Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(13)
Chapter 4
“She likes shy, geeky guys,” Chase said.
Jake folded his arms and gave his team buddy an exasperated look. “You couldn’t mention that two days ago?”
“Excuse me, but I have been recovering from a terrorist attack.” Chase contrived a martyred look.
Yeah, seeing Chase in a hospital bed punched Jake in the gut. But he rolled his eyes anyway. If he got too soft with Chase it would hurt that cocky morale of his. None of them were all that good at acting soft with other guys.
Could he act soft with a woman? Just curve his hand over those glossy curls and say, It’s okay, honey. I’ve got you.
Stroke away that frayed around the edges look that meant she hadn’t slept in a week. Shh. I know what it’s like to have bullets interrupt your dreams. You don’t have to prove you’re brave to me, sweetheart, I already know it. Shh. Does this help?
He frowned. He’d sure crashed and burned on his first attempts to get in closer to her. Her friend Vi might wait until a man was close enough to throw knives at, as Chase had established, but Lina shot men down with precision. When they were still a long way out.
“Why the hell does she like shy, geeky guys anyway?” Jake demanded indignantly. What did they have to offer? Hell, he didn’t even know any shy, geeky guys. “I’m reserved.” Did that count?
“Mark’s shy and geeky,” Elias said, amused.
“Damn it,” Mark said. Tall and lean, their team leader had a nerdy warrior-philosopher thing going that made some people overlook his intense physical self-confidence. “You guys are never going to let me live that book club down, are you?”
“It gave us a reputation,” Ian complained. “Reading. You do too much of that and people expect you to start thinking next.”
Said the guy who had graduated summa cum laude with an economics degree from Harvard and spent two years on Wall Street before he got bored and ran off to join the Navy instead.
“Now everyone thinks we’re nerds,” Chase said sadly. “They make me sit at a table by myself at the mess hall. Sometimes they throw spit wads.”
Yeah, right. Nobody in the whole world, except possibly Ian, was as overtly cocky as Chase. Big, muscled, gold-streaked brown hair, blue eyes, completely incapable of being serious except in very specific situations that usually involved someone dying. And even then he might say something to make everyone laugh. They had gotten a lot of shit about their “book club,” but not any more than they’d gotten for that damn charity calendar.
“Americans can read?” Elias said, astonished.
“I have to sound out the words,” Chase said solemnly. Chase could read in four languages. But his pronunciation remained Texan to the core. “Which doesn’t help me with French because you guys don’t know how to spell. Why the hell do you have so many letters in words if you’re not going to pronounce them?”
“Thought,” Elias said. “Though. Through. Laugh. Ought.”
“Cute accent.” Chase clutched his heart, going big-eyed. “Say through again?”
Elias narrowed green eyes at him. Elias’s American was pretty good, but the THR sound tripped him up every time.
“You should take that accent into an American bar,” Jake said. “Give Ian a run for his money.”
Ian had pretty much the whole Atlantic contributing to his genome, and as far as Jake could tell, all those different gene sources had gotten into some kind of one-upmanship contest at his conception. Whatever it was, he’d turned out too sexy for his own damn good, and he only had to stroll into a bar and quirk that grin of his to have women start stripping off their panties.
It was quite trying to hit bars with him, to be honest. Jake did just fine, but Ian did better, and that provoked his competitive instinct. All of them had extremely healthy competitive instincts.
“I’ve reformed,” Ian said. “Now I’m shy and geeky.”
Jake unfolded his arms in a clear signal: don’t make me punch you.
Ian grinned. “What? She’s cute.”
She was more than cute. She was f*cking gorgeous. Her heart face, her black curls, her raging courage, her shoulder under her friend’s that day as Vi slumped and Lina helped hold her up. She was literally the most beautiful woman Jake had ever seen.
If he told his team that, though, they would roast the hell out of him.
“This city is full of cute women,” Jake said. “Go find another one in some bar.”
Jake himself was sick of bars. Of how easy it was to pick up hot women and how hard it was to keep them. He was sick to damn death of being a facile sex object, and yet having no one to Skype home to, no one who was glad every day he was still alive, no one he could count on when things went south to help pull them back to true north. He didn’t want mindless sex, he wanted…something else.
A vision of black curls and a slim, pretty face, of gallantry under fire, of persistence and determination in bad times, of steady friendship and support and courage. A woman who wrestled with dragons.
So close he could touch her, and yet when he’d even hinted at making a move, she’d shot him down so far off he was barely a dot on her flirtational horizon. Picked him off at a thousand yards the first crawling movement he’d made out of his emotional bunker toward her.