Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(43)

She couldn’t figure that out. This guy was hot sex on a stick and trouble all over, and he was obviously excellent material for a hook-up—if he didn’t ruin a woman’s life the next day, exactly what she should have expected from an arrogant male. But a woman clearly would be an idiot to let down her guard around him.

The last man on earth you’d want to have see you battered and tired and defeated. She ran her fingers through her hair, to try to make sure it didn’t look battered and tired and defeated.

He didn’t pay any attention to her, stubbornly setting up the two sliced edges of that sleeve in a clamp and now trying to thread a needle with his big fingers. It took her a while to realize that there was the faintest tinge of color on his cheeks.

“Do you want help?” she asked finally.

He shook his head.

“Do you want to eat?”

“It’s one o’clock, honey. I ate a while ago.”

She voice-activated a little music, her wind-down playlist. He tilted his head a second and then smiled a little. “Pink?”

Vi found herself grinning. “I’m still a rock star.”

“Yep.” He said it simply, giving her one flick of a glance that was like being licked with a flame. The heat of respect, admiration, attraction. “How did it go today?”

Not awesome.

“Fine.”

His smile faded. He looked at her a long moment, waiting.

“I mean…you know…great.”

His lips twisted. He waited.

“It was great to get out with my team. They needed it, and I needed it. But…” She shoved her toe against the counter. “I just can’t do anything. The restaurant is closed until the inspections are over. So I just have to sit there and take it. I can’t cook anything. I can’t make flavors come alive and send them out to all those would-be critics to tell them now say something else. I can’t focus on my work and my world, on doing what I love, and just forget all those damn yappy dogs out there exist. So I just get…torn down and torn down, while all I can think about is how my life is getting sucked down the drain. I hate it. God, I hate it.”

He gave a grimace of empathy.

“I talked to the owners, and…they’re not blaming me or anything. They’re trying to be supportive. But they took a huge risk on me, because they were excited about me, and…” She shrugged, no words to convey how much she hated to repay them with this.

Chase grimaced again. As if he understood. “Why don’t you own your own restaurant? You know you’re the kind of person who would really rather the buck stop completely with you.”

“The cost, in Paris. I’m twenty-eight, I’ve been climbing fast already. Owning my own place is my next step. I might not even have any choice about it. This might knock me right down the staircase, so I have to start back up from the bottom and open my own place even to get a chance to cook again.”

Chase said nothing for a moment, his face grim as he worked. But then he said: “You know what I like about you, Vi? One of the things. You take it for granted that you will start climbing back up. You’re not going to stay down there defeated.”

She shrugged, not understanding the compliment. Of course she was going to start climbing back up. How could anyone be willing to stay at the bottom of anything? “If only I could just cook again. Act. Then I’d barely even care, you know?”

Chase nodded and focused on his stitching for a couple of careful double stitches. “Once,” he said suddenly, and his voice choked oddly and he stopped. He took a breath and rolled his shoulders, doing a stretching thing with his neck as if to loosen up his throat. When he resumed, his voice was steady again, although lower than usual. “Once a team of ours went down in the Hindu Kush. They were overrun and…I was one of the two men on the QRF. The quick reactionary force—that’s the back-up, if a mission goes wrong. We got on that helicopter so damn fast, ready to go. To save them or go down trying. I know that sounds…sacrificial or something, but that’s not really what it feels like. It’s just the way we’re made, you know? You’d be the same. You’d find it way easier to be taking bullets and at least giving out some of your own than sitting on the sidelines helpless.”

Her body tightened all through her at the shock of what he was saying. He was talking about real bullets. Not movie bullets. Real bullets, aimed at his body. That strong, warm, human body and that skull that might seem thick enough to stop a bullet, but…wouldn’t. Her breath froze in her chest. She stared at him.

“The same way if you were on a team that was losing badly, you’d way rather be out there with your teammates giving your all to turn it around than sitting on the bench,” he tried.

It’s not exactly like a sports team, Chase. If you’re fielding bullets instead of soccer balls. If you might die. If your teammates do die. God, her heart hurt all of a sudden. As if someone was stretching it in two big hands and it was starting to tear.

“And the f*cking *s in command kept the helicopter grounded,” he said low and viciously. “They wouldn’t let us fly out. They said they didn’t want to risk losing another chopper and even more men and that it was too dangerous during daylight, and we had to sit there all the f*cking day listening to them call for help over the radio until the last one died.”