Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(5)

Lina took it and rubbed its glossy, furry ear between her fingers. “Why stuffed animals, do you think?”

“Because they’re kids,” Jake said. “And they want to comfort you.” Probably plenty of adults had thought of stuffed animals as gifts for her, too. He kind of thought it was one of those secret advantages women had that they didn’t understand, that even as adults they were allowed to seek comfort in a stuffed animal without anyone calling into question their strength and courage.

But he was pretty sure there was no worse way to shoot himself in the foot than to start a debate on female privilege with a strong-minded woman he was trying to impress, so he kept the thought to himself.

Stepping into her apartment was a blast of unearned intimacy. He took a breath of it, the warm golds and ochres and rust-red tones of her comforter as he peeked under her bed, the scent of her as he opened her closet door to see a row of jackets—leather, a long wool coat, denim—and on the floor a neat line of boots and pretty heels and flat, comfortable street-styled black tennis shoes.

He checked the view from her windows, compulsively, even though he knew Elias’s men had the apartment watched, and then turned to nod to her, struggling to crush the sudden urge to kiss her good night. We weren’t just on a date. Jesus, talk about a desperate soldier. Can you not act like a pathetic stereotype?

“Satisfied I’m not harboring terrorists under my bed?” she demanded, very dry. She was trimming the ends of the stems of the bouquets and putting them in a few inches of water in her sink. She’d passed out a big batch to random lonely people in the hospital the day before, when she visited Vi.

Harboring? Weird word choice there. Maybe his French wasn’t up to some nuance. Or maybe she was just being ironic. The whole freaking culture seemed to consider irony the essence of communication. “I’m just compulsive,” he said truthfully. Yes, he knew the police were keeping an eye on her to make sure she was safe, but he was never comfortable until he checked over important things himself. There were only a handful of people he’d trust to pack his parachute for him, for example, and he’d been through blood and fire with all of them.

“My dad used to do that,” she said unexpectedly. “Check for monsters under my bed and in my closet to prove to me they weren’t there so I could go to sleep.”

He smiled down at her. “How old were you before you got a bat so you could go after them yourself?”

“Eight. He gave it to me.”

Jake thought he might like her dad. Of course, a smart dad might give her a bat to use against him, too.

“Well,” he said, profoundly reluctant to go. He’d feel so much better about things if he could at least sleep on the couch. Guards or not. “Good night.”

The instinct to kiss her surged up high in him again, and he tamped it down hard. Get a grip. Jesus.

“Bonne nuit,” she said. And just for a second, something flickered in her eyes, a fear of the dark he was about to leave her in that wrenched out his heart and fed the craving in him to stay.

But her father had been a smart man, giving her that bat and that belief she could handle whatever she had to. Turned out she’d needed that strength, when no one had been there to save her but herself.

“The guards are right here,” he said. “And you’ve got all these locks.” He ran his hand over the door on which, just like most city residents, she had three separate locks, and an alarm system Elias had made sure to have installed. He hesitated, wondering how long it had taken her dad to force himself to give her that bat instead of handling the problem himself, just because he knew she was scared. He was pretty sure she didn’t trust him enough for this, but… “Do you want me to stay? On the couch, I mean.”

Her chin went up, her ponytail swinging with the motion. “I am perfectly fine.”

He took a deep breath. “I know.” Or at any rate, she would be. If he would just leave her alone and let her confidence grow back.

He took a step back. Controlled one last time the urge to kiss her good night. “Bonne nuit,” he said and closed the door firmly between them.

Damn.

In the hallway, the two guards studied him with suspiciously neutral expressions. “I know,” Jake said tightly. “I know. You’ve got this.” He meant to run downstairs, but instead he looked up at the ceiling. “Think I’m going to go sit up on the roof for a while.” He warned them so nobody accidentally shot him.

One of the so-neutral guards let his lips kick up in a subtle, slanted sympathy. Yeah, okay. They had a protective instinct, too. Jake nodded at them and jogged up the next flight of stairs, then unlocked the roof access and climbed out.

He took a long, slow breath as he settled on the roof, tension easing. He’d always liked to be up high, where he could survey all his surroundings. He excelled as a sniper. It was just…

That intimate moment, when he held a human being in his sights and drew a breath and let it half out and squeezed the trigger…and that human being jerked and died…

Maybe Jake was getting old. Eleven years of this. He still got the adrenaline rush in a firefight, and it was still kind of addictive, but he wasn’t sure agreeing to go into sniper training had been a good choice for him. It gave him too much time to wish that he knew another way of saving lives that didn’t require him to kill so many people.