Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) (22 page)

No one was trying to make
him
lie down. Probably all these military men assumed
he
was the head of the kitchen, damn it, just because he was male.

“No other injuries, chef,” Adrien said. “A couple of burns from people grabbing hot pots to throw.”

Burns. Vi relaxed in relief. They knew all about burns.

“Mademoiselle.
Please lie down.
” The hand pushed on her shoulder.

“It’s my restaurant!” Vi snapped at the hand’s hard-jawed owner.
Merde
, any idiot could see this was a situation she needed to take charge of. Even if they were physically unhurt, her staff was going to be devastated by this. And half their diners must be complaining about what was taking their food so long.
Merde
, this was all her reputation needed. She could see the reviews now:
Cold food, melting structures, and no matter how artistic Violette Lenoir imagines herself to be, her dramatic splashes of red across a plate only manage to look like a massacre occurred in the kitchens. Perhaps she’s trying to suggest how close all carnivores are to the blood and death of their meals, but this reviewer found his appetite slaughtered in the process.

“Fuck.” A long way across the room, Chase was staring at her from where Jake had sat him on a counter. His face had gone white. “Vi, is that your blood? Jesus, is she hemorrhaging?”

“I feel really sleepy,” Vi said, confused. Even her voice sounded fuzzy.

“Here, Vi.” Lina, the only person in the entire room who seemed to understand Vi at all, scooted a little closer, proffering her shoulder. “I’ll help you up. Lean on me.”

So Vi did. Just for a second. Just to help herself get to her feet.

And then she just faded into black.

Chapter 17

“Let me get this straight.” Vi’s voice. Chase pressed a hand to the hospital wall, taking a deep breath. Dizziness swept over him. A nurse hovered next to him, trying to take his elbow, furious with him for being on his feet at all.

“You had information to suggest someone might try to stage a
ricin
attack in
my
restaurant. Ricin. An odorless, tasteless poison with no possible cure. And you
didn’t inform me
?”

Oh, good, she was in fighting form. Chase let his head and shoulder sink against the wall, just breathing for a moment. The last time he’d seen her awake, they’d been loading her into the ambulance, and she’d been trying to fight her way to consciousness enough to argue the EMTs into slowing down and letting her talk to her sous-chef first.

She’d lost the battle. Chase, being bundled into an ambulance himself and arguing about it, had carried with him a horrible, heart-freezing impression of Vi fading, not able to fight her corner. Torso wounds were almost always bad, but, within that context, his had been more minor than hers. They’d managed to keep the infection from the nick in his intestines down, and he’d lost a lot less blood. But Vi’s had touched the liver as well as leading to hemorrhaging, and it had required several small surgeries to stabilize and repair the various types of damage done in order of priority. She’d been medicated, mostly out of it, for the first three days, and he’d been going quietly frantic at his inability to talk to her and convince himself she was going to be fine.

A wheelchair appeared beside him, the nurse trying once again to get him to take it. He shook his head. It was only a few steps into the room. It wasn’t his wound making him dizzy. It was Vi’s wound, and finally hearing her voice again.

“Ma’am, it was imperative we not reveal we were on to them.” A male voice. Was that Brandon, the CIA case officer? Be good for him to have to deal with Vi in person. CIA guys always forgot what human flesh and blood was like. “And the information wasn’t credible. We were following a lot of threads tracking Al-Mofti, and this one seemed like a red herring.”

“It was credible enough for you to shut down my restaurant claiming salmonella!” Vi flared. Vibrant, passionate.

Thank you, Jesus.
Chase was not very religious. But there were moments when he just simply did not know what else to do with all the feelings he had.

When her body had gone limp like that, terror had surged up in his, ghastly, clammy. He’d seen too many people die.

Not Vi, not Vi, not Vi.

Vi was
life.

Passionate, impulsive, risk-loving, overconfident—
insanely
overconfident—hot-tempered, fighting for her space, her paths, her choices…
alive.

