Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(62)

She held up a finger. “You still should have told me about it. Keeping the staff and guests safe is my responsibility.”

He nodded resolutely. And then added, “Going on top-secret missions that affect multiple lives is mine.”

They gazed at each other a long, stubborn moment. Impossible really to tell who was the first one to start to smile just enough to encourage the other to smile, too. “I’m not giving in on this one,” Vi warned.

“I know. Of course, I’m not either.”

They both broke into bigger smiles. “You know it’s really kind of fun to box with someone who is up to your weight,” Vi said. “It doesn’t happen that often.”

Chase grinned at her and flexed one arm to make his biceps pop.

She laughed and returned her gaze to the phone number he had left her from the very first, and the drawing of wedding rings. He had left that note as he left her bed to go take over her career choices with macho conviction, hadn’t he? She shook her head at the impossible tangle of emotions he evoked. “It’s a good thing you have such good survival skills.”

“Five months and seven days left,” Chase said brightly.

She gave him a querying look.

“Until January 1. If I survive until then, you said. I was going to do little tally marks on the wall behind your bed like they do in prison movies or ones where people are stranded on a desert island. I get hot sex still, though, right? I mean, you’re not going to deny a man basic sustenance.”

She laughed and shook her head at him and turned the page in her journal.

Damn, you’re beautiful.

XO.

Chase.

She looked back at him.

He arched his head to try to see the page, and blushed some more. “That was the night you fell asleep. I was thinking I should probably go, but then…I didn’t.”

Her cheeks felt a little heated, too. Damn, you’re beautiful. She wanted to frame the words, to keep them for years and years and years.

She turned the page.

Got to make a quick trip out of town. Don’t mention it to anyone, okay?

A heart symbol this time, and Chase.

And:

P.S. Call me maybe?

A funny stick figure holding a phone, giant tears arching out of his eyes and over his head an image of his heart breaking.

A smile trembled on her lips. Funny, demanding, arrogant Chase, who apparently had never once just walked out on her without making sure she knew he’d be back.

“I put it in a very obvious spot!” he said. “Pinned open by your alarm clock. How could you not have seen it?”

She leaned back on the pillows, demonstrating flinging her arm out to fumble and knock an alarm clock to the floor. She still couldn’t stretch her arm out far, the movement pulled too much at her torso.

“Fine,” he said. “Next time I’ll write it in Sharpie on your forehead so you can see it when you look in the bathroom mirror.”

“Or, alternatively, if you want to survive, you could try the bathroom mirror itself. Or a note on the door. Pretty nearly impossible for me to leave the apartment without seeing a note on the door.”

“I sometimes go out the window,” Chase confided. “Just to keep life interesting.”

Vi had to grin. “You do keep life interesting, all right.”

Chase looked smug, licked his finger, and drew a point in his favor in the air.

She laughed. It was a happy thought, all that life and interest and challenge and a willingness always to answer her own challenges, always to pick up her gauntlets.

“Speaking of keeping life interesting, you know what’s terrible about hospitals?”

“Oh, I could make a really long list at this point,” Vi said, a little grimly. Pretty much the only good thing she had found about hospitals so far was that hospitals were the reason they were both alive. It turned out survival could be quite a painful, tedious process full of doctors and nurses with no respect for a woman’s privacy, absolutely terrible food when Lina and Célie couldn’t sneak them some, and a relentless smell of antiseptic.

“The lack of sex.” Chase shook his head. “It’s insane what they expect a man to live without. Also, French daytime television is terrible, can I just say? There was some exercise show with the woman trying to convince other women to do step exercises in high heels. You people are nuts. Fortunately, it did give me some ideas about you and steps and high heels, but I’m saving those for a more-healed rainy day. Now for barely out of the hospital, thank God you’re alive, take it very easy sex, I was thinking…”

“That sometimes you talk too much.” Vi put her fingers over his lips. “I was thinking…” She turned off the light, gave them just that gentle twilight of the July summer evening. “…something like this.” She drew her fingertips very, very lightly, as if he was fragile, all the way down his arm to the back of his knuckles, then took his hand and covered her breast.

“Vi.” His voice had gone low and rough. “I’m so glad you’re alive that I wake up in nightmares about it, over and over.”

“I know.” And nightmares about everyone in her kitchens being killed, and about terrible, jagged things she couldn’t even identify before they woke her in sharp terror. She shifted his hand over her breast, stroking herself with him. The hunger that woke in her was sharp and ferocious, a tantalizing counterpoint to the gentleness with which they touched. “Tonight, let’s see if we find a way to get some sleep.”