Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(36)

Her words gave him the oddest feeling. As if she could almost understand things about him. A woman who’d been challenging herself in tough conditions since she was fifteen. As if they might come from opposite worlds and yet somehow…like spoke to like.

She had her own calluses—the pads at the base of her fingers and the smooth, tough skin where a knife handle fit between her thumb and index finger that was not too different from the ones he had from handling guns. He traced them. “You’ve got great hands.”

She gave a startled twist of her head, trying to catch his expression.

“Strong.” He closed his hand over her unbroken one in a solid claim of it. “Pretty.”

She forced her head around farther, finally far enough to stare at him. Jesus, first she had no vases for flowers, and now a compliment on her hands surprised her? “Do you have really lousy taste in men or something? Who the hell have you been dating before me?”

Her lips parted in astonishment.

He bit down hard on the urge to lean forward and kiss them. He was not going to turn this into sex. Her expectations of him were way too low already.

That would teach him to have sex on the first date. It was hard to sell a woman a cow when…

“Well…not you,” she said finally, a little wryly, as if him summed up something pretty…unique.

A warm glow tried to swell under his breastbone, like a bubble he was a little afraid might pop and do something unpleasant to him. He’d never had to fight dolphins to the actual death, but he’d been on deep water training exercises against dolphins defending harbors, when every time a dolphin punched the hell out of you with a tagging device, it meant that in a real attempt to infiltrate an enemy harbor you would have been given a dolphin-delivered embolism, instantly lethal. She was like a dolphin—fast and sleek, and she’d hit him out of nowhere.

Okay, and it would be so helpful right now if he had any metaphors that didn’t involve somebody getting killed.

“I’m just going to go ahead and reset your bar for men a little higher.” He snugged his arm around her more firmly. This whole cuddle thing felt fantastic. He was glad he’d gotten himself to jump out of that safe plane into it.

“For the next man?” Vi said, constrained. She relaxed her head back onto the arm of the couch so she wasn’t looking at him any more.

He frowned down at the top of her cowardly head. If he was braving this, damn it… “My grandmother would kick my ass if I ever got a divorce. So no. Not for the next man.”

Tough it up, Vi, hell. I’m trying to let down my guard.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she muttered. But she didn’t try to elbow her way free of him or anything.

He smiled, dipping his head into her hair to hide it and just to enjoy her scent at the same time. Damn. This cuddle stuff was really addictive. He might should go easy on it.

But he didn’t pull away, shifting their hands so that he half held hers and she half held his, running his thumb over the soft spots and the callused ones, the inside of her knuckles, the lines of her palm.

“You’ve got pretty nice hands yourself,” she said suddenly. The warm bubble inside him spread, not like a lethal embolism, but dissipating through him in this fuzzy, golden glow. Hell, she’d paid him a compliment. A direct, sincere one. “Strong. Capable.”

“I’m late for my manicure, though,” he said sadly, turning his hand over to stretch out his fingers and display the lousy state of his cuticles.

She gave a little choke of laughter, and his arm squeezed her in involuntary pleasure. Ha. He’d gotten her to laugh again.

He closed his hand around hers again, holding onto it. He wondered if one of those French guys she was used to dating could get away with kissing her hand. Because, well…he kind of wanted to.

His cheeks heated, and he bent his head into her hair again to hide them, even though there was no one else to see.

“Hey. Vi,” he said, low.

She didn’t say anything, but she gave what might be interpreted as an inquiring squeeze of her hand.

“I’m not so good at the poor, pitiful you stuff. Where I come from, a man’s life isn’t over unless he’s actually dead. And you don’t seem pitiful to me. You seem brave and beautiful.”

A little breath moved through her body, and her hand tightened on his.

“So I guess what I’m trying to say here is…if you need someone to kiss your skinned knee, I’m actually pretty lousy at that. But”—he gave her a little squeeze, pressing her more snugly against his chest—“I’ve got your back.”

He braced for her to say something satirical like “and a knife ready for it?”

But she didn’t.

She must really, really be tired, was all he could figure.

Her fingers linked with his, securely, as if she was claiming him. A little sigh ran through her body. He waited a while, running through all the other things she probably wanted to talk about and trying to think what he could say besides “just in private security, honey.”

And then finally realized that she had fallen asleep.

Hunh.

He stared down at her blond head. Now he felt all backed up with things he wanted to talk about, but…

For Christ’s sake, what was wrong with him? Couldn’t he just appreciate that he’d been saved by a snore?