Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(43)
Because she was paranoid now. Yeah. Of course. And that wave of tenderness washed back over him, and he just wanted to pull her into his arms and make her feel as if everything would be okay.
What would it have been like if he’d done that, when she first asked him for sex? If, instead of taking her up on it, he’d just held her and petted her and given her strength and reassurance in a more intimate and more dangerous way?
One corner of her lips finally crooked up. Her eyes crinkled just a little. “Do you really have that weird a family?”
“Oh, hell, yeah.” It had been part of his motivation to get away. The determination not to be them had carried him through the brutal trials by cold and exhaustion of BUD/S. He let his lips crook back at her. “And you can’t talk.”
She almost had to laugh at that.
Which he felt pretty damn proud of, as he went back to the bathroom to reclaim the feeble armor of actual clothes.
Chapter 12
Jake Adams sure did run fast when things started to get intimate, didn’t he? Lina thought the next day as she spread a pastry cream infused with orange blossom water on a crust of ground walnuts and almond flour that had been lightly sweetened with date sugar, combined with a faint hint of cinnamon.
She should have been offended, and possibly she was, but what was a hot affair without a dose of angst?
It might be terribly French of her, but she’d take being the woman in a screwed up love affair over being the woman in a screwed up terrorist plot any day.
She made the pastry cream as erotic as she could. As lush and full of sensual promise as was humanly possible. Her hands were starting to warm after her latest bout with a recalcitrant dragon. She’d finally gotten the damn thing to fly upright, but when she tried to make it roar it looked as if it was sticking its tongue out at her. Either that or trying to “French” kiss her, which probably just about figured for a French dragon.
(Meanwhile, maybe her dragon could give a certain American a few lessons in kissing. Because he hadn’t kissed her once. That would teach her to get involved with someone from a country so hung up about kissing they had to blame even that on the French.)
She sliced barhi dates so fine each slice was translucent. They were in the rutab stage at this time of year, only partially yellow, crisp like an apple. Later they would get softer, sweeter, more mellow, earning their honeycream nickname. But she wanted to try them now. Be the first pastry chef in Paris to truly exploit all that dates could be, in all their stages.
She placed each translucent slice carefully at an angle to the riverlike curving base of cream and gazed at that, dissatisfied. Maybe more fanciful? The slices arranged like a flower here at the edge, just so, a blossom of difference, of the unexpected. For the vast majority of her clients, the first time they ever bit into a date at this stage of maturity would be at her tables.
If she got the chance. The restaurant was going to stay closed through August, the traditional vacation month for non-tourist restaurants anyway, which would leave only a very short window for barhi dates in this stage to still be available.
She gazed at her dessert, frustrated by how sweet it looked. How smooth. It looked like a damn lie.
She poured a sheet of caramelized sugar, let it harden, and then smashed it, picking the shards of it and sticking them at dangerous angles into the base of custard cream where they glowed with amber in the light.
Better. Now she needed to do something completely different with the original flowing river form of the base and with the barhi date flower, though.
Her cell phone rang. She glanced at the screen, didn’t recognize the number, and ignored it. Her publicist was supposed to field media requests, but sometimes they got hold of her private number. Or some crazy did. But it was amazing how fast the media moved on to the next thing. From fifty people outside her apartment the first two days, to thirty, to a dozen. This morning, she hadn’t spotted anybody.
She was still getting requests for interviews, of course, especially from the bigger and more serious outlets that wanted to do something in-depth, and she was still torn about whether she should eventually accept one. She didn’t want to be some kind of representative of all Muslim women—hell, since she didn’t really practice, there were plenty of people who claimed she shouldn’t be calling herself Muslim in the first place, this eternal damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don’t that having an ethnic identity left a woman in. But at the same time, she felt some obligation to use the role thrust on her to make the world see a little more of the vast range of individuality that a “beurette” could have. Maybe she could give her opinion on the damn burkini question.
But mostly, right now, she just couldn’t handle it. Couldn’t handle talking about what had happened on television or even for print, couldn’t handle facing probing give-us-the-gory-details questions from people dying to imagine how horrible it had been. So she ignored the call.
A knock on the back door of the restaurant. She froze for a long moment before she remembered she didn’t just have to open it blindly and called the number of her police guards. “It’s Jake Adams,” the policeman who answered said. “Do you want to let him in, or…?”
Oh, hell, yeah. Sexy, complicated feelings for a guy who walked out as soon as the mood started to grow too sweet and trusting?
Bring it on.
She yanked open the door, giving him a huge smile of delight.