He loved civilians. They were soft-bellied and incomprehensible and sometimes it was like loving his stuffed animals when he was a kid, but he still absolutely loved them. They gave him a reason for being. As a five-year-old, he’d piled those stuffed animals up in a fort made of brush and gone out to fight for them against imagined foes or sometimes his cousins and siblings. He’d made up conversations with them, pretended they could connect.

Vi was a civilian, too. She had that innocence. Or she’d
had
it. But she wasn’t soft-bellied. She’d never felt fluffy and made-up. She, too, was a doer, not someone who talked about what other people should do. He’d always felt as if, underneath the battles they had, they understood each other. From the very first moment he’d met her, life force had reached out to life force and just
surged.

They’d had to tell him over and over and over again that she was okay, as they were loading him and Vi in separate ambulances. But he’d known that all they were really trying to do was get him to calm down enough so that they could follow their best practices for torso wounds and transport the victims to the hospital as fast as they could.

Because torso wounds were shitty. That was why men expecting combat wore body armor, but Chase hadn’t, of course, floating on the success of his mission and the assumption that he’d made the world safe again, going to see his girlfriend so she could admire what a hero he was.

“You’re an international hero now, Ms. Lenoir,” a male voice was saying. “I think you’ll find that salmonella story has been buried under a much more fascinating one.”

“I’m a hero?” Vi sounded startled. “My whole team brought the first one down. And Chase got the second one.”

“Your whole team are heroes. But yes, you and Lina Farah have become the superstars in the world’s eyes. We’re keeping Mr., ah, Smith’s identity secret.”

Silence. Wow, Vi must be stymied.

“Once we got Al-Mofti, we found that he
was
producing ricin, so I think we were right to shut down your restaurant until we got a better idea of the threat. Of course, we shut the ricin operation down, and we thought we had stopped any attempts at terrorist attacks coordinated around the U.S. president’s visit, but we still had a couple of people staking out your restaurant and every single other possible attack site in the city just in case.”

“Hundreds of men,” Elias said. “Throughout the city. Some openly, some more discreetly. It’s not that we weren’t taking seriously the random mention of your restaurant that we had picked up, it was just that it seemed a least likely target among many likely ones, and we thought Al-Mofti’s death would disrupt any plans. Plus, with regards to your restaurant, we’d been very focused on the ricin threat and knew we had eliminated that one. I guess we miscalculated the influence of a personal grudge and erratic personality on your pastry chef’s cousin’s actions, on his willingness to substitute one style of attack for another and avenge Al-Mofti.”

“See, if you’d
talked to me
I could have told you all about that jerk,” Vi snapped. “
Lina
could have told you about him. I could have told you that if anyone ever gave him a gun and explosives to play with, he’d probably go try to use them on some women he hated.”

Chase fought men who hurt civilians all the time. And yet he would never understand them.

He pushed away from the wall and eased himself into the hospital room door.

Since both Elias and the CIA case officer had positioned themselves with a view of the door, they both saw him immediately, of course.

Washed out, hair limp, Vi had the head of the bed elevated enough she could half sit as she argued with Elias and Brandon Miller, and in addition to the expected wrappings around her ribs, she had gauze all over her left hand. Right hand in a splint, left hand in gauze, their motion more limited than usual, but both still gesticulating to make her point.

Until she saw him and her hands dropped in her lap.

“Hey, honey,” he said, low. His chest felt so shaky. “Mademoiselle Gorgeous.”

Her eyes grew very red. She grabbed a stuffed animal from the huge pile of them filling a chair and threw it at him. High up, far from his wounded side. Where it would sail over his shoulder and not touch him if he didn’t catch it.

He caught it. A floppy dark brown bear with silky, curly fur and a big nose. Very huggable. He hugged it and made his way across to her bed. “Room for me on this?”

She eased to the side, trying to control her wincing. He eased onto his share of the narrow bed, trying not to wince, too. Her warm shoulder against his, her thigh brushing his, their calves touching. Alive. Vi was struggling not to cry.

Alive, alive, alive. Thank God.

He gave Elias a beseeching look. He knew Elias was his only hope. Brandon never remembered to be human.

“I need a cup of coffee,” Elias said. “Mademoiselle Lenoir, do you mind if we take a break and come back later?”

