Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(66)
“—here’s what I think. I think I can help fix things.”
Oh, hell. That was what he had thought, when he was nineteen. And he hadn’t been wrong, but it sure as hell had been a violent road. And a lot of the ways he fixed things for his country meant someone else was broken.
“I do,” Lina said firmly. “These kids who end up in refugee camps here. The ones escaping out of war zones, who’ve seen people they loved killed before their eyes. They can’t just sit there gazing into their past. That’s no way to recover. They need something they can do, a goal, a task, and a path into their new society. Une raison d’être. And they need training. Don’t you think some of them would be like me? That they’d love being able to make something beautiful with their hands, that they could feed to other people and help make their lives beautiful, too?”
Jake felt himself softening, that painful wave of tenderness she provoked in him, over and over. “I bet they would.”
She nodded firmly. “Plus, if the girls are going to be living in France, it would be helpful to them to have a role model so they know how to handle idiots who ask them things like why they are or aren’t wearing a hijab, as if being Muslim makes their private religious convictions anyone else’s f*cking business. I mean, do I ask you why you don’t go to church every Sunday?”
Jake bit back a smile. “I hope your recommended way of handling it doesn’t involve chainsaws.”
Lina brooded. “No, but it might involve strangling some people with the scarf in question. Especially journalists.”
Lina had finally done exactly one interview. It had drawn even more death threats her way, but what had really made her give up interviews altogether was how freaking pissed off she’d been at the interview hosts. Between their discreet glee in probing for gory details and their intrusive questions on her religious identity and practice, it was a wonder Lina hadn’t punched somebody. Jake had watched it and had had a strong desire to punch some people himself.
He winked at her. “Want me to show you how to more effectively garrote people?”
“Hey, you never know when it might come in handy,” Lina said, and he laughed again. “Although I’m getting pretty good with a chainsaw.” Her ice sculpture contest was that week. She was heading out to Brittany tomorrow, and Jake had already arranged to be able to trail along with her. Au-dessus re-opened in two weeks.
Garroting and chainsaws aside, he did kind of fundamentally believe that it was better for anyone he cared about to know multiple ways to kill their enemies, just in case. Liquid nitrogen was a lousy self-defense weapon.
Jake frowned at the Eiffel Tower. Those police guards of hers wouldn’t last forever. But some crazy person’s desire for vengeance might. And she’d never learn to protect herself as well as he could protect her. If he was around.
“Tell me more about this plan to help refugees,” he said.
“I guess I thought of refugees because if my own grandparents hadn’t been able to immigrate to France back in the fifties and sixties, those refugees could be me. My grandmother on my father’s side was born in Syria.”
Jake nodded, feeling more and more somber. He had been part of the special forces sent to Syria. He had seen how civilians there suffered. Particularly women. Those civilians were the reason he fought. He’d gotten into this job to be a hero. But he wasn’t nineteen anymore. He paid attention to politics now and knew how often the decision as to whom he fought wasn’t made by someone who wanted to protect the innocent but by someone with strong ties to weapons manufacturers or the oil industry. He had doubts now. “I’ve thought about doing something along those lines, when I get out,” he said. “Maybe next year, if I don’t re-up.”
Lina slanted him a cautious, hungry glance. “Are you thinking about that?”
Oh, yeah. More and more every day. “I think it might be time,” he said. “I’ve been at war eleven years. Time to find another…raison d’être.”
“And you want to work with refugees if you do?”
“With the war-torn, one way or another,” he said. “What I’d really like is to rebuild things. I’ve seen a lot of places destroyed by war, and rebuilding once the war is over requires a certain kind of person.”
He’d thought about that a lot, too. His skills and how they might come in handy in recovering war zones—the ability to handle danger and persist, the ability to form and work with a team, the ability to put things together and make something work, no matter how hard.
“Who knows?” Jake said, watching her. “Maybe it might be compatible with what you want to do. Maybe we could work side by side.”
She eyed him sidelong, too, looking deeply intrigued by the idea, almost shyly fascinated. She wasn’t very shy, so that probably meant the idea was important to her, right?
“I was thinking I could set up a program,” she elaborated. “I think at this point in time, I’m a focus of enough international attention that I could draw donors, and probably other chefs who would volunteer to help. I could definitely imagine famous chefs all willing to visit the program center to give week-long workshops just like they do for famous cooking schools in Paris. And we’d have the base constant training, of course. I’d select the instructors for that and oversee the structure of it. It wouldn’t be too much more complicated, logistically speaking, than opening another restaurant.”