Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(54)
Wow. Nice golden glow in her middle at that compliment. “I’m busy, I guess. Also, I don’t think the kind of guy I like has the nerve to ask me out that often. Either that or he’s not out in bars at one in the morning, when I get off.”
“That shy, geeky guy?” Jake asked neutrally.
She nodded.
“Mmm.” He gazed at the river.
“Quiet,” she said suddenly. “Kind. I mean, it’s not like he has to be so shy and geeky he trips over his own shoelaces or anything.”
Jake proved he could do the quiet part by saying nothing in response to that at all.
“What about you?” she said. “You’re definitely not a jerk, and not every woman tries to wrap a man around her little finger. Why don’t you have a girlfriend?”
“Busy, I guess.” He considered. His lips twisted. “Also, I don’t think the kind of woman I like hangs out in bars around military bases, hoping to pick one of me up in between deployments.”
“One of you?”
He shrugged. “A certain vision of a certain type of man, let’s say.”
“Strong, capable, quiet, patient, steady? Yeah, I can see that.” Who wouldn’t want that?
He drew a careful breath, as if breathing was worth a man’s full focus, and slanted her a glance. “‘Patient,’ as in patient and kind or as in patient and predatory?”
“Probably depends on who you’re being patient with.”
“Right now, I’m being patient with you,” he pointed out, his tone a little steely.
“Kind,” she said immediately. “Very kind.”
He let his breath out, staring at her a long moment. “Define ‘geeky’. Does knowing all the X-Men count?”
She found herself biting back the happiest smile, as she gazed down the river. “Intello is the word here. You know—a guy who reads philosophy. Camus. Likes to discuss it.”
“There’s a lot of philosophy in the X-Men.”
She laughed out loud, a wonderful ripple of happiness.
“There is,” Jake protested. “And in Harry Potter, too. Were you even paying attention when you read them?”
“I’ve never read any of the X-Men comics,” she confessed, pretending to hang her head. She snuck a mischievous glance up at him from that position. “I did watch all the movies where my favorite actor took his shirt off, though. And that one where he took his pants off, too.”
He found her knuckle without releasing her hand and pretended to give it a pinch, amused.
“He doesn’t have anything on you,” she told him.
Jake’s eyebrows went up. He slanted her another glance.
She shrugged. “Just calling them like I see them.”
He looked fascinated and baffled both, and he kept sneaking glances at her.
“You’ve got this awesome body, and then it’s covered all over with all those beautiful freckles a woman just wants to lick and kiss and touch,” Lina said, her free hand lifting and curling in a craving for texture. “Miam.”
Jake’s lips parted. His hand tightened on hers like a vise.
Lina smiled up at him. “Just calling them like I see them,” she said again.
“Oh, is that what you’re doing?” He sounded somewhere between exasperated and frantic, as if he was about to give up and call for the rescue team to haul him out of the water.
But he must never have given up. She’d read about those swim tests guys like him had to pass. Hell, there were men who died in those things before they gave up.
She tightened her hand into her own vise on his.
They had passed the Louvre, and the sandy beach had grown less populated, almost like a real beach might after you walked on past a resort hotel. A young couple had taken advantage of the quieter space and was sitting high in the sand, his head in her lap, her hand stroking his loose curls back off his forehead, the expressions on their faces so vulnerable, so trusting, so full of longing for what they were in the act of finding.
Jake looked away. Lina kept sneaking discreet glances at them, wistfully. They looked lovely to her.
“I’ve decided to believe in the future again,” she said out loud, firmly.
He squeezed her hand and ran his thumb up the side of it.
“Do you want to be in it?” she asked.
Chapter 15
Jake stopped dead. He turned to face her, in pure disbelief. He had to disbelieve. Otherwise, the dark thing lurking under that incredulity, ready to surge up if it gave way, felt very like fear.
I go after what I want, yeah. But, when it comes to her, I never expected to get it.
Maybe he’d only ever really expected to get sex.
Lina looked serious but…joyful, too. As if optimism was a choice and a gift, both at once.
He stared down at her. It was deeply unfair that he found gallantry under fire so damn gorgeous. Her playfulness tonight wrapped around him, enticed him and aroused him and delighted him, until he was so tangled in it he couldn’t figure out how to unravel its hold on him without unraveling himself.
Her gallantry shone through her skin, her eyes, her hair, turning her so radiant it made his palms itch from not touching her. As if her insides were a golden luminescence and her cute little outsides just a trick. He wondered how many men she had dated who had never even realized how goddamn gallant she was, who had just been content to have a pretty girl smile at them and never looked further. Civilians were stupid like that, sometimes. They just didn’t realize how important courage was.