Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(24)

He bent his head and rubbed his shoulder. Fuck.

After a wait that shouldn’t have seemed long to a guy who had been through sniper training but which somehow lasted ages, Vi finally came out with a black splint that immobilized all but the thumb and index finger of her right hand. Chase leapt up, coming to her.

“Broken, then?” He tried to reach for her forearm, so he could lift her hand up for a better look, but she jerked away and cold-shouldered him.

He cursed. “I should have ducked.”

She spun on him. “You know what you should have done? You should have not played the cocky shit who can have anyone and anything he wants, when all that time, you were planning something that would ruin my career. You’re no better than Quentin.”

He stopped stock still. Quentin…the guy who had tried to rape her? The guy who had assaulted her in her own walk-in, so that she had to bring a case of milk bottles down on his head? Kicking his ass so bad he never even looked at another woman again without flinching in fear had been next on Chase’s to-do list.

“I was not planning anything that would ruin your career,” he said between his teeth. “You were secondary.”

She swung on him, and he dropped into a squat just in time for her splint to fly over his head.

“Will you stop?” he yelled. “You’re going to hurt yourself again if you keep this up!”

“I need my knives.” She stalked off.

He followed. “Secondary wasn’t the right word.”

“Fuck you.”

“I mean, it all—it had nothing to do with you, okay! I just…happened to run into you and didn’t want you to call the police.”

“I will kill you,” she said, in a monotonous scary voice, like a relentless robot, striding out the hospital doors.

“Vi! Damn it.” She hailed a taxi. “I can’t talk about this. Just—can you trust me that I had nothing to do with the food poisoning thing?” Well, maybe nothing wasn’t quite the right word, but…but… “I never meant you to get hurt!”

A taxi pulled up.

Damn it. Ten taxis in a row would drive by him in this city, and she got one within five seconds? How could a man do a proper grovel in these conditions? Rain started to spit at his head again, and it was all he could do not to shoot a bird at the sky.

She yanked the door open and then grabbed the edge of it, locking her eyes with his. “You had nothing to do with it?”

Well…he shoved his hand through his hair. It still felt absurdly short to him since his shift to Europe. In Afghanistan, he’d had a beard and shaggy hair. “More or less nothing,” he said. “I mean—it wasn’t my fault.”

“You’re pathetic,” she said, and climbed into the taxi and slammed the door.

He stared after her as the heavens opened up and started pouring icy rain down on him again.

Pathetic?

The next time he saw one of those movies about romantic, magical Paris, he was throwing popcorn at the damn screen.





Chapter 10


Anyone would think a woman who had frequently had to shower off with sliced fingers or second-degree burns on her hands could handle having a hand in a splint. Vi even had a variety of vinyl gloves and plastic bags around to keep a wounded hand dry, although the doctor had said that wasn’t necessary with this splint.

But somehow, standing under the water with her arm thrust out past the shower curtain and the pain from the fracture trying to eat its way through her brain, her head suddenly thumped against the dripping wall.

At least with the water pouring over her face, she couldn’t tell if she’d lost the battle against the stinging in her eyes. At least she’d broken down in private, not like some nineteen-year-old in a chef’s reality show, when everything went wrong and the top chef judges tore her work to pieces in front of everyone, and the video of her flushed cheeks and wobbling voice was on YouTube forever for the whole world to see.

Fucking YouTube. She’d drowned the clip with as many TV appearances and “how to make Vi Lenoir’s famous so-and-so” video clips as she could, but that old reality show clip still rose to the top.

This one would, too. Everything from today—her face when she learned her restaurant was being closed for salmonella, her getting arrested, probably her hitting Chase. It would take over the Wikipedia page on her. It would drown out all her accomplishments, everything she’d done.

Her eyes stung harder, and she stared up into the water to make sure that sting was coming from the shower and not inside her.

Idiot. She kept her face turned up into the shower, until the water was cold, until it was icy, and finally she had to drag herself out from under it, shivering uncontrollably as she bundled herself in pajamas and bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. Normally she just blazed right through the chilly weather, barely noticing it, but this afternoon, the cold summer had seeped into her bones. She felt like ashes, trying to remember the glory of when she had been flame.

The knocking on the door made her brace. The code on the building door had so far kept out the media who had been lying in wait, but eventually some journalist would be enterprising enough to duck in after a legitimate resident, pretending to be someone’s friend.

And she couldn’t even call the police. Maybe she shouldn’t have thrown her phone away without having a landline.