Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(21)

“Yeah, but only for a night to get some sleep or maybe a week’s vacation,” he said. “Not the same thing at all. We all hit tough spots.”

A subtle tone in his words caught her. Her eyes lifted to his steady gaze.

“All of us,” he said quietly, and touched the back of her hand.

Her eyes wanted to sting. She took a deep breath and lifted her hand in a tiny rejecting vibration of no, no, we can’t talk about this, stop.

He drew back and nodded. Gave her that slight smile and started prowling again.

That had been a close one. She focused on her desserts again, panic easing as she sank into the scents and tastes and textures. Making things beautiful. No matter what happened in the world, she could always do that.

It was the one thing she still had from the person before, the person who seemed so bright and beautiful and innocent to her now—Lina Farah, only a week ago. The thread that held her together, her past self and the self she was now. The proof that terrorists couldn’t win.

She was a top pastry chef and THAT WAS THAT. Fuck them. I’m the chef. I change things. You cannot change me.

Jake had been shot at, hadn’t he? And he’d done more than throw liquid nitrogen in defense. He’d killed people.

“When you look at pictures of you as a child, do you recognize yourself?” she asked suddenly.

“Does anybody?” he said, surprised.

Well, that answered that question. “I used to.”

“Strong family?” he guessed. “Parents who took lots of photos and like to bring them out?”

Didn’t all moms do that? “The photos play on their TV, whenever no one’s watching anything else.”

He nodded, smiling faintly. He didn’t ask when she had stopped being able to recognize herself. So she was right. He knew.

“You get through it, then?” she said. “You figure out who you are again? You start being able to imagine, say, an hour from now, or even tomorrow?”

“Well, I got through it,” he said, which wasn’t very reassuring. He was some black ops super ninja. He was made for this kind of thing. He held her gaze from across the kitchen. “You’ll get through it, too. What you’re doing right now is probably the best thing you could possibly do.” He gestured to the counter. “Something beautiful. What makes you you.”

Good to know.

She took a deep breath and let it sigh out, and looked at the small fresh scars on her hand, the only physical sign she had from that night.

“What shows your courage,” he said very quietly. “Your determination. Your sense of wonder, in a tough world.”

Her eyes prickled. She gave him a desperate look.

“Sorry,” he said, low, and prowled again, releasing her.

Thank you, she thought, in the safety of that quiet. Thank you for the respect. The understanding.

She watched that smooth, powerful movement of his. That showed his courage. His determination. And sometimes, in the careful way he touched his finger to a plate and sucked chocolate off it, his sense of wonder, in a tough world.

And thank you for being so damn sexy that I can focus on you, instead of everything else.

“Why are you hanging out here again?” she said. “I’ve got the police guards. Do you guys suspect me of something? Why don’t you go home and relax?”

“A bit of a long flight, to go home,” he said, amused. “Plus, the military is funny about us doing that when we’re in the middle of a deployment.”

“I thought you guys were civilians,” Lina said very dryly.

Those hazel eyes laughed at her as if she delighted his sense of humor. “Right.”

His secret humor was annoying but in such a weird way, like being tickled. Making her laugh despite herself, making her feel as if she could still play like a child.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t I just catch up with my book club and keep out of your way?”

He went to her office and pulled out the comfortable office chair from it, setting it in a far corner where he could keep an eye on her and both doors, and pulled a book out of the lower pocket of his cargo pants, slouching back.

Lina stared at him. “You have a book club?”

A book club? Wasn’t that something that nerdy intellectuals did, or else bourgeois women with too much time on their hands and a very unfortunate predilection for boring, expensive clothing?

Those creases in Jake’s cheeks as he opened the battered book. “You did say you liked shy, geeky guys.”

“Reading a book does not qualify you for shy and geeky!”

“Damn. This is harder than I thought, then.” He slouched lower in her chair, those creases of humor very visible.

“What are you reading?” she asked suspiciously.

He showed her the title. “Le Mythe de Sisyphe.”

“Camus?” That was…okay, that was pretty geeky actually.

Jake shrugged. “Mark thought we should focus on French writers while we were here. Chase says he wants to pick the next book, so we can read something fun for once.”

Lina hesitated. “I’m not sure there are any fun French writers.” Her experience with literature in school had been a turn off, that was for sure. Probably one of the many reasons she had ended up apprenticed in a manual career by fifteen.