Vi shook her bent head, looking almost, for a second—and this was really scary—
humble.

The other two men slipped out.

“Honey,” Chase said. He had no idea what else to say. How to encompass it.
You’re alive. Thank God.

He wanted to wrap her up in his body and hold on as tight as he could, but neither of them were in any shape for squeezing.

He couldn’t even take her hand properly. Both her hands were hurt. He took the wrist of the nearest one, the one with the gauze, and gazed at the tips, calluses peeking out from the gauze. His eyes stung.

Vi said nothing. He could hear her breathing, shaky. She nestled closer into him, turning her head into his body and taking another deep breath. At least their two unwounded sides matched, so they could roll a little toward each other.

“I haven’t been able to
see
you,” she whispered. “They were always operating on me, or you. I’ve been in surgery three times, and they kept medicating me, and they said you were okay, but that’s not the same as
seeing.
”

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I should never, ever have let you get hurt.”

She lifted her head. “Was that your job?” The sheen of tears in her eyes turned them very green, but they met his steadily.

Well…no, actually. They’d called the coast clear. Al-Mofti was caught—that
was
his job, and he’d done it—and the threat, they thought, cut off at its primary source. Sure, RAID had kept people in place around the city, including a discreet presence near her restaurant, for a couple of extra days, just on “better safe than sorry” principles. But personal protection of every civilian in Paris had never been his official job. France had a police force for that.

He was a bullet, not a shield. He protected civilians by taking out the villains. And as a bullet, someone always fired him. Called the target, sent him and his team after it.

“It’s always my job,” he said. “Vi…always.”

Sometimes dealing with civilians could be frustrating. Even though a part of Chase always loved civilians, there were many encounters with lazy, rude, entitled people that made a man wonder why the hell he was risking his life for them.

But Vi—never. As soon as he first saw her, he knew exactly why a man would risk his life for her.

“They’re my kitchens,” she said. “I think keeping people safe in them is
my
job.”

His mouth tensed. He shook his head. “It’s my job.”

Her mouth quirked just a little. “That’s not what your sexy friend said.” She nodded to the door. “He said it was RAID’s job. But that they thought the threat had been eliminated.”

Sexy?
Trust Vi to hand him a lifeline. As if she knew he might drown in all those emotions like regret and anger and pain if she didn’t hand him humor. As if she knew him.

He took a breath, focusing on it. Yeah, he could use this. He could find laughter here. “My what friend? Brandon’s sixty. Do you have a father figure complex you never told me about? I can dye my hair gray and act bossy.”

She smiled a little, that sheen of tears in her eyes warming with more life. “The
sexy
one. You know, black hair, green eyes, an ironic way of looking at you? Looks as if his parents came from Algeria? Why didn’t you tell me you had hot friends? I have single girlfriends, you know.”

“Are you contemplating an orgy?” Chase considered. “You know, I’m not entirely sure I’d go for that in real life, but…”

Vi touched her splinted hand gently to his shoulder and gave him a feather-light pretend punch. Her gentleness was unsettling. Had this damn wound made him start looking
fragile
or something?

Or did it just matter that much to her that he not get hurt again?

He closed his hand around her splint, lifted her hand to his mouth, and kissed her two unsplinted fingers. His eyes closed a moment.
Thank God you’re alive.

“Also, you already act bossy, Chase.”

He opened his eyes to find her watching him as if she was glad he was alive, too. God, he couldn’t believe he’d ever used fragile silk as a metaphor for his emotions around her. They were so powerful they turned
him
into fragile silk, shredding him ruthlessly, but that wasn’t quite the same.

“
You
can talk,” he said.

“I don’t
act
bossy. I
am
the boss.”

He dropped her splint to sink his hand into her hair as one of the few spots on her body it seemed safe to squeeze. “God, I love you.”

She closed her eyes a moment. “Chase. You should
really
be more careful about saying that.”

“Why?” he asked, baffled. When had he ever been careful about his life? They were lying here both with bullet wounds in them, and she wanted him to be careful about
words
?