Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(41)
His thumb ran over her knuckles. “Really?”
She laughed at him. “Of course really. What do you think I love to do most in the world?”
See, the problem with giving a woman multiple orgasms and then starting to regret he hadn’t taken advantage of the opportunity himself was that she had a bit of a head start on him. Shower or not, he wasn’t sure that food was his priority yet. He loved to eat and all, but it wasn’t what he loved to do most in the world. Still, her food was special. Nearly as pretty and defiantly gallant as she was.
“Hey, will you meet my eyes now, when you see me at the hospital?” he asked, tightening his hold on her fingers.
Color climbed up her cheeks, burnishing the gold. “It feels different, out in the open.”
Yeah, because he was her kinky sex. Did she hate herself for it afterward?
The idea hurt, but he still had to smother another chuckle at her belief that anything they’d done could possibly be classified as kinky. That remained hilarious. He wondered if he would still be teasing her about it on their tenth ann—
What the f*ck?!
He rolled out of bed abruptly. Grabbed his towel before it could fall and expose him even further. “I’d better go.”
She blinked, startled. And then stiffened a little. “Oh, right, sorry. Getting too intimate?”
Yeah, but…she made it sound as if he was the one using her for sex. Not as if he was a war weary soldier just trying to keep himself from ending up one miserable, heartbroken bastard.
She sat up, drawing up her knees, the bathrobe slipping enough to give him a quick glimpse of her naked body before she caught it.
A whooshing slide of that view through him. And then of the corrected view, her covered up with that bulky white bathrobe but all naked behind it, brown eyes on him. Trusting and wary both at once.
You know, there’s an easy way to break the cycle of meaningless sex. Walk away.
Leave her struggling alone to deal with this horrible thing that happened to her, when she asked you for help the only way she knew how.
“Why did you come by?” she asked.
Because I couldn’t keep away? “To check on you.”
“Were there more death threats?”
Both the women who had been on the scene got far more death threats than any of the male chefs. Part of that was because Vi was head chef and Lina was head pastry chef, the positions of greatest power, but most of it was because they were women.
And Lina’s Muslim heritage had made her a particular magnet for the crazies. The kind of fanatic who could throw acid in a little girl’s face for going to school considered Lina’s courage and strength and successful resistance to fanaticism a denial of their very right to exist. Which it was. And on the other side, the kind of crazy who thought all Muslims should be burned alive and their countries carpet bombed—oblivious to the fact that their country might be, say, France—had gone hysterical over her and their conviction she must have been in on it all along.
“Nothing credible,” he said. They sure were following a lot of rats back to their IP addresses, though. RAID and GIGN were conducting sweeping raids, and his own government had covert ops throughout Europe doing all kinds of things they couldn’t legally do. He was glad at the chance to be here by her side, but it still made him restless that his team had been sidelined and couldn’t take much more than a symbolic part in some of those. The curse of why a guy like him couldn’t retire so easily—it was that damn hard to leave the fighting in someone else’s hands.
She tried to keep covered by the bathrobe as she stood, and he tried to look politely away, but as she got her arms back into the bathrobe and belted it around her, glimpses of her body showed. And his gaze kept being drawn back to them, even as he kept his head turned.
You said no to that? What the hell is wrong with you?
He was an emotional coward was what he was. He saw clearly that she was going to batter his heart bloody and leave it for roadkill, and he kept trying to find a safe way around the ambush. Effective weapons. Body armor. Something.
Meanwhile, the only safe way out of this was to turn around and not take the road through the ambush in the first place. The damn road was doubtless mined to hell.
She got her robe belted and looked at him again, directly, holding his eyes. “So you didn’t have a real reason for coming by.”
Well…he bit back on the urge to tell her she needed to take a closer look at herself in the mirror, if she thought a man didn’t have a real reason to come to her apartment. Not productive. Try something else. He pinched his eyebrows, trying to think of something else.
She watched him. That kind of steady go ahead and admit it gaze that reminded him that in her own field, she was a commander, used to leading and controlling men—people—in high stress situations. Not as stressful normally as bullets, but those French culinary artistes she had to lead might not be as good at going calm under pressure as his own teams were, either, who knew? Maybe they were all emotional and Gallic all the time, and she was the calm under pressure.
Under that gaze, heat started to climb his cheeks. Fuck. The trick to keeping his redhead blushing tendencies under control, he’d learned by eighteen, was to turn off the emotions behind it, but somehow under that brown gaze, those emotions just kept boiling up.
“Ah,” she said very softly. A faint and somehow very womanly smile curved her lips. “I see.” She played with the tie of her bathrobe.