Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(65)

“So why do you think people date?” she said. “Really.”

So they had someone to kiss, just as he said. But really? “Because it makes them so happy.”

Her face lit. Jake thought he would never grow tired of how a few words from him could turn on that radiance of hers. She hugged him hard, her nose pressing into his belly.

“I take it that it makes you happy, too?” he tested, just because he liked the confirmation.

“Yeah,” she said, with a curious wonder in her voice. She sat up enough that she could expand her arms to apparently take in the universe. “It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it? How resilient life is?”

Jake thought it was kind of amazing how resilient she was, but he didn’t interrupt.

“You can know it’s as fragile as an egg you’re trying to keep juggling in the air without breaking, and yet still forget that and seize it with both hands.”

Jake hesitated. “Not sure that works, because you don’t break life by seizing it with both hands. Like you would an egg.”

Lina waved her hands. “Exactly. That’s what’s so cool about it. The more you seize it, the less it matters how fragile it is, because you’ve got the now.”

Yes. That was pretty much how he, and most of the men he knew, had lived their entire lives.

The problem was with him. Because the more he seized the now with her, the more he wanted it to last forever.

“I think I need to stop wallowing,” Lina said abruptly, and Jake felt the shock right through to his gut. He was her wallowing.

“What do you mean?” he asked very carefully.

“I mean, I’m being ridiculous,” she said. “Look at those kids in Syria. Talk about trauma. I just had to deal with one little incident.”

“I’m pretty sure your one little incident would have traumatized most people.”

She gave him a haughty look. “Do I look like most people to you?”

He compressed his lips over his urge to grin. “No, ma’am. You look like Lina Farah, one of the best damn pastry chefs in the world.”

She nodded approvingly and smacked her thigh. “Exactly. It’s about time for me to do something about this mess.”

He sure as hell hoped she didn’t want to do something about the world’s mess the way he had when he was nineteen. He did not want her in a war zone. “Are you sure you were fighting that dragon that day in your kitchens? You weren’t more carving a self-portrait?”

She grinned in pleasure at the idea, but she said, “I hope not. I cut its head off.”

He took her hand and rubbed his thumb over her knuckles for the pure pleasure of enjoying her strength. “Maybe you’re more like a hydra. Someone cuts off your head, and you just grow back two more.”

She considered that with visible satisfaction for a moment. “If I ever run into Hercules, I’m going to f*cking kick his ass.”

Jake laughed out loud, tightening his hand on hers and pulling her close to him again. So the scariest monster down that untraveled road was her, was it? No wonder that road was tempting as hell.

“Who does he think he is, going around slaughtering the last of every marvelous species he finds? Asshole.”

Jake could not stop laughing.

“Slaying the Nemean lion, for example. I like lions.” She slid a glance at Jake that seemed filled with meaning he completely failed to get. “I like the way the Nemean lion’s golden fur was impervious to all attack and its claws could cut through any enemy’s armor.”

“I thought you said you didn’t like your lit classes,” he said, amused. “Where’s all this mythology coming from?”

“Well, I went to collège,” she said, offended. “What do you guys learn in middle school?”

Jake tried to remember. “Math and science? The history of the United States?”

Lina looked taken aback. “How long can that take to learn? You only have a couple hundred years of it. You don’t have time for the real history of western civilization?”

Jake was laughing so hard. He hugged her, wondering how to tell her how much f*cking delight he got out of being with her, all the time.

“Besides, we learned mythology in my French class,” she said, and it took him a second to remember her French class would have been nothing like his own experience of French in school but more like English. “We had a lot of other stuff to cover in history.” She gave a tiny sniff and slid him a mirth-filled snooty glance. “Unlike some countries I could mention.”

Jake grinned at her. “We just appropriate your history and pretend its ours.”

Lina looked indignant.

“Kind of like you do the Greeks’,” he teased.

She laughed and hugged him, too, as if she got nearly as much delight out of being with him as he got out of being with her.

“So now that we’ve taken care of that bastard Hercules,” she said, “and I’m a hydra and you’re an invulnerable lion—”

He was? He had bad news for her about the ability of his body to resist all weapons turned against it, but he sure as hell didn’t want to bring it up. His job always had required that he live in the moment and simultaneously somehow stay convinced he was indomitable. And that same balancing act, that dual belief in the moment and in forever, might be essential to a woman in a relationship with him, too.