Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(11)
She stared at that broad back. He looked over his shoulder. “So are you in any hurry to get to bed?”
Blue eyes, tan body, that grin and that cockiness, all in her white sheets…
“Or do chefs keep late hours?”
“It, ah, can sometimes take us a little while to come down off the adrenaline,” she said cautiously, not sure she wanted to follow where he was going with this. And not sure she wanted to shut it down, either. She really did usually have a lot of adrenaline to release, and right this second, she was quite sure she wouldn’t calm down for hours. Possibly weeks.
“Because I’m a poor, lonesome tourist in this country.” He looked pitiful.
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“And you’re the nicest, most welcoming Frenchman—woman—I’ve met all day.”
She tried to stuff the laugh back inside, she really did, but he was just impossible. “What did the others throw at you? Bombs?”
“They did that—thing—whenever I spoke.” He pinched at his lips with his fingers. “And then they answered me in English. Every time.” He frowned and shook himself, as if shaking off a horrible nightmare. “It was brutal.”
“Poor baby.”
He gave her a disgruntled look. “You know, being a beautiful blonde Frenchwoman who wears leather and stiletto heels has given you a real lack of empathy for victims of snobbism.”
She snorted. “There are plenty of people who try to snob me in Paris.”
An eyebrow went up. He looked her up and down. “And how does that work out for them?”
She smiled.
He smiled back. His eyes were laughing, and heated with interest, but they were also so…warm. As if he really did like her, and not just think she was f*ckable. “What do you say, honey? I assume it’s still forty degrees, but the rain has stopped. Would you save your country’s reputation? Be an ambassador for peace? Show a poor, lost tourist the sights? Hopefully on the back of your motorcycle? Maybe even let him drive it once?”
She held up a hand. “You are not driving my motorcycle.”
A heavy, put-upon sigh. “Fine. I’ll ride behind you.”
It was only after he’d settled on the bike behind her that she realized how often he pushed for something really outrageous—the chance to drive her motorcycle, a marriage in Texas, babies—to get the thing he really wanted, which the technique made seem much more normal in contrast.
“I’ve got a knife on me,” she said, as those hot, strong thighs framed hers and his pelvis nestled up against her butt, his arousal very evident.
“If you need to stab me, do you mind aiming above the waist? I’d way rather lose my spleen than my balls.”
Chapter 5
His team was going to make him pay for this for the rest of his natural life, but what else was he supposed to do? Drug her? Yeah, that would be subtle. No way she would wake up from being drugged and not run straight to the police and create an international scandal.
Conversely, now what could she say? A guy broke into my kitchen in the middle of the night. I bought his story, took him off on a motorcycle with me, and…and…then he turned out to be a lying bastard and…
Wait. Stop that negative thinking right there. There was no reason for her to find out that he was a lying bastard. Also, covert operations and being a lying bastard were not the same thing. They’d even had a class on trying to tell the difference.
Just because a man was covert didn’t mean he couldn’t meet a hot girl. Other men met women in the line of their work. It wasn’t like he would be able to tell any other hot French woman what he really did for a living either, and he was deployed here for the next six months.
He, Jake, Ian, and Mark hadn’t been able to believe their luck when they’d gotten their assignment. Holy crap, Europe? Where there were women and, and…Eiffel Towers, and…women.
The weather in July had been a bit of a shock, but the woman part was working out just fine.
Oh, yeah, he was hooked on covert ops. He was so hooked he was freaking effervescent. In fact, his dick was starting to feel like a corked champagne bottle, getting too shaken up.
This whole operation restored his faith in God and Hollywood, that was what it did. It was too bad he wasn’t Catholic, or he’d go light a candle in one of these cathedrals that dominated the city. “Are you going to insist the babies be baptized?” he asked at a light.
She gunned the motor and accelerated so fast from the light he had to grab her tight. He grinned and valiantly managed not to kiss the nape of her neck or squeeze any inappropriate parts of her and mess up her driving.
“It would be okay,” he said soothingly at the next light. “Grandma would be really happy, actually. She’s from one of the old Spanish families there. Tried like anything to get my mom to baptize us.”
“Do you actually know how to be quiet and focus, ever?” she said.
Well. If she put it like a challenge. He’d gotten her out of the kitchens, without having to drug her or kidnap her or do anything else to the restaurant’s top chef that might tip Al-Mofti off to how close they were on his trail. So maybe now he could quit trying to keep her distracted and just shut up and enjoy the view.
And the feel.
Her between his thighs, her in control while he just wallowed in pleasure. That sleek leather-clad body. Her grace and strength, the way his weight on the bike challenged her at first, and how quickly she adjusted to it, back in perfect, sexy control of her machine within a couple of blocks. He was so freaking aroused he was embarrassed at himself, pressed up tight behind her on the bike like that. Hell, he hoped he didn’t really embarrass himself. That might be possible, with the vibration of this bike, the erotic over-stimulus of having her right there in control of him and yet at his mercy, and the fact that she was so freaking hot.