Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(33)

Célie’s and Lina’s eyes lit up when Vi pulled an open plastic zip bag out from her refrigerator and unwrapped a dark, dirty looking lump. A pungent, earthy smell filled the room immediately. “A real one?” Célie said. “It’s July!”

“From Australia,” Vi said smugly. “Top grade, too.”

“Australians grow truffles?” Lina said doubtfully, as if Vi was suggesting something sacrilegious. “Real ones?”

“Taste it.” Vi started to slice off a sliver and cursed as her splint made that awkward. Instead of letting that stop her, though, she pulled out a cutting board and braced the mushroom on it, clumsy but managing. “I’m not sure we could ever use them in Au-dessus, because critics would have hysterics, but maybe Texans wouldn’t care.” She cut Chase a sardonic glance, but then focused on cutting three very fine slivers and gave one to each of them.

Her face had changed. Her eyes were glowing with pleasure to offer this.

Chase’s sliver was rich and earthy and unlike anything he had ever tasted before. But he knew to say, “Mmm,” and to use about the same tone he would have if Vi had just wrapped her hand around his dick.

Besides, it tasted rich, full, amazing—and it made Violette’s eyes glow.

“Wow,” he said, for good measure.

“Wait until you taste it in an omelet.” She began slicing fine slivers, hands still amazingly deft even with one partially immobilized.

“Want me to slice it?” Chase touched her wrist.

Vi yielded the knife to him with the ease of someone used to delegating to sous-chefs. “Slice it fine. Very fine.” She bent to pull out two more skillets and set butter to melting in one, white wine to reducing in another, while Chase sliced. He eyed her sidelong. She was smiling a little as she worked, relaxed.

Well, hell. He’d finally figured out how to calm Vi down. Give her food to work with and hungry people to feed. That was what made her happy.

And she hadn’t been able to do it today, in her moment of crisis. Because he’d had her restaurant shut down. So he’d been party to not only the worst thing that could happen to her, career-wise, but to eliminating the way she dealt with bad things that happened to her. Her cooking.

She added flour to the butter, a rich, nutty scent rising off it, then whisked in the reduced wine and something that looked like sour cream but that she called crème fra?che. She dipped a spoon in it and put it to his lips, to make him taste the difference.

He smiled, loving the fact that she wanted to put flavors straight into his mouth.

She took the bulk of the truffles he had sliced, grabbed the knife and minced them even finer, then dumped them into the sauce, putting the skillet on the back burner to warm gently. “Now for the omelet.”

So he melted the butter with a sizzle and started to pour the eggs in.

“You’d better let me do it,” Vi said.

Seriously? He couldn’t even make an omelet right? “You should see me work a grill.”

Vi actually grinned. “For an omelet?”

“Everything is better with a grill,” he said loftily.

She laughed. And slipped between him and his pan, so that he got to stand with his chest brushing her back and one hand against the lower counter by the stove, framing her like they were…together or something, her body shifting against his as she rapidly twirled the pan with the egg in it rather than pushed the egg around with the spatula. Her hair smelled really nice, so fresh from the shower, and the warm, hungry scents of butter rose from the pan and mixed with white wine and truffles.

She was messing up his ability to compartmentalize. She was accessing all the emotions he set aside in a box for when he was back home.

And some new emotions he had no idea what to do with, since he and the men he spent his life around dealt with their deepest emotions by pretending they didn’t exist.

Might as well take the appearance of unicorns in stride as handle the emotions that rose up when a slim, proud woman stood with her hair brushing his chin as she worked in the circle of his body, holding a spatula with the thumb and finger she could still move with that splint on, where she had broken it on his jaw. Broken it because, to her, he had destroyed her life as if she was nothing.

She would never understand that he’d been protecting her life, as if it was everything.

What did you do with those emotions? When you’d spent ten years trying to box them up in a little carton labeled “impossible things” and pack them out of the way?

He knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to let his head slowly tip forward until it rested on her head and sigh some of his size and strength out so that he was small enough to fit in this space and just stay there a moment, with his eyes closed, breathing her in.

Just as well that she’d probably elbow him in the ribs or something if he did. Kept a man on his toes.

In what was so deceptively close to the shelter of his body—he felt like he was sheltering her, but she probably didn’t feel that way at all—Vi dribbled the truffle sauce down the center of the omelet, folded it, sprinkled it with a pinch of some special sea salt, and slid it on a plate for Célie and Lina. Then she set about making another one.

“Let me try.” Chase brought his other arm around before she could shift away, taking the pan and the spatula and holding them around her, so that she was captured by his body while he worked.