Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) (17 page)

Chase strolled in behind her, his size and his presence immediately taking over the whole apartment. “Can I touch your jacket?”

“You’ve done it enough damage. I threw it away.” When she’d come home, she’d stuffed it into her trashcan so she could go ahead and get that wound over with and never think about it again.

Chase got the jacket out of the trashcan, and when she frowned at him, he pretended to stifle heavy sneezes, casting terrorized glances at her with each one.

“
Quel imbécile
,” Vi said. But already she was trying not to laugh.

Chase smiled and sat down on the floor in front of her coffee table with the jacket. Digging into his backpack, he began to pull out tools of some sort—things that looked like they could punch holes, and things that looked like they could pound and clamp and…were those sewing needles?

Lining them up, he pulled out an iPad and searched something. She peered, unable to contain her curiosity. Instructions for sewing leather.

Her jaw dropped.

He turned the slashed jacket sleeve inside out and began to run some kind of grooving device over a cut edge.

Vi stared.

“Might as well take your shower,” Chase said. “I’m not sure how long this is going to take, and you’re making me self-conscious.”

“You can get self-conscious?”

He shrugged.

She
did
want to wash off the scents of the bar. She went into the bathroom, keeping her shower quick, very aware of how safe she felt doing that with him in her apartment. She didn’t even feel as if she needed to lock the door.

Slipping into her yoga pajama bottoms and cami, she came back out to sit at the kitchen counter and watch him.

Like the night before, just having him here started to work on her. His presence slipped in, twining its way with the comfortable feeling of her pajama bottoms and the relaxation of her shower, as if not only could he feed her need for adrenaline rushes but he could be the way she eased off that adrenaline, too.

As if he was making himself part of her quiet. That time when she wasn’t ready to face the world, when she wasn’t ready to take on all comers. When she let her guard down, replacing a chef’s coat and knives or leather and boots with pajama pants and bare feet.

She couldn’t figure that out. This guy was hot sex on a stick and trouble all over, and he was
obviously
excellent material for a hook-up—if he didn’t ruin a woman’s life the next day, exactly what she should have expected from an arrogant male. But a woman clearly would be an idiot to let down her guard around him.

The last man on earth you’d want to have see you battered and tired and defeated. She ran her fingers through her hair, to try to make sure it didn’t look battered and tired and defeated.

He didn’t pay any attention to her, stubbornly setting up the two sliced edges of that sleeve in a clamp and now trying to thread a needle with his big fingers. It took her a while to realize that there was the faintest tinge of color on his cheeks.

“Do you want help?” she asked finally.

He shook his head.

“Do you want to eat?”

“It’s one o’clock, honey. I ate a while ago.”

She voice-activated a little music, her wind-down playlist. He tilted his head a second and then smiled a little. “Pink?”

Vi found herself grinning. “I’m still a rock star.”

“Yep.” He said it simply, giving her one flick of a glance that was like being licked with a flame. The heat of respect, admiration, attraction. “How did it go today?”

Not awesome.

“Fine.”

His smile faded. He looked at her a long moment, waiting.

“I mean…you know…great.”

His lips twisted. He waited.

“It was great to get out with my team. They needed it, and I needed it. But…” She shoved her toe against the counter. “I just can’t
do
anything. The restaurant is closed until the inspections are over. So I just have to
sit
there and
take
it. I can’t cook anything. I can’t make flavors come alive and send them out to all those would-be critics to tell them
now
say something else. I can’t focus on my work and my world, on doing what I love, and just forget all those damn yappy dogs out there exist. So I just get…torn down and torn down, while all I can think about is how my life is getting sucked down the drain. I hate it. God, I hate it.”

He gave a grimace of empathy.

“I talked to the owners, and…they’re not blaming me or anything. They’re trying to be supportive. But they took a huge risk on me, because they were excited about me, and…” She shrugged, no words to convey how much she hated to repay them with this.

Chase grimaced again. As if he understood. “Why don’t you own your own restaurant? You know you’re the kind of person who would really rather the buck stop completely with you.”

