Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(42)
His face felt on fire. Hell, if this was as bad as his blushing used to be in high school, it might even be spreading down his neck to his chest. “Look, I’ve really got to go.”
She performed a fragile pout. “And leave me all alone and defenseless?”
He gave her a dirty look. That was a f*cking low blow. She had her guards, but he still hated to leave her, every time.
“I was kidding.” She turned away. “I’m fine.”
Yeah, right. That was why she was asking a stranger for sex. She was so f*cking fine.
He gazed at her back in some temper. Straight, slim, strong shoulders. He wanted to walk forward and start massaging them again.
It would hardly be helpful for her if he told her, You are clearly not fine. He shoved his hand through his short hair. A lot of men in special ops turned themselves into shaggy bearded creatures, but he had had no desire to start looking like some male version of Orphan Annie. So his look now, in Europe, wasn’t that different from his look for most of his military career. Close-cut. Contained.
“You’re amazing,” he said honestly. There, that was true. It was even constructive.
She stilled with her back to him and bent her head a little. Then angled it enough to glance at him over her shoulder, her face crinkling in that doubtful, searching way.
He shrugged. “I’m not the first to tell you that, sweetheart. I won’t be the last either. I can guarantee you’ll be getting some kind of medal.”
“Oh, I know,” she said dryly. “The chance to prove they don’t think all Muslims are terrorists will be too good to pass up.”
He frowned at her. “Okay, try your best to snap out of the paranoia. Vi will get a medal, too. Possibly several others on your team.”
She turned around. “It’s rather difficult not to be paranoid just at this second.”
He softened. “I know, sweetheart. But one moment you’re thinking we’re going to waterboard you and the next that you’ll only get a medal as some diversity symbol, and neither one of those are a remotely true perspective on who you are and who intelligent people think you are. Or how we operate. Lina…we’ve been fighting terrorists a long time. We’re not airport security, and we’re not idiot political pundits. We know we can’t just profile our way to a solution because that doesn’t f*cking work.”
“Abed was my cousin,” she said tensely.
“That’s why we say people like you are on the front line of this battle,” Jake said quietly. Before, he’d always wanted to ask journalists who used that term, or who claimed that the war was being fought over women’s bodies, if they’d like to experience what an actual front line in a battle was like and an actual war being fought over your body. Your buddies’ bodies. But…here she was. The front line had quite literally been her.
She studied him, reluctant, unpersuaded.
Was he going to have to start sharing personal details of his life now? Grow more intimate with and more exposed to a woman who had performed the most unique cock-block ever—interrupting his attempts to flirt with her by asking him if she could just use him for sex?
“One of my cousins is in jail for life for getting in a shoot out with cops who tried to break up his meth lab and severely wounding one of them.” He spoke as evenly as he could about this subject. “I had an uncle who was a preacher who played with poisonous snakes, went into public raptures where he claimed God was speaking through him, and told his followers women should keep their heads covered and be submissive and they should refuse all modern medicine for themselves and their children. He killed kids with that shit. Trust me, my country has plenty of religious fanatics who self-identify as normal all while thinking things like if a woman has a position of authority she has weakened her womanhood and weakened the manhood of the men who ‘let her’ have that position of authority. I’d hear that shit on television or in churches all the time where I lived. But of course we have plenty of Americans who think that stuff is batshit crazy, too. See how that works?”
Lina’s expression was ironic, as if she’d seen how that worked all her life.
“So I’d profile if it was helpful, but mostly we’ve found it very difficult to use skin color or religion to tell us the difference between a radical and a normal human being. You can either go for the carpet bomb approach, the one where you treat an entire group of people as if they’re of no more value than a bowl of candy you can throw out to protect yourself, and I can tell you flat out that you’ll make a hell of a lot more enemies with that one. You kill an innocent person’s kids with your careless bomb, and he will devote every breath he takes for the rest of his life to destroying you.”
Jake would, certainly.
She watched him unblinkingly, her eyebrows drawn slightly together.
It made him impatient, frustrated, as if he was facing some damn soldier-turned-politician who hadn’t seen action in two decades but was going to still force his idea of what war was like in the Vietnam era down the chain of command onto them. “Or you can do what we’ve found to be the most effective—hunt for terrorists through individual patterns of behavior and contacts rather than tarring everyone with one brush. But I’ve only devoted my entire career to this business, why the hell listen to me?”
Lina gazed at him a long moment. He gazed back, because he didn’t in the least feel like looking away and therefore yielding to her insulting opinion of his intelligence and prejudices. Well, maybe it wasn’t his intelligence and level of prejudice personally, but he did get the sense sometimes that she was…tarring him with one brush.