Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(35)

“Mademoiselle Gorgeous,” he corrected himself.

“Oh, shut up.” She closed her eyes. He smiled at her. He couldn’t help it. She was so pretty, and every time she told him to shut up or threw something at him, he got such a charge out of it. Besides, he would way rather she fight him than go down without any fight at all just because she had no visible opponent.

She opened her eyes again and caught him smiling. Oops. Green eyes gazed at him a long moment. “I’ve known Lina for years,” she said suddenly. “She’s a fantastic pastry chef, and if you guys are suspecting her of something just because her grandparents came from Syria and Algeria, you’re racist idiots.”

Not suspecting, no. But she did have that cousin. Of course, Chase had cousins himself, and if he had to take the blame for everything a couple of them did, he’d be in jail right along with them.

Still, no harm in stirring the pot. See if Lina mentioned to anyone the suspicious American military guy hanging around Vi, see if that tenuous is-anything-wrong information spread in certain directions, if Chase’s ambiguous appearance in Vi’s life and the salmonella story stirred up enough doubt to pick up chatter and phone calls they could trace. Or see if there was no reaction at all and no need to worry so damn much.

About Vi’s beloved city getting bloodied again, about her tasting one of those caramels or something, happy and alive…and then the ricin setting in. About watching her die. No antidote, no cure.

“I could take a shot at the cuddle.” He tried not to sound too desperately hopeful for one. Especially since the idea of a cuddle made him feel a bit like his first HALO jump. Looking out from a plane at twenty thousand feet and realizing that, after all, he did have a fear of heights. At least when he was that high and had to jump.

Her eyebrows crinkled, and she gave him a look as if he was the most baffling man ever invented. He was pretty sure that was just due to a peculiarly limited experience with men, because, hell…he’d been about as open and straightforward as it was possible for a man doing such highly classified work to be.

You’re hot. Can I come home with you? Oh, I can. Hot damn. Will you marry me? Not sure yet? I’ll keep asking.

“I’ll just…try it, okay?” He shifted off his couch. Vi wouldn’t like being the one trapped between the couch back and him, so he eased his body down between the back of her couch and her. After all, she was smaller, and if he wanted to break free, he could just move her. If he locked her in, she couldn’t get free unless he let her, and she would hate that.

She didn’t hit him or anything when he lined his body up with hers. Either he was growing on her, or she was just exhausted. He was kind of tired himself. He hadn’t slept in over thirty-six hours.

He laid his arm over her waist, shifting them gently until her back was nestled against his chest, her butt against his groin—nice—and he could smell her hair without being suffocated in it.

He checked her expression. Ironic.

Ha. She expected him to try to turn this into sex, didn’t she?

Well, he would just show her.

He caught a firm grip on his will. That didn’t stop him getting aroused, because even his will had limits.

But he didn’t do anything about it. He held her. Quietly.

And it really was kind of like a HALO jump. After you got yourself out of the plane and started free-falling, it was both adrenaline-filled and peaceful.

Maybe it was even more like a HAHO jump. You got your chute open early, right after you left the plane, and then just floated through beauty for forty miles, until you had to land and go kill somebody.

No. It’s not like anything that involves blood or guns at all. He adjusted his compartments in his brain sternly. Sometimes it would help if he had a greater variety of references. For all that he had done pretty nearly any impossible physical challenge known to man, since the age of eighteen all of his own training in those physical exploits involved guns or explosives at some point, or possibly knives.

He wondered if most of her experiences involved at some point getting burned.

His finger touched the splattering of dots of paler skin on her forearm. Grease, probably. He reached the black splint and traced over it gently. “I’m sorry about this.”

“Sorry that I hit you?” Vi asked incredulously.

He nodded. It made his nose brush her sweet-smelling hair. Made him damn grateful he still had his sense of smell. A lot of guys had lost theirs. IEDs or even minor things…turned out that sometimes even small impacts on the head could mess up the sense of smell. One of the many things that, once lost, you never got back. “I was being an ass. You never could have landed that punch if I hadn’t let you.”

Vi stiffened indignantly. “Let me?”

“You telegraph, hon—gorgeous. And that whole thing about staying under on purpose to make you worry about me, when your whole life had just fallen down around your ears? Yeah. An ass.”

“Staying under?” Vi said blankly.

Hey. “You did notice I went into the river, didn’t you?”

“My hand hurt.”

“I was under three minutes!”

“You showered off since then, right? Because that thing is filthy.”

“I’ve been dragged through worse,” Chase said wryly.

To his surprise, Vi touched his hand. With her good hand, she traced over one of his knuckles, all the way down to the tip of his index finger. She touched a scar and then another small scar, the kind a man picked up from all kinds of things when it got so hot he didn’t want to wear his gloves—the gravel flying up in rotor wash, a slide down a rough slope. She took his hand and turned it over, studying the calluses from handling weapons and weights and climbs. “Yeah. I’ll bet,” she said so quietly it was almost as if she was talking to herself.