Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) (8 page)

Chapter 8

“Salmonella?” Vi stared at the health inspectors blocking her access to her own kitchens with no regard for life or limb. Health inspectors were getting more and more suicidal these days. “In
my
restaurant? No, there damn well was not!”

“We’re sorry, Mademoiselle Lenoir,” the lead inspector said woodenly. “We have reports from a dozen people whose one point in common seems to be having eaten here last night.”

“That’s not even possible!” Vi said, outraged. “My team’s hygiene is
impeccable.
I know the source of everything we serve.” Even as she said it, she was running things through her mind: eggs from her brother’s farm, honey from the rooftop rosemary gardens and beehives of their own quarter in Paris, no oysters last night it wasn’t the season… “Let me see this—” She started to push by him.

He stepped to the side to block her, and something flickered through her. That was a very
adamant
block. A police officer kind of block. Or a military man’s block.

“
Pardon, mademoiselle.
It’s a public health emergency. Until we track down the source, we need to close the restaurant and run tests.”

She narrowed her eyes up at the health inspector, who certainly seemed to work out a lot in his down time. The set of his shoulders reminded her quite a lot of… “Is this something to do with Chase Smith?”

“Who?” the inspector said blankly.

She folded her arms to keep herself from stabbing someone. A health inspector, for example. “That’s not his real name, is it?”

“I have no idea who you’re talking about,
mademoiselle
,” the military-mannered inspector said formally.

“
Bordel de
—” Vi stabbed her finger at him. “These are
my kitchens. You tell me what is going on.
”

“We’re investigating a salmonella outbreak,” he repeated woodenly. “That seems to have started here.”

“So it’s true then?” a voice said from behind Vi to her right. “You’ve been forcibly shut down for salmonella?”

Vi pivoted to see—with a shock of horror—a television camera pointed her way. Oh,
fuck.

“Mademoiselle Lenoir, would you care to comment?” a perfectly coiffed brown-haired man asked, posing beside her before the camera and extending his microphone.

“How could I care to comment? I just found out about it! How do
you
know about it already?” She tried to see which news station they were from.

“Twitter,” the journalist said.

Bordel de merde.
“It’s on Twitter already?” Vi said, her stomach sinking as if she’d swallowed a bucket of rock.

The journalist nodded with an appearance of sympathy. “As I’m sure you’re aware, taking you on as chef here created some controversy, and your changes to the menu have been…splashy. Do you think a salmonella outbreak at Au-dessus supports those who have always claimed you were too young and too…flamboyant…to handle the job?”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Oh, shit, any minute they were going to bring out the “woman chef” thing. And she might have to hit somebody. “I think you’ll find there’s some other source to this salmonella outbreak.” She looked at the health inspector grimly. “Let’s see those tests.”

“I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you and your staff to remain off the premises while we conduct the investigation,” the military-like inspector said stiffly.

“Oh, no, you damn well will not.” Vi forgot all about the television camera. “Mess around in my kitchens without me there? Over my dead body.”

***

“
Salmonella
?” Chase demanded between his teeth. “Out of all the possible excuses for shutting that restaurant down, they went with the only one that would do someone actual harm?”

Mark propped his butt against the table behind him and folded his arms. “They said it was the perfect cover. It stirs up doubt. Al-Mofti might have to make calls to find out what was going on, and maybe we can get a location.
Was
there a ricin attack attempt? Did one of his men carry it out? Did they get caught and this is our cover up? He’ll want to know. And the more of his men he tries to communicate with, the more chance we have of tracking him down.”

“I said a kitchen fire! Plumbing!”

“You’ve got to admit it’s better,” Mark said.

Maybe. If Chase turned off all thought of individual consequences and went into his cold place. Kind of a lousy, crappy place to go when it came to a gorgeous, vivid, life-filled blonde in leather.

“Better only if you consider destroying a chef’s career a minor side effect,” Elias said, his voice very even and cold. “
Putain
, but you people have no idea of culture. Maybe later you can build a McDonald’s where her restaurant stood.”

