Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(32)

“Oh, for f*ck's sake,” Mark said. “Fine. That can be our next book.”

All the guys grinned. Even Elias looked as if the choice filled him with some delight, and Jake looked torn between throwing Ian off a tall building and laughing.

“But don't blame me when some sophisticated, beautiful Parisian quotes Sartre and you don't even know who she's talking about,” Mark said.

“Or Simone de Beauvoir,” Elias mentioned idly.

All the other men gave him et tu Brute looks at that one.

Busy fastening her case, it took Lina a moment to realize she was the sophisticated, beautiful Parisian being referenced by that exchange of looks.

She smiled at Elias, relieved to have someone she understood in the room. At least he knew how to flirt. With these Americans, she could never be one hundred percent certain if they knew flirting was a fun game or if they might have clumsy intentions behind it. Chase's idea of flirting with Vi had been to ask her to marry him in the first two minutes of their acquaintance and mean it.

Jake didn’t mean anything serious by his flirtation, did he? Ouf, surely not. Even Americans could grasp the concept of mindless, hot sex. Especially black ops people. They were kind of like James Bond toward women, right?

Although Bond was British. Hmm. The only American black ops equivalent she could think of off the bat was Jason Bourne, and in the movies he’d been stuck on that one woman for pretty much the whole series.

But surely Jake wouldn’t get serious…would he? Not in the circumstances?

“I've got to go,” Lina said. “I can’t stay long today.” She didn’t look at Jake.

She kissed everyone on both cheeks again, to say good-bye. Even, not meeting his eyes as he bent his head, Jake.

You can't feel the freckles at all. His jaw is faint prickle and his cheeks smooth skin.

She'd known that would be the case, of course. But it was different to actually feel it. And kind of surreally erotic to only now be discovering this when he’d already made her come once.

She shifted away from him quickly, still not meeting his eyes, and hurried down the hall to her police escort.

***

In the hospital room, all the men looked at Jake.

“That's the woman you said was yours?” Mark checked, that familiar grilled note of impatience coming into his voice.

“You know she's not into you, right?” Chase said, with the no-holds-barred frankness of a brother-in-arms trying to save another brother from heartbreak. “She barely even looked at you.”

“Yeah,” Jake said grimly. “I noticed that.”

“She likes me,” Ian said. “You saw how we were bonding over literature, right? I think it should be my turn to help keep an eye on her now.”

“No,” Jake said flatly. “Ian—f*ck off.”





Chapter 9


Think about sex. Lina looked away from her bathroom mirror and the pinch at the corners of her eyes, the way her lips kept parting in a look of panic, no matter how many times she pressed them firmly closed. She turned on the shower. Think about sex right here. Not on a counter, where she couldn’t do what she wanted to him.

But here. In this shower. Where she pressed that hot body up against the wall of her shower and he got that panicked look he got for her desserts, as if she was about to bite him, and she ran her fingers down those packed abs of his, pressed his wet body back against the wall, and did.

And he moaned and…

Yes! She turned her face up into the shower in victory as the vision grew vivid enough to take over her mind.

Thank God for sex.

She could think about that instead of the fact that even the late summer light was fading, dark was settling in. And that normally, she would still be out in the city on a night like this, either working or enjoying her night off amid the lights and activity. And if she was tired, well, then, normally, she would be enjoying the chance to watch a movie or curl up with a book. She loved leafing through picture books, for example. She got the coolest ideas from them. She had Tell Me a Dragon by her bed right now.

Normally, back two weeks ago, when she was still herself. Lina Farah. Not someone who would never, ever feel secure in her world again. Who never would be as secure in her world again, who would always be more likely to draw the attention of the crazies—the ones who wanted vengeance on her for defeating her cousin and the racist conspiracy theory crazies convinced she had really been on his side.

She yanked her mind back to the shower, focusing on that broad chest and those hard abs that would probably be covered with freckles—he’d rudely worn a T-shirt at the gym, so she didn’t know for sure.

But definitely, definitely, he would shudder as she—

Why oh why hadn’t she gotten his phone number?

Let that be a lesson to you, woman. If you don’t believe in the future, when it comes around, there you are stuck in it and you can’t even text a guy an eggplant.

Not that she’d ever done that before but hey…if other women could do it, she could, too, right?

She could understand why her dad hadn’t thought to suggest this particular distraction method to her when she was eight, but these days, it was way more effective to fill her closet and her bed with images of hot sex than fall asleep gripping a bat.

She let the warm water stream over her face, her eyes closed, and—