Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(17)

She nodded against the pillow.

“I have died and gone to heaven.” He thrust harder, his fingers tightening on hers. “Well…maybe not heaven, but somewhere a lot dirtier and more fun.”

“Don’t stop,” she whispered into the pillow.

“I tell you what, honey. I can’t promise not to stop. But I sure as hell promise you I’ll do it again.”

And, by God, he did.

The second time was in the shower, in this long, slow, mercilessly sensual stroking of water and helplessness, too much sensation everywhere, while he laughed low in his throat and lifted her and kissed her and manipulated her body every way he wanted to, until he finally pressed her wet against that wall, with the warm water pouring over both of them, took her mouth with his, and f*cked her senseless.

Almost literally. She was limp and somnolent from exhausted pleasure as he carried her and a bundle of towels to the bed and stretched her out on it, patting her dry with a kind of possessive smugness. And it was 2:50 a.m. when she fell asleep.

***

In the dark room, Chase propped on his elbow a while, smiling as he watched her sleep. She’d turned away from him, and her blond hair spilled over the sheets and her back, her arm flung out to the edge, her knee drawn up. She wanted to take all the bed, didn’t she? It was hers.

He rolled onto his back, with one hand behind his head, and checked his watch. Three o’clock. The smile slowly faded. If Vi had been awake, she would have seen his face go faintly grim, inscrutable, a blank, lethal contemplation. In the dark, where no one could see, he looked like a hardened killer anticipating battle.

But, of course, if she had been awake, he wouldn’t have let her see that face.

Time to go.

He rolled out of bed smoothly and silently, dressing without a sound. Vi didn’t even move in her sleep. He pulled open the drawer of her nightstand. No paper. But there was a journal lying on top of the stand. He opened it, flipping past what seemed mostly menu ideas to a blank page. It was one of those expensive journals he hated to rip up, so he hesitated a moment over it, pen in hand, then smiled a little as he wrote quickly. He set her alarm clock on top of it to hold the journal open to the page, so that she would spot it when she turned that alarm off.

Then he strode out without looking back.





Chapter 7


“So how did your fishing expedition go?” Mark asked with a crisp edge to his words, as if they’d spent too long on a temperamental grill. Being team leader of a group of men like them who had been sitting still for far longer than their temperaments could handle was not for the faint of heart.

Chase leaned back in his chair, locked his hands behind his head, opened his mouth, closed it…and a great, beatific grin spread across his face.

“I’m going to kill him,” Jake informed Mark. “God damn it. I spent the whole f*cking night on a roof in forty degree rain. Isn’t it July?” Half Irish and half God knew what—mountain lion, probably—Jake had golden red hair and skin that should currently be deeply relieved to find itself in a rainy climate. The dense layering of dust-toned freckles on his skin had pretty much left no non-freckled space, after the Middle East.

“I had to keep her distracted!” Chase said. “Her brain scrambled. You know.” He grinned, feeling so big he was going to explode any moment. Hell, she was fine. “Who wants to be the best man?”

From the doorway, Ian snorted. “No woman is dumb enough to marry you. She was just using you for sex.” There was a grain of truth to that which snuck under Chase’s skin. Special ops always did have more trouble getting a woman to marry them and stick with them through deployments than finding someone to have sex with.

“It’s true love,” Chase said loftily, instead of admitting that. “You’re just jealous.”

Possibly true. The gods had showered multiple ethnic blessings on Ian, as if each race in his ancestry had assigned him his own personal fairy godmother at the christening to try to form the ideal twenty-first century man, and, in consequence, he found it even easier than the rest of them to pick up women. He had possibly gotten a little bit spoiled, therefore.

Near him, their French RAID liaison, Elias, gave Chase a jaundiced look. The tall, black-haired, and bronze-skinned member of France’s elite counterterrorism unit had been born of an Algerian father and a French mother in one of the poorer banlieues outside Paris, and he had reacted to the 2015 attacks kind of like someone might react to discovering his brother had turned into a raging zombie cannibal and was eating out the brains of their parents.

In which case, Elias had chosen the role of Rick Grimes.

“Did you come here to help protect the civilian population or inseminate them?” Elias asked coolly.

Chase grinned at him. “Worried about protecting your womenfolk?”

Elias just raised one eyebrow. How did French men manage that damn eyebrow thing? Chase tried it, involuntarily—he always had to try physical challenges as soon as he thought of them—struggling to wiggle one eyebrow over the other, and sneezed.

“I know you don’t know much about restaurants in America, but trust me, a twenty-eight-year-old two-star chef can protect herself,” Elias said dryly.

Chase’s grin widened. Damn, she’d been hot wielding those knives. “She sure as hell can.”

“So I’m just going to assume she has lousy taste in men.”