Ice entered Chase’s soul. “I thought you said she can handle anything.”

“I suspect she can,” Elias said. “But that doesn’t mean her
restaurant
can. Or her current
career
can. Food poisoning. At a restaurant already at the center of every critic’s eye this year, as they love her or hate her or swear she’ll never make it.
Merde
, it’s a top chef’s worst nightmare.”

“At least she’s alive,” Mark said. “Which she wouldn’t be, if she were exposed to ricin. She probably has friends who aren’t alive, from the last Paris attacks.”

A grim look settled over Elias’s face. He didn’t have to tell them that he also had friends who were no longer alive. They all had friends who were no longer alive, these days. “Who the hell made this call? Were my people involved or was it the damn CIA?”

“It’s a coordinated initiative,” Mark said wearily. Within their team, that was working fine, but on a larger scale…it had already been a nightmare coordinating operations between the CIA and the military when they only had one country involved. “That’s all I’ve got.”

One of those visions of Violette Lenoir dying of ricin again. Not rippling under him in a glorious orgasm, shining with life, but wrenching in death, convulsions going weaker and weaker, until all of her was gone.

Sometimes he really wished he had gone into ranching or something for a living. Surfing. Skiing. Something else challenging and daredevil that didn’t stuff his brain with so many visions of so many different moments of dying. His brain was so damn good at switching out the real bodies seen with those of the people he most cared about, too.

A lot of people claimed his breed were psychopaths. But Chase knew how many of them had gone into the military not because of too little empathy but too much. They’d seen those bodies jumping from the windows of incredibly high buildings rather than burn alive, and the pain and the fury on their behalf had been too much.
I’ll get those bastards back for this,
the teenage boy thought.
I’ll make sure it never happens again
. And he enlisted.

Maybe that teenager adopted some traits of psychopathy later. Learned how to turn off that empathy switch, because what else were you supposed to do, when your mission night after night might be to slip into someone’s compound while he was asleep and kill him? But he wasn’t born that way. The problem of that teenage boy who enlisted wasn’t that he was born with too little heart where others were concerned…it was that he was born with too damn much, and he didn’t know how to give enough of it, except with his actual blood.

“I just think they could have used some excuse besides
food poisoning
,” Chase said. Damn it, and he’d been the one to say he didn’t care what they came up with. “What the hell was wrong with the kitchen fire excuse?”

“This leaves Al-Mofti in greater doubt, which gives us that many more chances to finally pinpoint where that bastard is.”

“Yes, but…” Chase logged into Twitter and found #audessus #vilenoir. Oh, shit. A sick feeling grew in his stomach. What the fuck? Had some asshole just called her a “dumb c***”, with a “women don’t belong in a real restaurant” added on? He was going to kick somebody’s ass. “Can you retract it? Correct it?”

“Chase,” Mark said firmly. “You have to hold it together. We’ll run ‘salmonella tests’ for a few days, follow any leads we might get, and later we can say the salmonella cases were traced to something else and nothing to do with the restaurant. I hope I don’t need to remind you that stopping Al-Mofti is our top priority.”

A vision of Flight 997’s family members, the screaming agony of the mother of the little girl who’d flown by herself for the very first time to see her grandparents and now would never be coming home. “No,” Chase said, feeling sick. “No.”

“And
do not tell her
,” Mark said. “We still don’t know what, if any, connection her pastry chef might have with any of this. We need
doubt.
We don’t want anything certain to slip out.”

Fuck.

Chapter 9

By four that afternoon, Vi had one thing on her mind: Chase Smith.

If she ever found that slimy bastard again, she was going to kick him so hard in the nuts he wouldn’t even be able to
look
at a woman he wanted to screw for months without wincing.

Not that she knew what the hell was going on, but she knew how a man’s eyes flickered when she caught him out. Like,
You’re married, aren’t you?
Or
Navy SEAL.
She knew what normal health inspectors looked like, and she knew they didn’t bar her from her own restaurant. And she knew what it was like to be screwed by a man who didn’t see her body as anything more than an enjoyable byproduct of his running his tank right over her life.

