to divide them so that they would fit.

He ended up with every single water glass she owned spread across the counter, each holding as many stems as it could, and gazed at the awkward deconstruction of the beautiful bouquets a moment, framed by red boxing gloves, then sighed.

He did look kind of…cute, over that disarray of flowers.

Damn it, Vi.
She kicked a slipper against the floor in lieu of kicking herself.

“Has no one given you
flowers
before?” he asked incredulously. “Where the hell are your vases? Wait, don’t tell me, let me guess. You broke them over the last guy’s head when he pissed you off, and that’s why he’s not around any more.”

She mostly didn’t date. She looked like she did, she knew that. But the reality was that men hit on her, of course, and then when she actually took them up on it and went out with them, they quickly turned into wimps who found her too much to handle. She didn’t give into them enough, she fought for too much space for herself when they wanted all the space and wanted it by automatic right, not by virtue of any effort.

She’d gotten kind of tired of men who thought she made a great sex object but not such a great, pliant girlfriend, and she’d mostly given up on the dating thing recently. Ever since she took over a two-star kitchen, she didn’t have time for a social life anyway.

Which was probably why she’d been so deprived she’d taken up with the jerk in front of her and been willing to play
his
sex object. “Did I mention I hate you?”

He picked her knife roll off the counter and set it on top of the kitchen cabinets, where she would have to climb up on something to reach it. “It’s come up a few times.”

“Then why are you still here?”

“Well, I’m hoping to talk you round before the wedding. Otherwise, if you try to knife me when the minister says ‘You may kiss the bride’, it’s going to cause a hell of a scandal in my family. Not as bad as the one at my cousin Ty’s wedding, but still.”

Wow, what had happened at his cousin Ty’s wedding? She bit back on the question, furious with herself for being tempted to ask it just to see what other B.S. he made up. Damn it. This man was
impossible.

He had
ruined her life
. And here he was acting like that was no big deal, because of course to him it wasn’t.

“It doesn’t even matter to you, does it?” she said.

“What doesn’t?” he asked blankly, and she grabbed a couch pillow and threw it at him.

It knocked over half the glasses, and he flung himself to catch them, managing to make sure not a single one hit the floor.

The flowers and water, of course, spilled everywhere, and he got quite wet. “Damn it,” he said plaintively, looking at the mess of flowers. “You sure do take a long time to calm down.”

He tossed the pillow back to her gently and patiently started reforming his awkward bouquets in all the glasses, adding water carefully and setting the array back in a line on the counter.

“My life,” she said between her teeth. “That doesn’t even matter to you, does it? It was never worth anything in the first place. Compared to yours.”

He stopped messing with the flowers and just looked at her for a long moment, holding two lilies. “I’d take a grenade for you without a second thought. So I guess it depends on your valuation system.”

Her lips parted involuntarily. She stared at him.

“But I do that kind of thing all the time,” he admitted. “Put my life on the line. That’s almost like you saying you’d risk second-degree burns or cutting off a finger to make me something special to eat.” He nodded to her bare right arm, where the scar from one really bad splash of oil would show all her life. “So I can see why you could say that doesn’t count.”