Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(30)

Grrrr. She needed more things to throw.

“And this morning I woke up to the food poisoning story.”

“There are rumors on some of the Arabic language channels that American special ops are moving on extremist groups here,” Lina said.

Chase gave her a quick, assessing look. “Are there.”

“You know, you can read Arabic without being a terrorist,” Lina told him darkly.

Chase said something Vi couldn’t follow, but it sounded vaguely like the Arabic she heard in the Métro often enough and occasionally when around Lina’s grandparents.

Lina looked at him blankly for a moment, then raised one eyebrow. “Your pronunciation is terrible.”

Chase sighed deeply and gave the flowers a look that begged them for sympathy.

“You speak three languages?” Vi said, impressed despite herself. To master French and English seemed pretty normal to her, but Arabic was a whole other level.

“Apparently not,” Chase said dryly. “Apparently I only read them.”

“Are you really from Texas?” Because nothing she had ever heard about Texas indicated that its denizens did anything but wear cowboy hats and guns, ride horses, and act macho. Oh, and there was the oil thing. They definitely didn’t interest themselves in other languages or in anything outside Texas, she was pretty sure of that. Unless Spanish? “Do you speak Spanish, too?”

Chase smiled at her and said nothing.

Hunh.

Vi contemplated that a moment. “Say something in Spanish,” she said suspiciously.

“Toda la noche so?é con las cosas que te podría hacer con la lengua,” Chase said promptly.

Vi frowned at him. Lengua, the only word she could guess at in the sentence, either meant language, which would be a perfectly normal subject of conversation right then, or…tongue.

He smiled at her beatifically.

Vi slumped deeply and stared at her bunny slippers. Energy tried to defy the slump. She was starting to get the urge to leap up and start pacing around again.

“So,” Chase said. “How hard is it going to be to recoup your reputation as a chef?”

And there went her spirits again, down, down, down into the depths of a dirty river. “Impossible.”

He held her eyes, raising his eyebrows just a little. “How hard is it going to be if you give up?”

She stared at him. Her eyes narrowed. “Really impossible.”

He grinned at her. “So ‘impossible’ is a pretty flexible word.”

“Can I have my knife roll?” Vi asked.

His grin widened. “Only if you can get past me to get it.”

She came to her feet.

He looked delighted. “Don’t mess up the flowers, okay? I’m just getting them to look right.”

Everyone in the room looked at his flowers. Stems of mismatched length flopped in random ways in wide-mouthed glasses.

“What?” he said defensively.

Célie and Lina bit down on their lower lips. Vi put her hands on her hips. Energy was starting to course through her, now that she was on her feet again. She kind of missed her boots. “This isn’t the kind of thing a chef can come back from, Chase.” Well…she was planning to, one way or another, but that didn’t mean he should make light of how hard it would be. “Think about it like if you were to shoot the wrong guy. Maybe it’s the same.”

“Not quite,” Chase said quietly and evenly. His eyes met hers, and for just a second she had one of those disorienting glimpses of depth and seriousness. “Because when I shoot the wrong guy, he’s dead. And he never comes back from that.”

Oh.

For a second, all three women were still, this little shock wave at the hint of a job they could barely begin to imagine.

“That’s why I went into private security,” Chase said blandly. “No actual shooting ever comes up, and the pay is much better.” He smiled at them, full wattage. “You girls hungry? When’s the last time you ate, hon—Ms. Lenoir?”

“Yesterday,” Célie said when Vi didn’t answer. “Come on, we all know that. That’s why we’re here.”

Chase reached into the basket of brown eggs Vi had on her counter and started cracking them into a bowl.

“Being a top chef is all about reputation,” Vi said, still trying to get the degree of damage done to her through his thick head. “You build your reputation on your abilities, but if people can get hold of anything to destroy that reputation—something like this—then it’s gone. This would knock even a top male chef all the way back down the ladder, but as a woman, people have been looking for me to fail from the start.” Since she was born, in fact.

Célie folded her arms across her belly, protecting her guts in visceral sympathy for the blow Vi had taken to hers, nodding. Lina looked grim. As pastry chef, the blame didn’t stop with her the same way it did with Vi—her name didn’t front the restaurant—but she still felt the responsibility, and it could even quite easily turn out to come from the pastry side of the kitchen. The eggs, the custards, the sauces.

Chase nodded, too, matter-of-factly. And held Vi’s eyes. “So you’re going to quit?”

Vi stared back at him. Her lips pressed. “Do you have a death wish or something?” Quit!