Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(53)

But he’d never actually had to deal with it, that disconnect between his job and the life that went on without him, not on such an intimate scale as the one created by a couple. He didn’t like it, he could flat out say that.

“You’ve been gone for over a week,” Vi said, tight and hard. “Without a word. And now you waltz back in during the service? And kiss me and manhandle me in front of my whole team? The second day we’re back open when I’ve got everything to prove to recover my reputation and the reputation of this restaurant from the depths to which you knocked it?”

“I didn’t—it—” It was for a good cause, he wanted to say. The salmonella thing. We caught Al-Mofti. Didn’t you hear it on the news this morning?

Probably this wasn’t a good place for that revelation. Probably she needed a security clearance. Probably no one was going to give him the okay to tell a hot blonde Frenchwoman in leather anything about anything at all. They’d all seen James Bond, too.

He focused on the one thing he could solve. “Didn’t you get my message?”

“Oh, I think I got it.” Vi folded her arms. “The one where you’re full of shit? Where you say all kinds of things when you’re horny and then you forget them entirely and go off to live your own life until you’re horny again?”

A muscle started to tick in his own jaw. “The one where I told you I was going to be gone for a while. The one where I asked you to get a new phone and give me the number in case I got a chance to call.”

Her eyes blazed. “I don’t sit by the phone and wait for anyone to call.”

“Vi.” He shoved his hand through his hair, hurt and anger twining inextricably. “Not even for me?”

It was a freaking cell phone, it wasn’t as if he was asking her to shut herself into her apartment and not go out with her friends. And even if he was…people had to time calls like that all the time, when they were deployed. Their one chance to Skype with each other that week, to say hi, to touch home. It was important when you were deployed. It was important to the people at home, too, right? Important enough for them to sit at home one night if they had to, to catch that call?

Right?

“Just because I had hot sex with a man doesn’t mean I have to change my life for him,” Vi said coldly.

He almost staggered. “Okay, what the f*ck, Vi?” The emotions thing they’d talked about. The fragile silky cloths in all their colors? She was shredding them, after he’d been so brave about letting them out?

He’d only been away a little over a week. It wasn’t as if he’d gone for a golf trip.

“There are more fish in the sea,” she said, with her chin up, her eyes hot.

His jaw clenched. A little fuse in his brain just sparked, and the flame started racing down a very short line to the dynamite in the middle of his head. “That goes both ways, honey,” he said, even though he didn’t mean it, and it was the worst possible thing he could say. She’d just flipped his freaking switch so damn bad.

Her eyes blazed. “Let’s just sum it up, shall we? You think what you do is so much more important than me that it’s beyond my comprehension and you could never tell me what it is. You think this,” she waved at the blinds and presumably the kitchen beyond them, “my whole life, all my dreams, is casual road kill as you roll your tank over it to some other goal of yours. And you think my own emotions, my worry is so irrelevant and so unimportant that you can just disappear for a week and not even think about what I might feel. Just show up the first second I’m starting to put the life you destroyed back together and expect me to be thrilled to see you, no harm, no foul.”

“I left you a message!” Chase roared. “It’s in your goddamn journal under your stupid alarm clock with its f*cking siren!”

Her eyes glittered. Her fingers flexed into her palms, forming fists and then forcing them apart. He drew a deep breath, trying to un-explode himself. He was pretty sure she was just like him. Once the yelling started, it was much easier to fight than to hear what was being said.

But un-exploding himself was hard to do. He felt as if he was trying to catch jagged shrapnel of his self-control and stuff it back into some semblance of a brain while it was still flying outward from the pressure of the blast. “Look. Vi. My job is really demanding and really important and sometimes—”

“And mine’s not?” Her own fuse lit. He could see it happen. Just see the explosion as she lost all possibility of hearing him or rational discussion. “You bastard. Just get the hell out! I. Am. Working.”

She jerked her office door open and strode out, slamming it behind her.

***

The glass walls weren’t nearly sound-proof enough, and everyone lifted heads to stare at her as she strode back into the foment of activity.

She cast one fierce glance around, all it took to redouble her staff’s activity. Energy radiated off her as if she was a radioactive core. She could not believe that jerk Chase. Disappear for over a week and then show up now, now of all times, when they’d just re-opened after a disastrous scandal, when there were at least three influential critics at the tables, and she was still clinging desperately to the increasingly slim possibility that Secret Service would suddenly flood the place and give her a half-hour warning that the American president was about to arrive.