Chase Me (P 2)

by Laura Florand

  A taxi pulled up.

  Damn it. Ten taxis in a row would drive by him in this city, and she got one within five seconds? How could a man do a proper grovel in these conditions? Rain started to spit at his head again, and it was all he could do not to shoot a bird at the sky.

  She yanked the door open and then grabbed the edge of it, locking her eyes with his. “You had nothing to do with it?”

  Well…he shoved his hand through his hair. It still felt absurdly short to him since his shift to Europe. In Afghanistan, he’d had a beard and shaggy hair. “More or less nothing,” he said. “I mean—it wasn’t my fault.”

  “You’re pathetic,” she said, and climbed into the taxi and slammed the door.

  He stared after her as the heavens opened up and started pouring icy rain down on him again.

  Pathetic?

  The next time he saw one of those movies about romantic, magical Paris, he was throwing popcorn at the damn screen.

  Chapter 10

  Anyone would think a woman who had frequently had to shower off with sliced fingers or second-degree burns on her hands could handle having a hand in a splint. Vi even had a variety of vinyl gloves and plastic bags around to keep a wounded hand dry, although the doctor had said that wasn’t necessary with this splint.

  But somehow, standing under the water with her arm thrust out past the shower curtain and the pain from the fracture trying to eat its way through her brain, her head suddenly thumped against the dripping wall.

  At least with the water pouring over her face, she couldn’t tell if she’d lost the battle against the stinging in her eyes. At least she’d broken down in private, not like some nineteen-year-old in a chef’s reality show, when everything went wrong and the top chef judges tore her work to pieces in front of everyone, and the video of her flushed cheeks and wobbling voice was on YouTube forever for the whole world to see.

  Fucking YouTube. She’d drowned the clip with as many TV appearances and “how to make Vi Lenoir’s famous so-and-so” video clips as she could, but that old reality show clip still rose to the top.

  This one would, too. Everything from today—her face when she learned her restaurant was being closed for salmonella, her getting arrested, probably her hitting Chase. It would take over the Wikipedia page on her. It would drown out all her accomplishments, everything she’d done.

  Her eyes stung harder, and she stared up into the water to make sure that sting was coming from the shower and not inside her.

  Idiot. She kept her face turned up into the shower, until the water was cold, until it was icy, and finally she had to drag herself out from under it, shivering uncontrollably as she bundled herself in pajamas and bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. Normally she just blazed right through the chilly weather, barely noticing it, but this afternoon, the cold summer had seeped into her bones. She felt like ashes, trying to remember the glory of when she had been flame.

  The knocking on the door made her brace. The code on the building door had so far kept out the media who had been lying in wait, but eventually some journalist would be enterprising enough to duck in after a legitimate resident, pretending to be someone’s friend.

  And she couldn’t even call the police. Maybe she shouldn’t have thrown her phone away without having a landline.

  She checked the peephole. Chase.

  She hesitated. But then she did open it, mostly because it was hard to hit someone through a door, and braced it, ready to slam.

  “I brought you something,” he said hopefully, drawing his hand out from behind his back. A pair of red boxing gloves dangled by a string from his finger.

  Vi almost laughed. A little start of a laugh that got choked by pain and exhaustion and anger.

  “That way, if you want to hit anything…” He held them out.

  She closed the door immediately, before he could get to her again. Hadn’t she already let him ruin her life once?

  She stood for a moment on the other side of the closed door, expecting another knock, expecting him to argue or plead or state his case.

  But there was silence. She peeked through the peephole again.

  He’d gone? Just like that? Not even arguing with her about it? The guy who could argue his way out of Château d’If, probably via hot sex with the prison warden’s wife?

  She scowled and flung herself on the couch and stupidly started crying again.

  Damn it. She scrubbed her hands over her eyes and stared at the ceiling, taking deep breaths.

  After about ten minutes of trying not to contemplate the ruins of her reputation, she heard another knock.

  Only masses of flowers were visible through the peephole. She hesitated.

  But Lina or Célie might come by. In fact, she was kind of expecting—wanting? not wanting?—to have to deal with the sympathy and fury of her friends as soon as they could get to her.

  So it might be them, right? She could tell herself that, anyway, as an excuse to open the door.

  Boxing gloves bounced against it, where Chase must have left them dangling on the knob the last time.

  This time, he shoved his foot in the door immediately, bracing it open as he lowered his arms to proffer the masses of flowers.

  “What did you do, rob a florist?” she said. I hate you. But the cold and the tears must have defeated her, because she couldn’t get up the physical courage to break her other hand on him. And she’d be damned if she’d dull any more of her blades on him. She’d started her knife roll when she was fifteen. Buying her first precious blades, adding to it as she could, keeping everything carefully honed, her knives, her work, her life.

  He sure as hell didn’t deserve to have any more of them dulled against the wall by his head.

  “They didn’t have any bouquets I thought were worth you,” he said, so matter-of-factly it was confusing. It should have been a dorky attempt at a compliment. But it sounded as if he was just saying what he meant. “So I went for quantity to try to make up for it.” He thrust them at her.

  She tried to close the door on him.

