Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(30)

“No kidding,” Chase said from his bed.

Oh. Right. Because any man in this room, if a voice sounded unexpectedly immediately behind him, would have reacted with similar intensity. And they were reproaching Jake, and Jake was apologizing because…he would have known better than to sneak up on his team brothers, so he should have thought about it with her, too.

They respected what she’d been through? She didn’t seem weak and fragile to them? Was all that weakness and fragility deep in her tummy something no one else could see?

Well, good. She’d made her entire career out of being tough enough to handle whatever a high-octane kitchen threw at her. Her stupid cousin was nothing. Or at least he should be—worth absolutely nothing.

“If you’ve finished proposing to her down there,” Ian said dryly.

Jake looked down at the big box in his hands and came to his feet with that economic grace of his. He gave Ian a dirty look that stiffened Lina’s spine.

Oh, the suggestion he might propose marriage to her made him that annoyed?

Fine, then.

Ian came up to her to kiss her cheeks and squeeze her shoulder. Then he shot Jake an undecipherable look, took a chair in the corner, slouched back in it, slipped on a pair of black-framed reading glasses, and pulled out a copy of Harry Potter from a pocket in his cargo pants. The first Harry Potter, the one that was small enough to fit in a big cargo pants pocket. “Now where was I?” he asked Chase.

Aww. That was kind of cute. This hotter than hell guy, with his brown T-shirt clinging to big biceps and a flat stomach, reading to his friend in a hospital bed. “You guys are reading Harry Potter now?” she said, charmed.

Elias made a noise like a strangled sneeze, and Jake gave Ian a look like a rattlesnake about to strike.

“Cute glasses,” Chase said, blue eyes vivid with mirth.

“We’re still on Camus, sadly, thanks to this dork,” Ian told her, jerking his head at Mark. “But we’re pushing for Harry Potter for the next one.”

“Sartre,” Mark said.

“Damn it, Mark, you can’t read Sartre to a man in a hospital bed. You might kill him.”

That did seem kind of cruel and unusual, actually. “There’s always Kafka,” Lina said, her lips quirking.

Mark looked intrigued. By Kafka, ou?lle. No wonder they wanted someone else to start choosing their book club books.

“Lina,” Chase protested, pained. “I thought you liked me.”

“In a weird way.” She smiled at him, setting her case on his table and bending down to kiss his cheeks.

An unfortunate thought crossed her mind of the last time she had bent over at just about this angle with Jake behind her.

She straightened and focused on opening her case, hoping she wasn’t flushing.

She wasn’t supposed to flush that easily, damn it. It was supposed to be an advantage of having gold skin. Freckles over there was the one supposed to be flushing all the damn time.

“Or how about Simone de Beauvoir?” she suggested, in revenge for the blush.

All the men stared at her. “Who’s Simone de Beauvoir?” Ian asked warily.

“You went to Harvard?” she said. “Really? What, they only teach you what males think there?”

Ian blinked and sealed his mouth tightly shut. He held up his Harry Potter book weakly and pointed to the name J.K. Rowling on the cover. As if everybody in the world hadn’t noticed Rowling had had to use initials that disguised her sex to help that book start selling.

To her credit, J.K. was also single-handedly responsible for making sure that most male readers had read at least one book by a female author in their lives. Talk about breaking a barrier.

“Simone de Beauvoir is only one of the most famous and influential thinkers of the twentieth century,” Lina said. “A vanguard feminist writer.”

The men exchanged glances.

“Sartre’s wife,” Mark explained.

Lina pivoted and put her hands on her hips.

Elias whistled softly. “You guys never cease to amaze me.” Wry green eyes met Lina’s. “Please ignore these cavemen as best you can.”

“Remind me how many women are in RAID again?” Lina said.

Elias looked studiously at his feet. After a second he held up two guilty fingers.

“Yeah, but that makes sense,” Chase said cheerfully from the safety of his hospital bed. “Men are stronger.”

Lina spun on him.

He grinned at her and, despite being badly wounded, pale, and washed out, flexed his right arm to make his biceps pop.

“I’m telling Vi you said that.”

“Aww. Don’t tell her until she has recovered more. I don’t want her dragging herself out of her hospital bed to come kick my ass.” He looked wistful. Like he missed her trying to kick his ass very badly.

Lina missed Vi, too. More than this guy could possibly imagine, surely, since he’d barely known her for a couple of weeks, and Lina and Vi had worked together for years and been friends since they were teenagers.

But of course, being an arrogant man, he was probably convinced he was now the center of Vi’s life.

“You’re lucky you’re in a hospital bed so I don’t kick your ass,” Lina told Chase.

His grin came back. “I just had to help out my brothers. Solidarity, you know.”