“The cost, in Paris. I’m twenty-eight, I’ve been climbing fast already. Owning my own place is my next step. I might not even have any choice about it. This might knock me right down the staircase, so I have to start back up from the bottom and open my own place even to get a chance to cook again.”

Chase said nothing for a moment, his face grim as he worked. But then he said: “You know what I like about you, Vi? One of the things. You take it for granted that you will start climbing back up. You’re not going to stay down there defeated.”

She shrugged, not understanding the compliment. Of course she was going to start climbing back up. How could anyone be willing to stay at the bottom of anything? “If only I could just
cook
again. Act. Then I’d barely even care, you know?”

Chase nodded and focused on his stitching for a couple of careful double stitches. “Once,” he said suddenly, and his voice choked oddly and he stopped. He took a breath and rolled his shoulders, doing a stretching thing with his neck as if to loosen up his throat. When he resumed, his voice was steady again, although lower than usual. “Once a team of ours went down in the Hindu Kush. They were overrun and…I was one of the two men on the QRF. The quick reactionary force—that’s the back-up, if a mission goes wrong. We got on that helicopter so damn fast, ready to go. To save them or go down trying. I know that sounds…sacrificial or something, but that’s not really what it feels like. It’s just the way we’re made, you know? You’d be the same. You’d find it way easier to be taking bullets and at least giving out some of your own than sitting on the sidelines helpless.”

Her body tightened all through her at the shock of what he was saying. He was talking about real bullets. Not movie bullets.
Real
bullets, aimed at his
body.
That strong, warm, human body and that skull that might seem thick enough to stop a bullet, but…wouldn’t. Her breath froze in her chest. She stared at him.

“The same way if you were on a team that was losing badly, you’d way rather be out there with your teammates giving your all to turn it around than sitting on the bench,” he tried.

It’s not exactly like a sports team, Chase. If you’re fielding bullets instead of soccer balls. If you might die.
If your teammates do die.
God, her heart hurt all of a sudden. As if someone was stretching it in two big hands and it was starting to tear.

“And the fucking assholes in command kept the helicopter grounded,” he said low and viciously. “They wouldn’t let us fly out. They said they didn’t want to risk losing another chopper and even more men and that it was too dangerous during daylight, and we had to
sit there all the fucking day listening to them call for help over the radio until the last one died.
”

His knee jerked up into the table as he made a hard movement, the crack of the contact sounding through the room. He caught himself and took a deep breath, bending his head. No, it was more than his head. For a moment, he hunched into himself, as if his stomach hurt.

Vi stared at him, beyond words. She felt dizzy, as if she was spinning over vaguely formed mountaintops in another country, trying to peer down through her own fuzzy inability to imagine them to what death and violence looked like in their…snow? Tundra? She handled a lot of dead animal bodies. Did exposed human flesh and bone look the same? Nausea rose up in her.

“Oh, God, I’m so sorry.” Her voice puffed out of her harshly, stuffed and strangled. She came off the stool to go kneel across the table from him.

He shoved her words away with a push of his hand, then shoved that same hand across his face and through his hair. Rolled his shoulders. Then shook his head once like a dog shedding water and smiled at her, that easy smile of his. “It was a long time ago,” he said, and only a little roughness under his voice belied the relaxed tone. “I’m a civilian now.”

“Oh, yeah, what the fuck ever.” She put her hand over his, because all words sounded lame, and just held on tight to that callused, scarred hand.

He bent his head and gazed at their joined hands a moment. His eyes closed, and he took a deep breath, his thumb shifting to catch her hand and keep it around his.

“The November attacks,” she said, low. “I mean…I went to the Bataclan all the time. It’s just a couple of streets over. Nobody even knew what was
happening
, and then…all you can do is leave candles and flowers. When you want to hit someone, to rage. We try not to think about it too much, because…we want to be alive, we want to be Paris still. But…yeah. It’s horrible to have nothing you can do. You don’t know how many people enlisted in the French military the week after those attacks, in order to try to do something.”

