Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) (25 page)

A little breath of a pause. A voice gone carefully neutral. “You’re thinking about getting out?”

“Well, I…it wears out your body, you know. Bullet wounds and constant joint impacts and all the other stuff. I’ll start feeling it in a few years. And I…I mean…if a man had
kids
, you know, he might want to…be there, and not…”

“Are you
blushing
?” A gentle hand in his hair. No splint on it now. The bone had healed faster than the recovery from the bullet.

“I’m a hardened warrior. I eat nails for breakfast. Of
course
I am not
blushing.
It’s possible I’m feeling overheated from thinking about pink peekaboo panties.”

“You certainly didn’t blush the first time you mentioned kids. About two minutes after you met me.”

“Yeah, but…Vi…it’s starting to become
real.
”

***

“Why do you get all the stuffed animals anyway? That’s just sexist.”

“Chase, they kept your identity secret. How would anyone know to send you stuffed animals? You’ll have to be happy with your medal.”

“Well, yeah, but…
you
got a medal, too,
and
growly bears from all the kids. It’s just not fair.”

Vi handed him a pink stuffed unicorn with big eyes.

Chase smiled and tucked against it like a pillow. “That’s much better.”

***

“Did you just look at that woman’s ass?”

“Vi! Of course not! I was just checking for concealed weapons! You know how alert I like to be to my surroundings.”

“Alert to your
hot women
surroundings.”

“It’s the first time we’ve been out in a while! I’m just trying to see how much fashions have changed.”

“In six weeks?”

“Besides, Vi, nobody’s ass can compare to yours. I could probably write a poem to your ass. We’ll call it ‘Ass, a haiku by Chase Smith, alias’.”

“
Oh, purée.
”

“Ass

High, firm, round, tempting

Inviting the touch of my hands

Also of my d—”

“Chase!”

“What, doesn’t that make five syllables?”

“You know everyone at the other tables can hear you, right?”

“Sorry, honey. I forgot you were so shy.”

***

“Tell me a story.”

“A story?”

“About you. Anything, really.”

“Well…once there was a young man who met this really hot blonde and decided he was going to get her. This woman was so hot that
nobody
could get her. So obviously she had to put him through some tests to make sure he was worthy. She threw knives at him, and he survived. She threw him into a deep river, and he survived. And then she thought, that was way too easy for him. He’s going to win too fast if I don’t think of something
really
hard. So she thought really evilly, and she figured out the very hardest thing to do for that man, and she said he had to do it: he had to wait. But he was strong-willed, and he was brave, and he was stubborn, and he did that, too. And then she had no choice. She had to keep her word. So…”

Vi buried her head in his side, laughing. There was really maybe nothing quite as perfect as two people stretched out on the same couch, on a quiet evening, tucked together. “But I meant a story I didn’t know.”

“Oh, so
you
know the ending, too. You’re just pretending not to.”

She pinched him. But not really enough to sting.

“Okay, what kind of story?”

“Just any story. Maybe a story you like to tell. Or maybe one you never tell, because you wanted to, but you didn’t know who to tell it to.”

“Comedy, tragedy?”

A little pet of fingers against his chest. “Anything.”

He took her hand and ran his thumb up her work-toughened fingers. “We can take turns. You tell me some, too.”

She nodded into his side.

He thought and thought. “Well…once there was this young man who saw people fall from tall, tall towers. And it hurt his heart, because he couldn’t catch them, and he watched the towers crumble to the ground. And so he tried to make himself into someone who could always
do
something, never just watch a television helpless again. And…I don’t think I can tell this.”

Vi squeezed his hand. “I’ll go for a little bit. You grew up on a ranch, and my grandmother and brother have farms, right? Let’s start with that.”

***

“Does this package contain what I think it does?”

“Oh, look at that! More fan mail. Now I wonder which of your fans could have sent you pink peekaboo panties?”

***

“Wow, you look happy, even for you. What’s going on?”

A big grin. “I’m cleared for action again. You would die of jealousy if you knew the training they’ve got us on for the next month. It’s in Corsica, with your 2e REP, SAS from Britain, and the KSM. They said this time the imperative really was for us to learn how to cooperate and not try to beat all the other forces, but we’ll see how that goes.”

