Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(17)

She was used to seeing hunger in a man’s eyes—she was a top pastry chef—but there was something about Jake’s as he propped himself in the doorway watching her approach that made her want to walk right up to him, put her hands on his shoulders, and go up on tiptoe. Probably a good thing she was carrying a case of desserts and couldn’t.

He straightened and stepped out of the doorway. “Ma’am.” His big hands closed around hers as he took the case from her as if she, who spent her life carrying giant mixing bowls, might need help.

Cute little thing, am I?

She narrowed her eyes up at him. I am not fragile. Even if the fragility of her world did splash across her consciousness in vivid red any time she closed her eyes.

How did he do it? He carried himself so strongly, but he had to know his world was just as fragile as hers was. His friend Chase was lying on that hospital bed, proof in the flesh of how bullets didn’t really care if you were big and strong and arrogant or little and sweet and arrogant.

Jake made her shoulders feel straighter just looking at how straight his were. If he could be strong and handle this life with grace and humor, then so could she.

She was Lina Farah, damn it.

Jake’s mouth curved subtly, a wash of warmth over her, as he studied her lifted chin. Then that hazel gaze drifted to just below her eyes. She touched the sense of heaviness there. Could he tell she wasn’t sleeping?

He held her eyes a moment. Then he braced the case in one hand to close the other around hers in a warm, firm, gentle clasp of greeting: You’re strong. You’re doing just fine.

She took a little breath in relief at the message, because she really hadn’t felt she was doing just fine. But he would know, wouldn’t he? He wasn’t new to this. Her hand tightened a second around his.

“Lina.” Sexy Elias, the only Frenchman in the room, moved in to kiss her on both cheeks, Jake holding on a little too long as the other man claimed her attention. Green-eyed and black-haired, Elias clearly had Maghrébin ancestry—Algerian, maybe?—which she probably wouldn’t have even noticed two weeks ago but which these days she found vaguely reassuring. Like they were all in this together and she wasn’t the Other in the room. “Come to spoil us?”

“Come to spoil me,” Chase called from the bed, and Lina’s face relaxed into a grin. How anyone could not grin around Chase was a mystery to her. “Quit stealing my treats! You aren’t wounded.”

He strove to look pitiful, having no idea how sick and pale he already looked without posing. Chase’s belief in himself was too strong to admit his own mortality. Bullets hadn’t bounced off him, but he was going to go ahead and pretend to the whole world, himself included, that they had.

“I brought enough for all of you,” Lina said. Feeding people. Now that felt as if her life was still normal.

Ian stepped in beside Elias and proved he was trying to adapt to local culture by bending down for bises, too. Accidentally brushing too close to her lips, he pulled back, looking bashful and awkward.

Hmm. Her previous impressions of Ian had been of extravagant flirtatious confidence, not bashfulness. Of course, Americans were always awkward with cheek-kissing. And then they went around wrapping their arms around people they barely knew to say hello. Their sense of personal space worked in mysterious ways.

Jake was giving Ian a very steely look. She moved to greet Mark and bent down to kiss Chase’s cheeks. Chase had taken to cheek-kissing fast. “How are you doing today?”

“Bored,” he said. “How’s Vi?”

“Bitchy,” Lina said, amused. “She’s about to climb the walls, only she’s not strong enough to do it yet, so you know how that’s making her.”

Chase beamed. “That’s my girl.”

Lina sighed. Yeah, Vi probably was his girl. She sure had fallen head over heels for a cocky idiot fast. An idiot who had literally upended her life. And you wonder why I prefer shy, geeky guys, Vi.

“Seriously, if he talks about his girl one more time in that gloating tone, can I throw him out the window?” Ian said plaintively.

Chase looked delighted. “Jealous?”

From all around the room came several huffs of breath.

“Don’t be,” Lina said, biting back a laugh. “She’s trouble.”

None of the men looked scared of trouble.

“It’s not jealousy of Vi per se,” said Ian. “I mean, myself I prefer brunettes.” A sidelong, merry glance at her.

Oh, he did, did he? Lina raised an eyebrow at him.

“But I’d love to be able to call someone my girl.” He deepened his voice longingly over the words my girl in a way that would warm any girl’s bones and make her long, too.

He certainly had gotten over that moment of awkward shyness quickly, hadn’t he?

Jake was gazing at him as if Ian’s life span was shortening dramatically with every word he spoke.

“I mean…” Ian suddenly retreated into bashfulness again, giving Lina an awkward look. “I mean…you know what I mean.” He looked down like a shy virgin who would never in his life dare flirt with a woman of her bedazzling beauty.

Lina bit the inside of her lip, and on the other side of her, Jake shifted.

“Hey!” Chase said very loudly. “What did I say? Don’t get thrown out. Then I’d have to watch French television again to keep me entertained.” He shuddered.