Chase Me (P 2)

by Laura Florand

  Joss just looked at her with steady, faintly challenging, hazel eyes. “Since you attract essentially every man alive, just by walking by, I’m going to go ahead and insist it’s a selection issue.”

  Vi scowled at him.

  “Are you sure nothing is wrong?” Célie asked. “Did you call him?”

  Vi’s stomach clenched around that worry, that had woken so small and innocent in her only five days before but had long since stretched its cute little tentacles out in her belly, planted them, and started to feed. It was a monster worry now.

  She infinitely preferred to believe that she’d been dumped by an emotional coward than to focus on that worry.

  If she concentrated really hard on all her past history with men and not Chase himself, that dumped-by-a-coward scenario almost seemed likely.

  “I don’t have his number,” she said.

  Célie’s lips rounded.

  Vi flushed. Yes. That made her seem like nothing but a booty call.

  “Does he have yours?” Lina asked. With her glossy, loose curls and pretty face, Lina looked as sweet and delicate as her desserts, and she’d learned from childhood to have a sure, tough inner core, therefore. Perception, balance, and sense, to Vi’s energy and flamboyance. They worked well together at Au-dessus.

  “I threw my phone into the river.” Vi had ended up getting a disposable phone so she could argue with health inspectors and harass them every hour for results, but she was trying to put off having a new smartphone until the ugliest chatter about her had died down on Twitter.

  Chase didn’t have the disposable phone’s number, though. She’d bought it after he disappeared. She’d called that embassy number yesterday, but they’d acted as if they’d never even heard of a Chase Smith.

  She slanted a glance at Lina. “Your cousin hasn’t been doing anything weird, has he? Receiving strange guests from Belgium?”

  Lina glanced around to make sure no one else in line could overhear them and shook her head. Lina had a cousin who was the despair of their mutual grandparents, a weaselly jerk who had grown more and more weaselly through high school—at seventeen, he’d once grabbed sixteen-year-old Vi’s breasts in the stairwell of Lina’s building and tried to trap her against the wall, and she’d kneed him and shoved him down the stairs—and who had ended up in gangs, then fallen under the sway of some weirdo imam and started spouting pseudo-religious nonsense that sure as hell didn’t correspond to anything Lina or her parents believed, and then run off to Syria and come back fairly soon after, with his tail between his legs.

  Everybody in the family worried about him, and Lina personally hated him, but the police did nothing at all. So apparently he was just a misogynist jerk who liked to fantasize about killing people.

  Right.

  Vi gave her shoulders a flick as if to rid herself of uncleanness just thinking about him and focused on the shrinking line. She would really like to be in a dark theater with a very funny comedian making her laugh, already.

  Lina’s weaselly wannabe cousin is the very last person who would actually know if something was going down right now. Something big enough that American special ops would be involved, inside France.

  She couldn’t even imagine anything big enough that the French would allow Americans a hand in it, on their soil. The guy responsible for the Christmas flight, maybe. Al-Mofti. She really had no idea whatsoever how countries cooperated on this kind of thing, but she could see them wanting that to be a joint operation. Maybe the Americans would say, We’ve got some information, but we want to be in on the kill.

  A vision of Chase, big and easy and grinning and doing his puppy eyes, flashed through her, and all the hair on her arms lifted. She shivered, rubbing her arms.

  The wounds of the last attacks in Paris had been immediate. She’d seen with her own eyes the blood on the street only a couple of blocks away, the bullet holes in the walls, she’d laid flowers in memorial. She’d opened her doors to people stranded, fed them in her restaurant for free that night, gone out the next night when so many people were huddling inside, and, along with Célie and Lina and her team and Célie’s boyfriend Joss and her boss Dom and his wife and just so many, many people, been part of those Parisians who surged onto the terraces again, saying, Fuck you. We might be afraid, and we might be wounded, but we won’t hide and we won’t give in. We’re still Paris.

  So she knew plenty of people fighting terrorists emotionally, by refusing to give in to discrimination or by going out into the streets and celebrating life and being together.

  But she had never known anyone fighting terrorists with bullets. Well, she knew some police officers, but more everyday riot police and traffic cops. Not RAID.

  Not…she pushed her hand through her hair…not American black ops. Not outside of movies.

  And a hundred scenes from Hollywood of men in black or camouflage with guns raised, going in, rose in her brain, and she tried to put Chase in the place of one of those men, and…

  “You okay?” Célie said.

  “Need a jacket?” Joss asked.

  “I’m okay,” Vi lied. And, as the line shifted forward, “Oh, thank God, we finally get to go in. This guy had better be hilarious.”

  He was, but not enough to take Vi’s mind off the utter bizarreness of receiving a call from the health inspectors right at intermission. It was nine o’clock at night. “We just wanted to inform you as early as possible that the test results came back negative, and the salmonella in your clients was traced to spinach they purchased at the grocery store. Your restaurant is cleared, and you can return to operations.”

  Vi hung up and went back to her seat, staring at the comedian as he came back out on stage. She needed to call her publicist and try to get the vindication of Au-dessus and Violette Lenoir out as far and wide as possible, even if it would never have the same reach as the story that she had poisoned the president. She needed to call the U.S. embassy and see if the president would still come on his visit the day after tomorrow. She needed to get up early for the market tomorrow and figure out a menu that would absolutely knock everyone’s socks off.