You’re lucky you snuck out without leaving your number, you bastard.
She rolled her right shoulder and touched her right cheek, where both had been bruised when the police had to forcibly remove her—pushing her against the wall by the restaurant back door and cuffing her. More good fodder for the cameras.

Putain
, she might have broken Twitter.

Fortunately, her arrest had been a catch and release deal. The police had just wanted her to calm down and
give up her own restaurant into the hands of imposter health inspectors
. One of them had even told her a pretty woman like her shouldn’t get so upset, she should show more class. And she hadn’t even been able to deck him, because all the power was in his hands, and he would just have arrested her again, and this time kept her locked up.

She glared back at the Commissariat, the main one on the Île de la Cité, where she was pretty sure she’d been taken just to put more distance between her and her restaurant in the Tenth.

Then she checked her phone. Yeah, that “c***s don’t belong in the kitchen” Tweet had been reTweeted 2753 times. With her tagged each time. She didn’t even want to check the hashtags. Her publicist would have to handle that one.

Merde,
now Twitter was claiming she’d food poisoned the President of the United States? That had been a
prospective
visit
a week from now
.

She threw her phone in a long arc from the point of the Île de la Cité into the Seine, and stood there, her hands on her hips, watching that phone sink down into brown water and the mud below like her life.

Fuck.

How had this just happened to her? She had been at the heights and still climbing, a rising star, glowing bright and determined to keep climbing. Controversial, yes. Flamboyant, yes. “It’s pretty but is it art?”, yes. But any woman worth her salt in this field had to face that crap.

The same way she had to face the way so many onlookers cheered her fall now and threw rotten eggs and tomatoes at her while she was down in the dirt.

She shoved her hand through her hair and stared at a passing barge, tempted to swim out to it and beg the captain to take her away from this city. Maybe she could change her name, change her hair, change countries, and start over.

A movement to her left, a man coming in too close to her personal space, and she pivoted so fast she nearly drilled a hole through the cobblestone with her heel. Some jerk wanted to harass her right now? Bring it.

But it was Chase. Big, tan, easy-moving, gold-streaked brown hair, with those blue eyes and the lines around them from squinting into who knew what. Bullets?

As cocky as ever. Checking her out, with that quick
I-own-that-now
flick up and down her body. Larger than life, hard-bodied, absolutely sure of himself. Except for that guilty smile on his mouth.

A wave of memories washed over her—his hands all over her body, inside her body, his face as he looked down at her butt, his mouth on her…all while he knew he was going to bring her life down around her ears. Her fingers curled into her palms.

“Hi, honey,” he said, just cautiously enough that she
knew
. She’d been his roadkill, hadn’t she? And now he had a guilty conscience.

“You.” Her fist clenched.

He held up placating hands, like a cheater calming down his little woman after she caught him with another girl. “Now, honey,” he started.

She hit him.

***

Chase had a split-second to control his instinct to duck, and he managed it. Took it on the chin.

Vi’s hand connected with a force that shouldn’t have surprised him, and he shoved off with his feet for good measure, so that the punch sent him flying back into the river. He grabbed a deep breath as he flew, hit the water with a loud splash, and sank out of sight.

Okay, let’s just hang out down here for a while, give her a chance to calm down.
Given all the free-diving he’d done, he was tempted to give it a full five minutes just to panic her—best way to break through anger, right?—but he didn’t want her actually diving in after him. Well, he kind of didn’t. Ruin that leather of hers. So he came up after three, expecting to find her hovering on the edge of the stone quay, getting anxious.

She wasn’t even looking at him!

She was—oh, fuck, she was huddled over her hand, her face twisted in agony.

He leapt out of the river, water flinging off him. “Honey—” He reached for her wrist.

Her hands flew up, and he barely saved his eyes. One of her nails raked up his cheek, as she went for them.

He grabbed both her arms, taking firm control of her. She kicked him in the groin.