Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(38)

There. Done.

Yeah, he’d known it would only take him thirty damn seconds to come.

Was there anything more f*cking lonely and futile?

Take her up on her offer. What are you, an affronted virgin?

So she wants to use you for sex. Like every other woman out there. She said you could use her, too.

It’s not like it would be the first time.

He sank his head against her shower wall, deflated both physically and emotionally in this literal anticlimax.

She was so f*cking beautiful, inside and out. He didn’t believe in whining, but, Jesus—it wasn’t fair.

He dried himself and wrapped a towel around his waist and went back to her bedroom door.

She slept. Black curls touseled around her face. Innocent.

Peaceful.

Young.

Twenty-six. Eleven years working her butt off, which made her “adult” life the same length as his. He’d joined the Navy at nineteen. She’d apprenticed when she was fifteen.

But she looked younger by the deaths of too many men at his hands, by the deaths of team brothers, by a thousand encounters with explosives and rocket launchers and bullets, by being crouched down under scarce cover as the men who had them pinned down in the dark strafed the earth closer and closer to their location and one of his brothers in arms lay trying not to moan and give their location away beside him, two limbs blown off.

Lina was younger than he was by a million years.

And yet…

She was older by a century than what she had been just two weeks before. Older and younger both. This new person—the person she was now after someone had tried to kill the person she was before—was only a few days old.

Yeah.

Grief squeezed him, that she hadn’t stayed innocent. That no matter how many deaths stained him, he hadn’t been posted as a sniper that day on the rooftop across from her restaurant, to add two more lives to the weight on his soul before they burst through the restaurant’s back door to burden hers instead.

It was his job, to keep people like her safe. It had been his job to keep this whole battle entirely out of her country, and his own, but even though all the teams were being stretched to their absolute limit, somehow they were still failing at that.

He should go, shouldn’t he? Or at least get dressed. Go do his job. No rest for the weary.

He leaned a shoulder in the doorway and sighed. Don’t be an idiot.

But she was so damn pretty. Too small for war, and yet she’d gone to war anyway, when her people were threatened. Used the weapons she had to hand—that damn liquid nitrogen and her own body, throwing herself at her f*cking * cousin’s legs, to try to take him down.

And now—God, the way she sought life. Making her desserts. As he’d sat there pretending to concentrate on a book discussing suicide—thanks a lot, Mark—she’d about wrung his heart out of his body, with those beautiful, fragile things she kept making over and over. Every time one broke, because it was impossible for something that fragile and beautiful to exist, she had just gone right on to the next one, adjusting her technique in ways he couldn’t tell.

Until eventually they had stopped breaking. They had shone perfectly.

And once she had them perfect, she’d fed one to him.

Making life. Making something beautiful. Giving it to others.

He’d never done that. He fought for her life, and for her right to make beautiful things, but he’d never made anything beautiful himself. Hell, the last time he had made anything to give someone pleasure was probably some flower pot for his mom in grade school.

Of course Lina was going to seize on sex as another way to seize on life. Talk about the two most potent biological drives to life right there—food and sex. He sure as hell had done it, back from missions. Hell, he’d done it as a nineteen-and twenty-year-old before he ever even got sent into combat, just from the pure, cocky joy of the feast of women that had opened up before him as his body and the way he carried himself changed in the first two years of intense training.

He lov—he admired that about her, that instinct to life. The way she chased those demons back down into the hellhole where they belonged. And he f*cking hated those demons for having opened up that hellhole inside her, one that she might try to cap with a heavy lid, but which she would always, forever after, have in her.

Okay, so go now already. Don’t just stand here watching her sleep. That’s not helping you out.

But he straightened from the door and his feet took him the opposite way of what he told them, right up to her bed. He picked up her bathrobe and spread it over her like a blanket, then sat down on the edge of the bed.

She lay on her stomach, one knee drawn up, black hair and golden skin against the warm, rich pattern of her comforter. And his heart just kept swelling up bigger and bigger until he was surprised it didn’t settle down on the bed like an enormous blimp and crush them both.

His hand stretched out of its own volition to trace her shoulder.

She startled awake, hand jerking up to strike, body flinching back.

Idiot. A sleep without nightmares was going to be very hard to come by for her, for a long time. It was one of the things she was using him for, right? To sink into oblivion.

He kept his voice deep and easy. “It’s just me.”

Her eyes focused on him in the low light of the late summer evening.

She drew a breath, and the tension eased out of her.