  He blocked it with one big shoulder. “Hone—I mean, swee—I mean, Mademoiselle Gorgeous.”

  She arched her neck and stared at the ceiling, counting to a dozen. The number of roses in one bouquet. The others were more creative—gorgeous combinations of flowers that she recognized from the display in front of the florist just down the street. Maybe she could stuff them all down his throat. “You can say ma’moiselle.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t have to pronounce the D if it’s too hard for you.” Although the careful four chunky consonants and drawled vowels of his attempt at mademoiselle were starting to grow on her somehow. If she didn’t hate him, they might be charming.

  He stared at her a second. “I hate your damn language.” He thrust the flowers right into her chest, so that she had to either take them or drop them. “Except when you speak it. When you speak it, it’s beautiful.”

  He let go of the flowers.

  She dropped them.

  “Damn it, Vi.” He bent to pick them up. “Now you’re just being rude.”

  “You ruined my life.”

  “I sav—” He bit the word off abruptly, turning his head away, jaw set.

  “And on top of that, you used me!”

  “I…used you?” For the first time since she’d met him, anger flared in those blue eyes. “Last I checked you had a really good time!”

  She tried to slam the door on him again. It bounced off his shoulder.

  “Look, nobody made you take me home last night! I would have been happy to take you out for a while first.”

  She grabbed one of the bouquets from him and hit him over the head with it.

  “You’re gorgeous!” He pulled the bouquet away, white petals from it clinging to his hair and on one cheek. “You’re so damn fine. Hell, you are fine. You’re so fine it makes my brain shrink little bitty and then explode.” He pressed his fingers into his forehead and then flared them ou
t to indicate. “If you wanted to make me court you, you think I wouldn’t have done that? You chose to go fast. I did not use you.”

  She glared at him, both insulted and stymied. Because she made all her own choices, and made them proudly. And it was true that she’d chosen him.

  Knowing he was arrogant, cocky, uncrushable, stubborn, and doing something that was really out of line, knowing that he was challenging her and teasing her and deliberately misleading her, she had still taken him home. Because all the adrenaline in her just focused on him like he was where her energy could find its home. Because he was deliciously hot...and she was an idiot.

  Plus, in her defense, she had watched way too many Hollywood films and halfway thought his behavior was normal for an American.

  She made his brain shrink little bitty and then explode?

  His blue gaze drifted over her, and all that hard energy slowly softened out of him. “You look like you could use a cuddle or a punching bag. I have more practice at the punching bag role, but I could definitely try the cuddle.”

  “I hate you,” she said. “Go away.” But she didn’t try to close the door on him again, just turned around and trudged back into her apartment. Her slippers shuffled.

  All her proud stride, with her clicking boots, reduced to a shuffle. Oh, hell, and were her eyes red? Could he tell she’d been crying?

  She spun around, ready to attack him with flowers again to prove her strength.

  He moved lithely past her and into the small kitchen area, setting the gloves on the bar and reaching up into her cabinets. Failing to find vases, he made do with some of the larger water glasses, making a mess of the bouquets as he tried to divide them so that they would fit.

  He ended up with every single water glass she owned spread across the counter, each holding as many stems as it could, and gazed at the awkward deconstruction of the beautiful bouquets a moment, framed by red boxing gloves, then sighed.

  He did look kind of…cute, over that disarray of flowers.

  Damn it, Vi. She kicked a slipper against the floor in lieu of kicking herself.

  “Has no one given you flowers before?” he asked incredulously. “Where the hell are your vases? Wait, don’t tell me, let me guess. You broke them over the last guy’s head when he pissed you off, and that’s why he’s not around any more.”

  She mostly didn’t date. She looked like she did, she knew that. But the reality was that men hit on her, of course, and then when she actually took them up on it and went out with them, they quickly turned into wimps who found her too much to handle. She didn’t give into them enough, she fought for too much space for herself when they wanted all the space and wanted it by automatic right, not by virtue of any effort.

  She’d gotten kind of tired of men who thought she made a great sex object but not such a great, pliant girlfriend, and she’d mostly given up on the dating thing recently. Ever since she took over a two-star kitchen, she didn’t have time for a social life anyway.

  Which was probably why she’d been so deprived she’d taken up with the jerk in front of her and been willing to play his sex object. “Did I mention I hate you?”

  He picked her knife roll off the counter and set it on top of the kitchen cabinets, where she would have to climb up on something to reach it. “It’s come up a few times.”

  “Then why are you still here?”

  “Well, I’m hoping to talk you round before the wedding. Otherwise, if you try to knife me when the minister says ‘You may kiss the bride’, it’s going to cause a hell of a scandal in my family. Not as bad as the one at my cousin Ty’s wedding, but still.”

  Wow, what had happened at his cousin Ty’s wedding? She bit back on the question, furious with herself for being tempted to ask it just to see what other B.S. he made up. Damn it. This man was impossible.

  He had ruined her life. And here he was acting like that was no big deal, because of course to him it wasn’t.

  “It doesn’t even matter to you, does it?” she said.

  “What doesn’t?” he asked blankly, and she grabbed a couch pillow and threw it at him.

