Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(44)

His knee jerked up into the table as he made a hard movement, the crack of the contact sounding through the room. He caught himself and took a deep breath, bending his head. No, it was more than his head. For a moment, he hunched into himself, as if his stomach hurt.

Vi stared at him, beyond words. She felt dizzy, as if she was spinning over vaguely formed mountaintops in another country, trying to peer down through her own fuzzy inability to imagine them to what death and violence looked like in their…snow? Tundra? She handled a lot of dead animal bodies. Did exposed human flesh and bone look the same? Nausea rose up in her.

“Oh, God, I’m so sorry.” Her voice puffed out of her harshly, stuffed and strangled. She came off the stool to go kneel across the table from him.

He shoved her words away with a push of his hand, then shoved that same hand across his face and through his hair. Rolled his shoulders. Then shook his head once like a dog shedding water and smiled at her, that easy smile of his. “It was a long time ago,” he said, and only a little roughness under his voice belied the relaxed tone. “I’m a civilian now.”

“Oh, yeah, what the f*ck ever.” She put her hand over his, because all words sounded lame, and just held on tight to that callused, scarred hand.

He bent his head and gazed at their joined hands a moment. His eyes closed, and he took a deep breath, his thumb shifting to catch her hand and keep it around his.

“The November attacks,” she said, low. “I mean…I went to the Bataclan all the time. It’s just a couple of streets over. Nobody even knew what was happening, and then…all you can do is leave candles and flowers. When you want to hit someone, to rage. We try not to think about it too much, because…we want to be alive, we want to be Paris still. But…yeah. It’s horrible to have nothing you can do. You don’t know how many people enlisted in the French military the week after those attacks, in order to try to do something.”

“Oh…I have some idea,” Chase said with an odd somber wryness.

When had he enlisted? He must have been a young teenager for the attacks on New York. Too young to enlist yet, but it would have marked him.

His hand tightened slowly on hers.

“I’ll survive this,” Vi told him, her tone adamant. “There’s no doubt about that.”

His eyes opened, and light came back into them as they ran over her. Genuine light, that vivid blue pleasure. “I know you will, honey,” he said. “God, you’re so alive. Life just comes right off you like electricity.” He cupped his free hand just shy of her hair, as if he was savoring the buzz. “Damn, you’re gorgeous."

“You are, too,” she said, and instead of grinning cockily, he flushed a little and gave her a funny, awkward smile.

“In your arrogant, annoying way,” she said, and his smile relaxed a little into more genuine humor. “Did you just one up my own tragedy?”

“Your tragedies are wussy.” But his eyes flickered as he tried to joke, and his attempt at a grand, dismissive gesture came off wooden.

Yeah, so…yeah, she was an idiot, to try humor for that. Some things humor just didn’t work for. She squeezed his hand again and settled onto the floor, leaning against the table.

He was quiet for a long time, just gazing at her hand over his and stroking it slowly with his thumb. “Sorry,” he said eventually, voice a little rough.

“Seriously, don’t make me hit you.”

A little smile came back. He squeezed her hand and let it go, picking up the needles again.

She felt stupid now, to have made such a big deal out of her jacket. Even if he should not take over her choices and ruin her beautiful jacket. But still…it was only a jacket. It wasn’t friends lying dead in the mountains.

But watching him slowly and painstakingly try to heal that unhealable wound in the leather, she didn’t stop him.

Maybe healing unhealable wounds was something they both needed to know how to do.

The reality of this big, sexy, hard-willed man who clowned and teased and who…what? He had to be part of a counterterrorism unit. Or working for the CIA in some capacity. That was the only thing she could figure. What the hell else could a military man from Texas whose eyes flickered when she mentioned Navy SEALs be doing in France breaking into restaurants his president might be visiting and then, if she was right, getting them shut down? Bastard.

A laughing bastard who…had spent most of his adult life in Afghanistan and Iraq, maybe? One of those guys who fast-roped into compounds in the middle of the night and took out the enemies of their country and…got shot at. Stepped on mines. Killed people.

That Hindu Kush event that still ate at him…he was upset because his commanders had refused to let him go die, too.

She rested her folded arms on the table as she watched him. Under the table she shifted just enough that her knee tucked against his thigh. Human touch.

He had gotten the needles threaded and was checking the instructions on his iPad. Now he was starting the stitching, which apparently required two needles going at once in opposite directions.

Blue eyes squinted in concentration, so that she could see exactly how they had squinted time and again to leave those lines at their corners. Sun-streaked brown hair a little shaggy for a military man.

“Did you have a beard recently?” she said suddenly, startled.