Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(45)
“Something like that,” he said mildly, inscrutable.
She frowned a little, her hand still curved against his cheek, thinking about what he did for a living. Well, he never actually said what he did for a living, but his team’s cover had been blown ten days ago, at least as far as the Au-dessus staff was concerned. She knew. And he knew she knew.
He just couldn’t break his country’s need for deniability and say it out loud.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Routine.”
Also, she was herself related to a terrorist, meaning he could have particular concerns about information she might let slip if he told her anything. “You know, I would never say anything that would put you more at risk,” she said suddenly. Her palm pressed against his cheek.
His expression changed. Searching. Easing open. “Why, thank you, sweetheart,” he said very quietly, his hands rubbing her shoulders.
She felt that delicate heat touch her cheeks. “I don’t blame you for not trusting me, but I wouldn’t.”
He kept rubbing her shoulders. “It’s not a question of trust. Men aren’t even allowed to tell their wives what’s going on. Because it’s the silly slips that betray a mission. Maybe you call your mom and say you’re coming over for dinner after all because you got stood up last minute. Maybe she mentions to someone else that she’s worried about this guy you’re seeing, and how he just stood you up without explanation again. Maybe someone else overhears that conversation and puts two and two together.”
“My mom doesn’t know about you,” Lina said, horrified. Her mom might have taught her about contraceptives long ago and how to make up her own mind and not let the pressure of some man make it up for her, but that didn’t mean she needed to know Lina was having a just-for-sex affair. That was way too much information.
Jake’s expression closed. His hands fell from her shoulders as he drew back. “Understood.”
Lina gazed at him, a little at a loss. Did he want to know her family?
Jake shifted a step down the length of the counter to study her current dessert experiments instead of look at her. The smooth, golden, riveresque S-curve of the first one, with its flower of date slices. A second version, the same curve pierced with shards of amber sugar-glass. The third one, the river cut at the middle and the two sides separated by three centimeters, each with only one shard of sugar-glass, there at the point of separation, like two guillotine blades that had cut one half of the river from the other.
His lips twisted. He looked back at her.
“Would you like to taste the cream?” Lina tried again to make her voice seductive, promising. Would you like to taste this erotic, lush promise of deliciousness?
His breath released from him in a sigh of surrender. “Sure.” He sounded like a man who had given up hope of rescue.
Seriously, he had the most offensive reactions to her desserts sometimes. “Don’t let me force you,” she said coolly.
“No. You’re not forcing me. I can say no.”
O…kay. Seriously, what was she? Crack or something?
She dipped a clean spoon in the leftover cream, trying to figure out if that was a good or bad thing to be.
Crack was bad. But being so addictive he couldn’t say no to her felt pretty damn hot, too.
Of course, crack ruined people’s lives.
Nope. That’s melodrama. From here on out, on a one to ten scale of ruining someone’s life, if ten is bursting into a woman’s kitchens with suicide bombs and machine guns, then luring a single guy into an affair is a…minus one thousand.
“Have some cream,” she said firmly and offered it to his lips.
Hazel eyes glinted just a little as he looked down at her over the spoon, but he parted his lips and let her slip the cream between them. His hand rose and closed around her wrist. “That’s beautiful. Fresh and lightly sweet and with this taste to it that’s almost like a scent in the air. It’s what you must have been like just two weeks ago.”
She met his eyes.
He winced a little, as if just realizing he shouldn’t have said that last part out loud. “I mean—what you still are like, of course,” he said, but the words sounded lame to both of them.
She took pity on them both and held a date slice up to his lips. “I bet you’ll never guess what this is.”
“It’s not dates?”
Oh. “You’ve had them like this before?” she said, disappointed.
“I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Iraq and Syria.”
Oh. Oh, right. At war.
She’d never been to Syria at all, even though her mother’s mother came from there. She had visited Algeria and neighboring countries as a tourist with a deep culinary curiosity, and she had met up with some second cousins one trip, but that was really the extent of her knowledge of the Maghreb and the Middle East. From his own troubling perspective—an enemy on foreign soil—he probably knew a great deal more about the regions some of her ancestors came from than she did.
“Plus, there’s a branch of them right there.” He nodded to the branch behind her on the other side of the counter’s L, thickly clustered with yellowing dates.
She was pretty sure most people in Paris wouldn’t recognize fresh, half-ripe dates on the branch, but oh, well. She handed him the slice anyway, still disappointed.