A faint smile, green eyes watching him very alertly. “This just revs you up, doesn’t it? You love your job.”

“It’s my purpose, Vi.”

She came to stand in front of him and rested a loose fist on his chest. “Have fun. Kick ass.”

“Will you miss me?”

“Of course I’ll
miss
you. But I’ll be busy kicking ass, too.”

“It will get harder,” Chase warned, warily. “I’m with SOCEUR right now, but they don’t have to keep me there. The next deployment could be six months in a war zone again.”

“Is this the part where you realize you need the kind of woman who can pack up her life and follow yours around?”

“No. This is the point where I know how good it is to be with a woman who has a full, good, happy life without me. So I don’t have to feel guilty about my own life choices. But it will still be hard. For both of us.”

“Chase. Please try to wrap your mind around what it means to apprentice in a starred kitchen at fifteen and work my way up to my own two stars by twenty-eight. I. Do. Hard. Things.”

“Damn, I love you.”

“I love you, too, you arrogant idiot. Now go kick ass.”

***

“Vi! Vi! Wake up! Guess what day it is?”

“It’s…is it
four in the morning?
Merde
, Chase, we just got to bed an hour ago.”

“It’s
January
! I survived!”

“You might be premature on that.”

“Too late! I
made it
. Pay up, Gorgeous.”

Vi rolled over slowly. In the dim pre-dawn of her brother’s farm house, where they’d gone to celebrate New Year’s Eve, Chase’s big body was propped over hers, his hand shaking her shoulder. He looked as pushy and unstoppable and eager as a kid at Christmas. Which she should know, having been dragged out of bed at this hour only a week before by his nieces and nephews when they spent Christmas in Texas.

Even though she was in that swimmy, queasy space between a night full of dancing and good wine and the hangover that was going to set in soon, she still had to smile.

Chase had fun at New Year’s. He danced all night. He carried the kids on his shoulders while he danced and let them put funny hats on him and crouched in a corner coaxing smiles out of a tearful three-year-old who, overstimulated but determined to make it until midnight, was having a harder and harder time handling it when her older cousins ran faster than she did.

He had fun at Christmas, too. He washed dishes and decorated trees and helped cut out cookies—although he mostly ate the dough—and split wood, making sure Vi came to watch him flex while he did it, and kept a fire going. Christmas morning, he got down and built train tracks and robots and even, calmly and with a secret glint of humor in his eyes, played with dolls in princess outfits when his littlest niece begged him, although he tended to have the princesses get in catastrophic situations and then explode into action with flips and derring-do as they surmounted it. His niece loved it.

From what he said, missing Christmas with his family was one of his hardest times downrange, and he was thrilled when, like this year, his tour ended in time for him to enjoy it.

“Pay up what?” she demanded, just to see what he said.

“Your entire life, of course,” he said grandly. “Now
mine
. As promised.” He held out a small box. “Plus, Grandma says can we quit messing around and pick a date. She’s decided she wants to complete a triathlon, and she’s worried we’ll mess up her training schedule.”

Vi had to pause at that. “Seriously?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Won’t get on a plane but is considering swimming four kilometers in open ocean? At the age of eighty-six?”

“You met her, right?”

“Yeah, and I think you were exaggerating about the ailing part. If she and my grandmother ever meet, they are going to hit it off so well.”

“Maybe
they
can get married.” Chase paused as he heard what he’d said, and a grin crossed his face. “Love to see the look on my parents’ faces if that happened. Vi!” He nudged the ring box against her hand.

Scarred but healed, that hand.

Resilient. Like them.

“Damn, I love you,” she sighed.

A huge smile split his face. He opened the ring box.

And she was a little afraid. Because he hadn’t consulted her about the ring choice—she hadn’t even known he had bought one already—and when a man chose the engagement ring on his own, it seemed as if he made a statement. Of who he thought the woman he was marrying was, and of who he wanted her to be.

One of those moments when the difference between who a man wanted to have hot sex with and who he wanted to have in his life as his partner and mother of his children really shone through.

