Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(32)

Chase beamed and patted himself on the back.

Vi slammed the bathroom door.





Chapter 11


Chase was having a hard time holding steady. Humor had gotten him through some tough shit in the past, so he clung to it, like he always did, but Vi was messing with his ability to compartmentalize, waking up emotions. And not fun, happy, adrenaline-charged, she’s-so-damn-hot emotions either. Those made him feel as if he’d finally fallen into one of those Hollywood action films about men like him.

No, these were the scary kind of emotions. They were vulnerable, and even though they seemed to reside in his middle and his head, he couldn’t figure out how to fit body armor and a helmet on them no matter what he did.

The swelling sense of failure—I didn’t protect her, a civilian hit by my own unit’s friendly fire—the powerful desire to fix it, this morass of other emotions that he didn’t even have names for but that swelled up at the sight of her in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, like someone who wasn’t a Bond girl right that minute but who needed a man who could sweep her up close and warm and hold her tight until all the bad went away.

He’d mentioned it, that he could try the cuddle. But she clearly realized that wasn’t in his normal skill set. She’d gone for the option he was good at—taking flack. It was such cute flack, too—slippers and pillows and a bouquet of flowers. Adorable, when compared to AK-47s.

After he’d fielded her friends’ probing questions for a while, she came back out, her straight blond hair silky dry, as if she was about to head out somewhere glamorous for the evening. She’d abandoned that fluffy bathrobe and slippers, but she hadn’t really gotten dressed, just put a bra on under her black camisole top, still wearing black pajama bottoms, barefoot.

The combination of that silky, pretty hair and the quieter intimacy of her attire hit him like a punch in the gut.

It troubled his stomach, this tumble of a fantasy a man like him never got to actually have. Women loved to date men like him, loved hot sex, loved, yes, the idea of marrying guys like him, but they never really lasted through the actual him. The man who was too tough, too impervious, too able to ride roughshod over almost everyone without even realizing it, and, of course, who was gone most of the year.

The knit camisole clung to a slim, athletic body that moved now not so much like a whip cracking, as it did when she was taking on the world, but like a dancer winding down from a long performance—the energy subdued, but all that grace and strength still obvious in the lines of her body and in every casual move.

To his surprise, she didn’t go back to sending verbal jabs his way, or throwing things at him, both things he could handle. Okay, that he enjoyed handling, except when he was too stupid and cocky a shit and his damn showing off made her end up with a boxer’s fracture.

She seemed…quieter now. Thinking. She took the bar seat across from him, pushing a couple of his makeshift vases to the side to rest her chin on her good hand.

He sliced a pat of butter, feeling weirdly self-conscious. He hadn’t felt self-conscious since he was a teenager. What the hell?

“Heat the pan first,” she said.

“What?”

She grabbed his wrist across the counter, and the pat of butter he’d been about to add fell to the stove. “Heat the pan first. It expands the metal and gets rid of any invisible porousness, so the eggs are less likely to stick.”

He smiled at her fingers circling his wrist. Hell, he was easy. But he liked having her grab his body and manipulate it however she wanted. He wished she’d do that to a lot more than his wrist. “I thought I was adding the butter so the eggs wouldn’t stick.”

“You’re adding the butter for flavor.” She let go of his wrist.

It was all terrifyingly enticing—her sitting across a counter from him while he cooked a simple omelet. Of its own volition, his hand rose to draw a strand of her hair through his fingers. Soft and silky, still a tiny bit damp.

He expected her to bite his hand or something, but she just let that proud chin of hers rest on her fist, letting him play with her hair the same way he’d let her control his wrist and gazing at him as if she couldn’t figure out what to make out of him.

You can’t make much, he almost wanted to warn her. I am already what I made myself.

That was another thing that blocked him from those quiet moments of intimacy. Women, whether they admitted it or not, usually wanted to change a man, mold him to who they were. But he, like most of the men he knew, was just too hardened by the life, too stubborn, too confident. He had that will before which everyone else’s dissipated like ghosts.

And so he kept being him, and…well, here he was. Not divorced yet, which was something of an accomplishment in his field. Surrounded by a band of brothers. But…alone.

He hadn’t felt lonely the other night, when he met her. He’d felt cocky and sure of himself, quite willing to take her dares and ask her to marry him.

But seeing her vulnerable this evening made him vulnerable, too.

He didn’t know what to do with vulnerable. Pull on body armor? Crack a joke? Bring up his weapon?

He gazed down at the pan.

“You know what would be good with an omelet?” Vi said. “Truffles.”

Chase’s contact with truffles was confined to the chocolate ones his mom made for Christmas and which had always turned splotchy brown and grainy by the time they reached him in Afghanistan. He’d hide with them inside his hooch anyway, eating them slowly and closing his eyes as tight as he could to try to pretend he was home for Christmas.