Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(21)

She glared back at the Commissariat, the main one on the ?le de la Cité, where she was pretty sure she’d been taken just to put more distance between her and her restaurant in the Tenth.

Then she checked her phone. Yeah, that “c***s don’t belong in the kitchen” Tweet had been reTweeted 2753 times. With her tagged each time. She didn’t even want to check the hashtags. Her publicist would have to handle that one.

Merde, now Twitter was claiming she’d food poisoned the President of the United States? That had been a prospective visit a week from now.

She threw her phone in a long arc from the point of the ?le de la Cité into the Seine, and stood there, her hands on her hips, watching that phone sink down into brown water and the mud below like her life.

Fuck.

How had this just happened to her? She had been at the heights and still climbing, a rising star, glowing bright and determined to keep climbing. Controversial, yes. Flamboyant, yes. “It’s pretty but is it art?”, yes. But any woman worth her salt in this field had to face that crap.

The same way she had to face the way so many onlookers cheered her fall now and threw rotten eggs and tomatoes at her while she was down in the dirt.

She shoved her hand through her hair and stared at a passing barge, tempted to swim out to it and beg the captain to take her away from this city. Maybe she could change her name, change her hair, change countries, and start over.

A movement to her left, a man coming in too close to her personal space, and she pivoted so fast she nearly drilled a hole through the cobblestone with her heel. Some jerk wanted to harass her right now? Bring it.

But it was Chase. Big, tan, easy-moving, gold-streaked brown hair, with those blue eyes and the lines around them from squinting into who knew what. Bullets?

As cocky as ever. Checking her out, with that quick I-own-that-now flick up and down her body. Larger than life, hard-bodied, absolutely sure of himself. Except for that guilty smile on his mouth.

A wave of memories washed over her—his hands all over her body, inside her body, his face as he looked down at her butt, his mouth on her…all while he knew he was going to bring her life down around her ears. Her fingers curled into her palms.

“Hi, honey,” he said, just cautiously enough that she knew. She’d been his roadkill, hadn’t she? And now he had a guilty conscience.

“You.” Her fist clenched.

He held up placating hands, like a cheater calming down his little woman after she caught him with another girl. “Now, honey,” he started.

She hit him.

***

Chase had a split-second to control his instinct to duck, and he managed it. Took it on the chin.

Vi’s hand connected with a force that shouldn’t have surprised him, and he shoved off with his feet for good measure, so that the punch sent him flying back into the river. He grabbed a deep breath as he flew, hit the water with a loud splash, and sank out of sight.

Okay, let’s just hang out down here for a while, give her a chance to calm down. Given all the free-diving he’d done, he was tempted to give it a full five minutes just to panic her—best way to break through anger, right?—but he didn’t want her actually diving in after him. Well, he kind of didn’t. Ruin that leather of hers. So he came up after three, expecting to find her hovering on the edge of the stone quay, getting anxious.

She wasn’t even looking at him!

She was—oh, f*ck, she was huddled over her hand, her face twisted in agony.

He leapt out of the river, water flinging off him. “Honey—” He reached for her wrist.

Her hands flew up, and he barely saved his eyes. One of her nails raked up his cheek, as she went for them.

He grabbed both her arms, taking firm control of her. She kicked him in the groin.

Ow. Damn it. He should have kept that vow to wear protection around her. Hunching over himself, he glared at her. “Was that the f*ck necessary? Ow.”

“Fuck you.” She clutched her wrist, her face a mask of pain.

“Honey.” Damn it, had she broken her hand on his jaw? And he’d been so damn cocky about letting her hit him. It had never occurred to him that she’d get hurt. “Let me look at it. Please?”

He was vaguely aware of the audience they were gathering, all the other couples or groups who had been hanging out on this stone island in the middle of the Seine now focused on them with varying degrees of fascination, wariness, and willingness to intervene to help Vi. He kept the awareness of the crowd and its potential for trouble in his peripheral, but mostly he focused on Vi.

Who had all her rage focused on him, green eyes like two of her own knives. “You ruined my life. Go to hell.”

“I didn’t! It wasn’t—” He bit his teeth together over the words.

I didn’t come up with the food poisoning thing.

But he was the one who had said the restaurant needed to be shut down.

“You didn’t ruin my life?” she said very precisely. “I’ve been climbing my way up through macho kitchens since I was fifteen. I run a two-star restaurant. I worked eighteen-, twenty-hour days for the past thirteen years. And now this will be the only thing the world remembers about me. What the hell do you think you haven’t ruined?”

He shoved his hand over his face. “Can’t you still do all that? I mean—those people who give stars don’t even like the American president, right? They’ll probably give you an extra one for poisoning him.”