What if the ring was fragile and sweet and fancy? What if it had a huge, protruding diamond, to show him off—what a good, generous guy he was who could take care of his little woman—rather than a ring that suited her work and how much she must use her hands?

Chase had such a hopeful look on his face, excited, pushy…exactly like his nieces and nephews on Christmas morning.

Nieces and nephews who had given Chase quite a few handmade presents he didn’t quite know what to do with, but which he had exclaimed over enthusiastically anyway, as if they were the greatest treasures he had ever received. He had a bracelet made out of pink yarn and bits of crayon-colored paper stashed carefully in a small treasure box right now, a bracelet he’d worn every day of the rest of the visit and right onto the plane back to France so his niece could see it on his wrist.

She looked down at the ring.

A gorgeous Damascus steel, with the classic ripple pattern, and a tension set diamond held in the wide band like a star caught in strength. Exquisitely simple, the diamond winking in that smooth band.

Her breath caught, and she looked up at him quickly, her eyes stinging.

“I wanted it to be something that showed off your hand,” he said cautiously, checking her face, just like his niece had his about that yarn bracelet, to make sure she liked it. “Rather than the other way around.”

Her scarred, tough hand. The stinging grew worse.

“I know you’ll still have to take it off a lot when you’re working, because of hygiene and all that, but I wanted it to be at least
possible
to work in it. Like it…honored what you do, wasn’t the opposite of it.”

It was very embarrassing, but she was starting to cry.

“A lot of the rings I saw looked like they were really designed for women who liked to imagine themselves as somebody’s arm candy, as if the ring was what gave them value, you know? And I wanted the ring to honor the value you already had.”

A little tear rolled down her cheek. And she couldn’t even remember to fight it. “Chase,” she whispered. She stroked the ring.

“When I was in BUD/S, at the start of Hell Week, one of the instructors said they were going to break us open. That we were just pretty clay pots our parents had made, but they would smash us and find out what was inside. And some of us would have nothing inside, and some of us would just have shit. But some of us would have Damascus steel. Like you do, Vi.”

And like him. She put her hand on that beautiful pure steel of him, that he cushioned with human muscle and with humor and warmth.

“Will you get me one?” he asked, quiet and deep, almost
shy.
“Because I saw one. A similar style with a broader band and a smaller diamond, as if it was this unbreakable strength that had caught something absolutely brilliant and glowing and precious. I…really liked it.” He dipped his head a little. Definitely shy.

She caught his hand, curling her fingertips into his, linking them tight.

Blue eyes met hers, so bright. So full of life and wanting and hope. And full of this certainty, with that strange brush of shyness to it, as if they had reached a point so vulnerable and so trusting that even Chase could not barrel his way brashly through it.

He had to just wait, all open.

Trusting for her to open just as much.

“I never thought I would say this about that
enfoiré
Abed, but he brought me so much luck,” Vi whispered, squeezing his fingers.
Brought me you. All the way from Texas.

“You make your own luck, Vi. Luck’s just the world’s response to all the energy you put into it.”

“Then you, too.” She squeezed his hand hard. “You make luck, too.”

“Trust me, I know.” He looked down at their hands, his expression vulnerable and steady and wondering, and then took the ring out of the box. “I know exactly how lucky I am.” He slid the ring onto her finger. “And I’m willing to do everything I can to keep that luck.”

And they did.

***

THE END

BUT IT’S REALLY THE BEGINNING

***

Author’s Note

This started as an ode to Hollywood kind of story—a vision of leather and knives and banter and how much fun it would be to write a knife-wielding heroine like Vi. The counterterrorism plot was essentially a device for what was intended as a lighthearted caper. And then, about three fourths of the way through the writing of it, the November 2015 attacks occurred in Paris. This was a very dark time and, because of the similarities between what the hero in the “lighthearted” plot was working to prevent and the real world devastation, it made it very difficult to return to this book for some time. I think, no matter what, there are elements of darkness in it now that weren’t part of my original intention. But I hope that, just like in Paris itself, the life and energy win out. And I like to think Vi makes a good heroine for Paris…no one can keep her down.