Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(18)
Jake and Ian held each other’s eyes a moment longer, Ian’s dancing and Jake’s inscrutable. A little dangerous.
She focused on Chase, who was easy. Cocky, fun, and taken. “I brought you some movies.” So Chase and Vi didn’t have to spend a fortune on downloads while they were in the hospital, she and the kitchen team had gone through their old DVDs for favorites.
“Captain America?” Chase said hopefully. “The one where he gets to flirt with a beautiful woman in leather?”
Lina pulled out a dozen DVDs from her backpack and spread them out on Chase’s table. French films, with artsy covers. Chase’s face scrunched. Then he tried valiantly to hide it. “Ah…just what I was wanting to see.”
Lina watched him pretend to be enthusiastic for a moment, keeping her teeth firmly on the inside of her lip. Then she opened the DVD cases.
Several James Bond films. Mr. and Mrs. Smith. All the good Star Wars.
Chase broke into a big grin. “Lina. I am taken, but trust me, if I wasn’t, I would love you.”
“I’m not taken,” Ian said.
Jake released a long, careful breath. Ian grinned.
“If you guys behave, I’ve brought you something special,” Lina said, reaching for the case Jake still held.
He set it down on Chase’s table for her, and she popped the clasps.
Having worked part of her teenage years en boutique, where much of what they made was catered to location, she had kind of enjoyed revisiting the concept of transportable desserts for these guys. When things go wrong, go back to the beginning, a certain Spanish swordsman had once said. Well, boutique work was her beginning. Maybe, if she worked her way right back up through an apprenticeship again, she could turn back into herself.
If only life was like a shattered dessert. You cleared the ruins off your counter and started over, pulling a fresh one together in seconds to make perfection again.
***
The woman was crazy.
The world demonstrated for her—graphically—that it was brutal, full of hatred, and that death stalked life jealously, always ready to snuff it out.
And Lina went to the gym to try to beat the crap out of it in response and then went and made more desserts so delicate and brave that even she couldn’t always touch them without breaking them. Jake had seen her shatter the impossibly fragile sugar domes repeatedly the day before, but she’d just kept working on them until she got them right.
A layering of gold and deeper gold in a short glass, cream and…mango? And sugar caramelized golden-brown on top of it.
The guys flocked around her, holding up the glasses she gave them, completely subjugated by this beautiful delicacy in their rough and tumble world. She ought to be careful with that, but she didn’t know her own power. How much it meant to them that anyone would do something so special for them. So damn fancy and delicious.
As if they weren’t just body armor and nerves of steel and ruthless will and ability, but they had palates. Taste buds and eyes that appreciated beautiful things and the patience to take time and savor it.
It was strange to take that time and savor, he had to admit. He’d been so used to shoving food in his mouth in mess halls and out in the field, indifferent to its crappy taste, just nourishing the machine so that he could keep on dealing in death to save the lives of people like her.
The fact that the enemy was getting more and more skilled at infiltrating behind the lines and still attacking people like her was f*cking shitty.
His fingers brushed hers as he took the little glass from her, and they felt too big and rude, crowding out her smaller fingers’ space. It wasn’t like his fingers were clumsy. He could disassemble and re-assemble any number of weapons blindfolded and under pressure. He could rest his finger on a trigger and gently squeeze just at the right second in the bob of a boat to kill someone at a thousand yards.
So he had a delicate touch, too. It just felt really, really different from her delicacy.
He didn’t even have words for the sensations in his mouth, when he took his first spoonful of her dessert. The fresh and the sweet and the cool, the layering of—yes, mango—and something creamier and greener in flavor that he didn’t know the name for. It made him think of an oasis. Or of sitting in the shade of a palm tree on a deserted island, with nothing but him and peaceful, warm water as far as he could look.
It made him want to kiss her, to see if she would taste like that, too.
Jake. She’s just been through a major trauma and she gave you a hard brushback earlier today. Take it easy.
He knew how to do easy. He knew how to do slow. Not so much with a woman, because for the past ten years, he’d mostly picked up women in bars in under half an hour, but he was a sniper. Slow and easy getting in place without being spotted. Slow and easy sometimes for days under a bush that didn’t look big enough to hide a bunny, waiting, keeping his mind calm. Slow and easy on the trigger…
Jesus. No wonder guys had such a hard time adapting back to civilian life. Sure, the skills were in theory transferrable, but hell. He looked down at her black head. That wasn’t the kind of slow and easy he wanted to do with her at all.
And definitely not the kind of slow and easy she might need. It was all he could do to keep his hands curved around the glass and not lift one to cup those glossy curls. Trouble sleeping, honey? Come here.
“You don’t like it?” Lina said, a little stiffly.