Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(52)
The world was still hers. No one could take that from her.
***
She took him to the beach.
Sprawled all the length of the Seine, soft sand and potted palms and night-furled blue parasols. It was the craziest fantasy to uncurl below a thousand years of grandiose buildings and five hundred years of bridges, all glowing beautifully above this C?te d’Azur whimsy.
The soft sand seemed like an insanely easy place to bury a bomb, she couldn’t help thinking, but Parisians flocked to the area anyway. Tourists were scarce, after this most recent attack, but Parisians had clearly decided to make lemonade and just enjoy the space and having the city to themselves. They sat in the sand or on picnic blankets or on the loungers the city had set out. They drank wine, or played drums, or some groups of men called to passing women.
Jake turned his head and just looked at a group of young men when they called out to her. The men shut up.
On the bridges, because of the heightened alert status in a city under a state of emergency, men patrolled with assault rifles, a couple of men per bridge. On the lower quays, more policemen strolled than normal, so maybe no one would notice the two strolling ten meters ahead of her and Jake and the other two ten meters or so behind them.
Jake had suggested she wear a baseball cap to deflect attention, which had made her look at him incredulously. Then she’d pulled out a jaunty little black hat with a brim, normally something she’d wear in the fall, but they’d been having a cold summer, cold enough she also had her leather jacket on, the zips running up the tight sleeves making her feel stylish and tough.
Jake had gone for the baggy tourist look instead, easy-fitting cargo pants and a long, loose shirt over his T-shirt that hid a shoulder holster.
She wondered what it was like to know how to shoot. She’d started the boxing and muay thai with Vi and Célie, because they’d all been on their own in male-dominated kitchens, coming home alone very late at night, since they were young teens. Boxing was both a good stress reliever and a good way to develop confidence in your ability to deal with whatever crap some * threw at you. But it had never even occurred to her to think about guns. Guns were for movies. They didn’t belong in real life.
Damn it. They shouldn’t.
“People have a misconception about tulips,” Jake said suddenly, confusing her for a second. Oh, right, his favorite flower. “People pamper them and cultivate them and take them to Europe to grow them in fields around Amsterdam, where they’re easy to cut down. But they’re native to some of the most remote, barren places of the earth, and sometimes we’d be humping it over some godforsaken barren steppe in full gear and come on a cluster of them, just this splash of red against gray rock. In Afghanistan, they’re almost a national flower. Fields of them grow with the mountains for a backdrop. Children sell them by the roadside, and there’s a whole forty-day festival dedicated to them. It was banned under the Taliban, but it’s come back. Kind of an act of courage, you know. Like girls going to school.”
She looked at that hard, lean profile, the short, sandy lashes, the weather-worn freckled skin, strength. He’d helped those girls get back to school, hadn’t he? Those were the kinds of things he fought for.
He gestured to her and the people sitting on the sand. “Living is always an act of courage. Some people just get to be more oblivious to that fact than others. But eventually the veil always gets ripped aside, so that you know that living is inherently an act of survival, and then you have to make a choice. It’s funny, but the choice is almost always to go on living.”
She tilted back her hat to glance up at him, mostly because she really liked looking at his face, but she was wearing a cute hat, so she went ahead and took advantage of it, using the brim for flirtation, to emphasize an up and under glance. Jake gave her a dark look.
She touched her fingertips to his forearm. Walked those fingers like a secret around to the inside of his wrist. Slid her hand down and tucked it into his.
Jake took a deep breath and pressed his lips together, gazing straight ahead. Then he slanted that gaze down on her, challenging and just dangerous enough to be erotic. “Oh, are we holding hands now?”
“I think I have a crush on you,” Lina confided.
His hand squeezed once too hard on hers. He stared at her.
“A big one,” Lina said, spreading her free arm and, more limitedly, the one that held on to him. “That keeps getting bigger.”
His lips pressed harder, in such a gorgeous stymied temper, like she’d caught a great cat and was tormenting it.
“It makes me prickle all over,” she confessed, tucking herself up against his arm, her head against the side of his shoulder.
“For f*ck’s sake.” Jake pulled his hand free and stepped away from her.
He turned to face her, making a brisk pedestrian veer around them, muttering touristes.
“Were you an incorrigible flirt in your previous life?” he demanded.
Previous life. That was a good word for it. “Well, I certainly knew how to go after what I wanted,” she said, a little amused he could think otherwise. What did he think it took to be head pastry chef at twenty-six in a two Michelin star restaurant? Also, frankly, what did he think it took to handle Vi as head chef and still control her own side of the kitchens?
“So do I,” he said through his teeth. “Which was what I had started doing, when you freaking cock-blocked me by saying you wanted to go straight to sex.”