Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(8)

Wrong. They didn’t break us. We fought and we won.

Jake turned at a corner and prowled back. He was a hard-muscled man, but not bulky in that way of men whose workouts focused on bulk. His muscles had clearly developed to a purpose. Survival emanated from his every pore.

Yes, he was very stubbornly, very indomitably alive.

And merde but those freckles killed her. For example, his butt. Would he have freckles on his butt? A woman needed to know these things. The curiosity was killing her. Would they be fewer, would the skin between them be paler? Would that hard, tight ass feel like—

Her hand squeezed on the torch, and her attempt to give her dessert a delicate golden-speckled complexion overheated and the sugar blackened and smoked.

Merde. Survive one damn terrorist attack and it turned you back into a rank apprentice with nymphomaniac issues.

The mountain lion prowled back.

Her skin prickled all over again.

“Is it supposed to look like that?” Jake asked, nodding to her blackened dessert.

Lina’s teeth clicked together. “No. Don’t spoil my concentration.”

“So it’s leftover?” he said.

She paused. Well, there you go. She’d known somebody was filling this room with hunger. She’d been worried it was her. “The sugar’s burnt,” she said. “You can’t eat that.” Not in her kitchen.

That tiny, compressed curl of his lips that meant he was amused. She thought. He had a secretive way with his amusement, as if he didn’t think she deserved to be in on the joke. It made her want to upend a bowl of custard on his head.

But it tickled her middle, too.

“You’ve never tasted an MRE, have you?” he said.

A what?

“Meals ready to eat. For when we’re in the field.”

She looked at the over-blackened sugar globe that was her earlier attempt to turn the traditional crème br?lée into one that could give the visual impression of floating off the plate, entirely cased in that famous burnt-sugar crust. When you tapped it with your spoon, all the cream inside would spill lushly out in an orgy-like glorification of what a crème br?lée should be.

“Did you just compare something I made to military rations?” She was a two-star pastry chef with eyes on a third star. Military rations?

“Favorably,” he said. “Definitely favorably.”

“I can see why Vi tries to kill Chase on a regular basis.” Violette Lenoir was the head chef of this two Michelin star restaurant. She and Lina had been close friends ever since they were teenagers growing up in a sketchy outskirt of Paris and fighting to make their way in a male-dominated profession. Together against the world. Then Chase had burst into Vi’s life only a couple of weeks ago. And now both he and Vi were lying in hospital beds, thanks to Lina’s cousin.

And maybe jokes about killing someone weren’t funny, once someone actually did try to kill you.

“She should make the attempts more irregular,” Jake said. “Spontaneous. Keep him on his toes. He’ll enjoy it more.”

Lina couldn’t stop her lips from twitching. Extroverted, cocky, larger than life Chase probably would, at that. Maybe Vi’s attempts to “kill” Chase were still a little funny.

“Of course, Chase is a trouble-maker,” Jake said. “Adrenaline junkie. Me, I’m more the calm, quiet type.”

Lina took a moment to look that lean, powerful body up and down. (Nobody could blame her for taking her time with that, could they? Not every day a woman got a chance to eye a body like that so slowly and then pretend she was dismissive of it. All those thoughts that didn’t want to behave bumped against the lid of that box she was trying to keep them in.) “…Right.”

That tiny, secret curl of his lips again, like he would just never let her in on the damn joke. “Patient,” he said. “Thorough.”

Okay, her mind just went somewhere dimly lit and horizontal where he could be patient and thorough as he…

She scrubbed her face and frowned at the black globe of sugar. “I’ll make you another one. Don’t act desperate.”

Hazel eyes held hers a moment, faintly narrowing. “…Desperate?”

“You can’t be that hungry,” she clarified.

“I’m guessing you don’t know much about hunger.”

For some blasted reason, that did a whole tumult of things to her middle, as if a slumbering volcano had just rolled over in her belly and thought about waking up.

Jake picked up the spoon she’d used a bit earlier and eyed the blackened sugar globe as if planning his attack on it.

She grabbed his hand and pressed it down to the counter. “Will you wait one minute! I’ll make you a good one.”

His gaze dropped to her pale gold hand on his darker, freckled one, hazel eyes hidden by stubby, sandy lashes. His hand was large and warm under hers. Her callused, capable hand looked suddenly absurdly small.

She pulled it back so it could go back to looking its capable, strong self again.

He flexed his hand carefully. “I could eat both. There’s no point this one going to waste.”

“Shh,” she said, and his lips curled again.

She had made a dozen sugar globes for experimental purposes, because she was trying to be normal again. Just be herself. Even if “Lina Farah” felt like an alien, someone she couldn’t recognize in her own mother’s photos of her, she could at least try. Follow the recipe of who she was. Make desserts and pretend she could make her world secure again.