“Oh…I have some idea,” Chase said with an odd somber wryness.

When had
he
enlisted? He must have been a young teenager for the attacks on New York. Too young to enlist yet, but it would have marked him.

His hand tightened slowly on hers.

“I’ll survive this,” Vi told him, her tone adamant. “There’s no doubt about that.”

His eyes opened, and light came back into them as they ran over her. Genuine light, that vivid blue pleasure. “I know you will, honey,” he said. “
God
, you’re so alive. Life just comes right off you like electricity.” He cupped his free hand just shy of her hair, as if he was savoring the buzz. “Damn, you’re gorgeous."

“You are, too,” she said, and instead of grinning cockily, he flushed a little and gave her a funny, awkward smile.

“In your arrogant, annoying way,” she said, and his smile relaxed a little into more genuine humor. “Did you just
one up
my own tragedy?”

“Your tragedies are wussy.” But his eyes flickered as he tried to joke, and his attempt at a grand, dismissive gesture came off wooden.

Yeah, so…yeah, she was an idiot, to try humor for that. Some things humor just didn’t work for. She squeezed his hand again and settled onto the floor, leaning against the table.

He was quiet for a long time, just gazing at her hand over his and stroking it slowly with his thumb. “Sorry,” he said eventually, voice a little rough.

“Seriously, don’t make me hit you.”

A little smile came back. He squeezed her hand and let it go, picking up the needles again.

She felt stupid now, to have made such a big deal out of her jacket. Even if he should
not
take over her choices and ruin her beautiful jacket. But still…it was only a jacket. It wasn’t friends lying dead in the mountains.

But watching him slowly and painstakingly try to heal that unhealable wound in the leather, she didn’t stop him.

Maybe healing unhealable wounds was something they both needed to know how to do.

The reality of this big, sexy, hard-willed man who clowned and teased and who…what? He had to be part of a counterterrorism unit. Or working for the CIA in some capacity. That was the only thing she could figure. What the hell else could a military man from Texas whose eyes flickered when she mentioned Navy SEALs be doing in France breaking into restaurants his president might be visiting and then, if she was right, getting them shut down? Bastard.

A laughing bastard who…had spent most of his adult life in Afghanistan and Iraq, maybe? One of those guys who fast-roped into compounds in the middle of the night and took out the enemies of their country and…got shot at. Stepped on mines. Killed people.

That Hindu Kush event that still ate at him…he was upset because his commanders had refused to let him go die, too.

She rested her folded arms on the table as she watched him. Under the table she shifted just enough that her knee tucked against his thigh. Human touch.

He had gotten the needles threaded and was checking the instructions on his iPad. Now he was starting the stitching, which apparently required two needles going at once in opposite directions.

Blue eyes squinted in concentration, so that she could see exactly how they had squinted time and again to leave those lines at their corners. Sun-streaked brown hair a little shaggy for a military man.

“Did you have a beard recently?” she said suddenly, startled.

He glanced at her, then focused on his twin needles again. “What makes you ask?”

“Your skin is paler on your jaw line. Less tanned.”

He gave a little nod of acknowledgement and a shrug.

“But…you mean you really are a civilian?” Or had been one long enough to grow a beard, tan around it, and shave it off? Did people in the military get to wear beards these days?

He didn’t say anything. She needed to do some Internet research on U.S. special forces.

“You have complete files on me, don’t you? And I don’t know a thing about you.”

“Not a thing?” he asked quietly.

Okay, maybe some things. She knew he was cocky and with good reason. She knew that physically he couldn’t conceive of an insurmountable challenge. She knew that a siren-like alarm in the morning threw him into high stress alert, and that in that state of alarm, his first instinct was to cover her body with his own. And that a minute later, he had played the clown as if nothing of any importance had just happened.

She knew he felt bad that she had gotten hurt. She knew that he wanted to save people, but he didn’t need her to be weak so that he could satisfy his own superhero complex. He wasn’t one of those guys who would try to keep her small to make himself feel strong. No, he’d always give her a wicked grin and a challenge, a
yeah, I know you can do it.