Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(28)

Chase gave her a rueful smile, as if his excess of caution was just an amusing quirk, and that hard I-could-kill-anyone expression vanished so completely she could almost forget it had been there. He opened the door, a friendly smile on his face.

Célie and Lina pushed inside, frowning at him as they passed him. “Who are you?” Célie asked bluntly. She was trying to grow her winged pixie cut out, wanting to reach shoulder length, but all her attempts at styling the burgundy-red hair at the current length left her looking like a pixie who’d gone savage and been living in a thorn bush.

“A friend of Vi’s,” Chase said at the same time as Vi said, “A jerk.”

Célie looked back and forth between them, her eyebrows going up and her lips quirking a little. “Ah.” And then, the flicker of humor disappearing, “Merde, Vi, are you okay?”

“Super.” Vi kicked her coffee table.

“The team is in an uproar,” Lina said. “But you’re their hero right now, getting arrested like that on behalf of the restaurant. Also, I think Mikhail and Amar might be single-handedly waging a Twitter war in defense of the restaurant. You know how those two get.”

Vi smiled a little. Explosive. Emotional. Arrogant. Easily insulted. Damn, she loved her team. “I’ll take everybody out tomorrow. All the drinks are on me.” She gestured as she spoke, forgetting her splint.

“What happened to your hand?” Lina took three long steps toward her. Her thick black hair bounced in a ponytail of glossy curls. “Did you hit somebody or something?”

“You know me too well.” Vi stared morosely at her hand. Her right hand, too. She didn’t mind throwing knives left-handed, but if she tried to fillet a fish that way, she was going to end up stabbing herself.

“You didn’t pick a fight at the Commissariat, did you?” Lina asked warily. “No, that can’t be right, they let you out.”

Chase returned to the flowers, gazed at them a moment, then tried shifting tall flowers for short ones to see if that improved the look of the makeshift array.

“Where did you get that scratch?” Lina asked Chase coldly.

“A kitten,” Chase said, with an attempt at that woeful look he’d given Vi the night before.

“I’m not a f*cking kitten!” Vi yelled, kicking the coffee table extra hard.

“Oh.” Chase touched his cheek, discovering the scratch her nail had left when she’d tried to gouge his eyes. “That one.” He felt it a moment. “I forgot about that.”

Vi thumped her head back against the couch. “I hate you.” Even fists, knives, scratches didn’t make an impact on him. Okay, she hadn’t actually tried, with the knives—she hit what she aimed at—but still. She could probably shoot him, and the bullet would bounce off. So how could she expect herself to make an impact?

“Who the hell is this guy?” Célie handed the box of DR chocolates to Vi and stood between her and Chase, her hands on her hips. “Oh, purée, Vi, did you fall for one of the police officers who arrested you? I saw that video. They looked pretty rough with you to me.”

“They did?” Chase’s eyes narrowed. He scanned Vi’s body.

“I’m fine,” Vi said. She was mostly extremely pissed that the police had been able to handle her body as if it was their right to control it. But she hadn’t resisted arrest, just tried to force her way into her own restaurant. “And he’s American, Célie. Clearly he’s not police here.”

“Well, where did you meet him? Why is he still in your apartment if you hate him and think he’s a jerk? Since when do you go for military men?”

“Civilian.” Chase tried to slouch his shoulders. “I swear.” He didn’t seem that intent on convincing them, though. He seemed more amused by the pretense than anything, except for a tiny second when his eyes flicked to Lina and there was something narrow and cool in them, assessing her reaction.

Célie looked at him a moment. Her eyes narrowed, and her head tilted. “Since when?”

“What makes you think I was ever in?” Chase said.

“I recognize macho military when I see it.” Since her boyfriend had just gotten out of the Foreign Legion, she certainly should recognize it. “It’s a whole different look and swagger from macho non-military.” Another look Célie should recognize, given her boss, Dom Richard.

“I used to be in the military,” Chase said firmly. “But now I’m a civilian.”

“How long ago did you get out?” Vi asked. “Forty-eight hours ago?” Just in time for a black ops mission in an allied sovereign country that would be illegal if he was still in the U.S. military?

He gave her a bland look.

“Why don’t you bring one of those glasses over here, so I can see the pretty flowers?” Vi asked tightly.

“No. Then you’d just throw it at me, I’d have to clean up glass shards, I’d miss a tiny shard, and sometime in the night when you came to get a drink, you’d forget your little slippers and you’d cut your foot. And think how guilty I would feel.”

Vi took off a slipper and threw it at him.

He caught it and gazed at the cute brown bunny face on the toe for a second bemusedly.

“You see how damn patronizing he is?” Vi asked her friends between her teeth.