  But she couldn’t shake the conviction that her restaurant had been caught up in the throes of something she knew nothing about, that Chase was at the center of it…and that something might have happened that very day and she had no idea what.

  The comedian might have been funny, his second half. But she didn’t hear anything he said at all.

  Chapter 16

  Chase bounced into the kitchens of Au-dessus like he was about to bounce right through the ceiling. He felt like one of those men on the moon—if he wasn’t careful, he’d bounce himself into space.

  Au-dessus must be busy—what was it, eight p.m.?—because scents and sounds filled the kitchen, heady and clashing and warm. Color splashed across plates in ardent drama. There was motion everywhere and Vi was in full swing, precise and graceful like a whip cracking, pivoting between one station and another, checking food, confirming orders were coming up, calling for waiters.

  Aww, look at her in her white coat and with her hair piled up on the back of her head and her skin glowing with perspiration, making everybody do what she wanted. She moved as if this whole kitchen was her orchestra, only they didn’t line up in front of her where she could see them, they were all around her, and her whole body was the conductor’s wand, jabbing, dancing, lifting, guiding, making sure everyone’s note came in at just the right moment, just the right way. Hell, she was hot.

  As soon as he saw her, all that energy in him figured out exactly what it wanted to do with itself.

  He sprang across the kitchens, so happy to see her and so full of himself he could barely stand it, caught her by the waist just as she pivoted toward him, lifted her up, and swung her around.

  All around them, every single motion stopped for five full seconds. Any threat making the gazelles here freeze? No. They were just staring at him and Vi. So he dismissed them from his attention.

 
“Miss me?” He grinned up at her, set her down, swept her into his arms to squeeze her, and kissed her hard.

  Damn that felt good.

  He tried to do it again, and Vi shoved him, ducked, squirmed and…wait, what? He loosened his arms, staring at her in confused hurt.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked between her teeth.

  Returning as a conquering hero? Ready to celebrate? Happy to see her? Okay, she didn’t know about the conquering hero part because it was really better she not, but…wasn’t the rest obvious? “Damn, I missed you,” he said, and started to reach for her again.

  She shoved him back from her. “I’m working.”

  Well…yeah, but…he’d been gone for more than a week. And he had ten stitches up his shoulder from a shrapnel wound for his job, and he and his team had just taken out one of the most wanted terrorists in the world.

  A little kiss might be nice.

  “I just got in,” he said. “Didn’t you miss me?”

  Vi stared at him, and a muscle in her jaw flexed. She spun suddenly toward her staff. “Get back to work. I don’t need to remind you how perfect everything needs to be today. Adrien.” She jerked her chin at a young man and then jerked her chin at Chase in a very similar way but with more disfavor and strode into her office.

  He followed after her, starting to get a little indignant, and let the door close behind them. The office was glass-walled. Vi reached up and closed the blinds, then spun on him.

  Chase folded his arms. “What a warm welcome.”

  He’d heard about these kinds of things. You just shot Bin Laden or something, and you come home and your wife puts your kid in your arms and says his diaper needs changing and it’s about time you started pitching in.

  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 fuck, 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 fucking 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.

  But of course when had Chase ever for one moment really considered that her job was important?

  She was twenty-eight years old, a Michelin two-star chef, and yet to him, just like to every other man, she was still some cute little woman whose career could never possibly be anything but fluff, easily brushed away when the man’s important job took precedence.

  A man who considered his job so important he couldn’t even tell her about it. What the hell had he been doing this past week? Had he had anything to do with Al-Mofti’s death that had been all over the media that morning? Was it coincidence that the dropping of the salmonella investigation happened at the same time? Could anyone possibly tell her what the hell was going on that put her restaurant at the center of this? Was the connection some figment of her imagination?

  Lina came by, carrying an open bucket of liquid nitrogen, vapor rising off it as she called, ironically, “Chaud, chaud, chaud! Chaud devant!”

  Mikha
il shaved red tuna with a knife so sharp each slice was transparent.

  One of their newer cooks dropped slices of beef into a pan with three centimeters of hot oil, and Vi leaned over him, grabbing the handle. “Not yet. Like this. Watch—”

  And a wave ran through the kitchens, a stiffening in shock, like the moment when a lion appears and every member of the herd responds to the reaction of the first gazelle to spot it. In that alert kitchen, reaction time was probably shorter than half a second.

  Secret Service? Vi spun and—

  Black mask. A man struggling with a machine gun as if something was wrong with it, yelling at everyone to get down, and…

  Holy fucking shit.

  She swept the pan she was holding around in one hard arc and threw it, oil and all, at his head. Lina heaved that whole bucket of liquid nitrogen straight into the man’s chest. Mikhail reversed his knife and threw.

  And…oh, shit, there was another man, surging behind this one, and his gun was not jammed, and…

  Vi leapt across the counter toward him, grabbing more pans as Lina threw herself on the floor and toward his legs and Adrien grabbed a blow torch, lunging in from the side as he squeezed out flame, and…

  The second masked man staggered again, again, again, his machine gun giving a little spurt—her brain managed to process that she was seeing the impact of bullets on his body. And then she heard the bullets, in strange delayed echo in her brain, sounds it was finally identifying. She’d never heard bullets except on film. And at a distance that night…that night in November when…

  “Vi, get the hell down!” someone was yelling. “Get down!”

  But she’d already slammed the pot she held as hard as she could into the second man’s face.

  He went down, and she went down on top of him, her legs going right out from under her as if she’d slipped or something.