  It knocked over half the glasses, and he flung himself to catch them, managing to make sure not a single one hit the floor.

  The flowers and water, of course, spilled everywhere, and he got quite wet. “Damn it,” he said plaintively, looking at the mess of flowers. “You sure do take a long time to calm down.”

  He tossed the pillow back to her gently and patiently started reforming his awkward bouquets in all the glasses, adding water carefully and setting the array back in a line on the counter.

  “My life,” she said between her teeth. “That doesn’t even matter to you, does it? It was never worth anything in the first place. Compared to yours.”

  He stopped messing with the flowers and just looked at her for a long moment, holding two lilies. “I’d take a grenade for you without a second thought. So I guess it depends on your valuation system.”

  Her lips parted involuntarily. She stared at him.

  “But I do that kind of thing all the time,” he admitted. “Put my life on the line. That’s almost like you saying you’d risk second-degree burns or cutting off a finger to make me something special to eat.” He nodded to her bare right arm, where the scar from one really bad splash of oil would show all her life. “So I can see why you could say that doesn’t count.”

  Well…it wasn’t that it didn’t count, exactly. It seemed terribly…wrong, at the minimum, to say that a man’s willingness to die for you didn’t count. But…but…she thrust her hand through her wet hair, frustrated. How was it that a man could die to save your life and still not respect that life? How did they do that in their screwed up heads?

  “Honey—I mean Mademoiselle Gorgeous—I can’t tell you what’s going on. I was brought in to test security, that’s all. The rest was just an excuse to keep flirting with you. But I will say that I’m pretty damn sure that nobody, not even the stupidest idiot on the planet, weighed your life against one other life, even the President’s, and thought it wasn’t worth as much. Now they might—and I’m just theorizing here—have weighed an ignorant little lie they didn’t realize would affect you against a few thousand other lives and, yeah, sold you out. But I couldn’t say for sure, because I’m just inventing all this off the top of my head and have no idea of anything.”

  “A few thousand?” she said numbly.

  He shook his head, his lips pressing together until just for a second he looked like that grim, lethal man she’d glimpsed when he heard about Quentin. He stuck his lilies in the glass, saying nothing.

  “Was someone going to blow the restaurant up?”

  He said nothing. The firm line of his lips changed him radically. He looked trustworthy, even, and…scary. Like someone even she might not want to mess with.

  Well, that would explain why they would want to clear the restaurant. It might even explain why her career had been sacrificed to do it. But…this was Paris. Why would Americans have been involved in stopping a terrorist attack here? In warning of one, yeah, sure, but French special police would have been the ones to take action.

  “Was it some kind of sting? You caught somebody? Some kind of arms-trader or bomb-maker or financial handler for al Qaeda or ISIS or something?”

  He said nothing.

  He looked different, with that tough, tight expression on his face. Her fingers touched her mouth. “Have you killed anybody in the past twenty-four hours?”

  A flat, blank glance. “I’m just in private security, honey.”

  Private security for whom? The CIA?

  “Mademoiselle Gorgeous,” Chase corrected himself.

  “Did your president ever plan to come to my restaurant at all? Or was that all just part of some sting?”

  Chase said nothing.

  “Putain de merde.” She beat the pillow against the back of the couch, slamming it multiple times. “I can’t believe my whole career was ruined over some fucking—stupid�
��cover-up.” She slammed the pillow again. “Americans don’t have the right to intervene here. I should take this to the media.”

  “Take what? Sounds like a pretty wild-eyed story to me. The kind of thing a woman chef who bit off more than she could chew and then failed would come up with to try to cover for her own inability to handle a man’s job.”

  “Merde, I hate you,” she said viciously, her hand fisting in the pillow.

  “Yeah.” He sighed, and just for a second, both the cockiness and the grim lethalness slid off him, and he looked…sad? Not the puppy-eyes sad thing he did when he was playing her, but real emotion. “You’ve mentioned.”

  Vi slumped down onto the couch. It took a lot to make her slump. She’d thought she’d gotten it out of her system in the shower. But her day sank on her, the weight and the frustration of having her whole life randomly ruined just when she’d thought she was reaching the stars, so heavy and so dark a weight that sometimes even her anger couldn’t fight it, and it settled on her like unending despair.

  Her butt slid slowly off the couch, because she just couldn’t bear to sit that high up, and she slumped on the floor against it, burying her head in her hands. Well, in one hand, and in one chunky splint.

  “I hate this,” he said. “I really hate it. It does matter to me, Vi.”

  Not enough to tell her the truth or anything, though. “Go to hell.”

  A knock sounded. Vi lifted her head and gazed wearily at the door, and after a second Chase went to it himself. He gazed through the peephole. “Do you have a friend who’s Middle Eastern? A girl? Shorter than you. Pretty. She’s with another woman with dyed red hair who’s kind of curvy and cute and is carrying a metal box that has DR marked on it.” His face had gone grim. That expression he had when he forgot to keep joking, that always raised the hairs on her arms. As if a superhero had dropped his genial secret identity and suddenly she was in the presence of lethal force.

  The kind of lethal force that let her throw knives at him because he thought it was kind of funny.