Her eyes lifted suddenly and met his. Their gazes held for an odd moment. He was the one who looked down.
He looked back up almost immediately, feeling almost—and this was surreal—shy. But she had already turned her head. A moment later, when he was watching vibrant Célie as she spoke, he thought Vi looked at him again, but couldn’t catch her at it.
That was okay. The less she looked at him, the more he could watch her. That fine, proud chin of hers, the beautiful cheekbones, the way her hair slid over her shoulder when she turned her head, making his own skin itch to know what that felt like sliding over his.
Watching her made him feel naked.
He frowned into his nearly full wine glass and then set it aside, resting his head against the arm of the couch behind him, trying to turn his brain off. Just be in the moment.
He was good at being in the moment, but this one scared him. He kept wanting to escape out of it to long-term planning or worrying about the past and future, because the moment itself felt too wide open and full of wishing.
It was after midnight before Vi’s friends finally went home. Chase sank his butt more firmly into the floor as they kept giving him insistent glances while they were getting their things. Célie jerked her chin at him and said something low-voiced to Vi.
“It’s okay,” Vi said. “I want to talk to him.”
Damn talking. But that sounded like a reprieve, where kicking him out was concerned, so he stood to shake hands good-bye with the women.
They looked at his handshake bemusedly. But neither of them offered to do that kissing thing instead that they’d taught him about in his LREC training.
By the time Vi had closed the door on her friends, he had managed to get back to one of the two couches and stretch out on it, making his body as heavy and supine as possible. A two-hundred-pound man who was sitting up—well, you could almost expect him to be able to get to his feet and get going. But supine…good luck moving that.
Vi stood with her hands on her hips looking down at him a moment.
“I’m listening,” he said.
“Yeah, but you’re not giving answers, are you?”
It would be so nice to get it off his chest. Just tell her. I did make the call. I couldn’t risk it, honey. Have you ever seen what ricin can do? I had to save you. Your team. The world. In case.
But instead of losing all plausible deniability for his country and this operation, he could only shake his head with a little sigh. “I’m just in private security, honey.”
She gave him an annoyed look, but he really must have worn out her annoyed-look muscles, because this one lacked punch. Slinging herself down on the other couch, she crossed her long legs at the ankle and rested her head on the opposite arm.
“Mademoiselle Gorgeous,” he corrected himself.
“Oh, shut up.” She closed her eyes. He smiled at her. He couldn’t help it. She was so pretty, and every time she told him to shut up or threw something at him, he got such a charge out of it. Besides, he would way rather she fight him than go down without any fight at all just because she had no visible opponent.
She opened her eyes again and caught him smiling. Oops. Green eyes gazed at him a long moment. “I’ve known Lina for years,” she said suddenly. “She’s a fantastic pastry chef, and if you guys are suspecting her of something just because her grandparents came from Syria and Algeria, you’re racist idiots.”
Not suspecting, no. But she did have that cousin. Of course, Chase had cousins himself, and if he had to take the blame for everything a couple of them did, he’d be in jail right along with them.
Still, no harm in stirring the pot. See if Lina mentioned to anyone the suspicious American military guy hanging around Vi, see if that tenuous is-anything-wrong information spread in certain directions, if Chase’s ambiguous appearance in Vi’s life and the salmonella story stirred up enough doubt to pick up chatter and phone calls they could trace. Or see if there was no reaction at all and no need to worry so damn much.
About Vi’s beloved city getting bloodied again, about her tasting one of those caramels or something, happy and alive…and then the ricin setting in. About watching her die. No antidote, no cure.
“I could take a shot at the cuddle.” He tried not to sound too desperately hopeful for one. Especially since the idea of a cuddle made him feel a bit like his first HALO jump. Looking out from a plane at twenty thousand feet and realizing that, after all, he did have a fear of heights. At least when he was that high and had to jump.
Her eyebrows crinkled, and she gave him a look as if he was the most baffling man ever invented. He was pretty sure that was just due to a peculiarly limited experience with men, because, hell…he’d been about as open and straightforward as it was possible for a man doing such highly classified work to be.
You’re hot. Can I come home with you? Oh, I can. Hot damn. Will you marry me? Not sure yet? I’ll keep asking.
“I’ll just…try it, okay?” He shifted off his couch. Vi wouldn’t like being the one trapped between the couch back and him, so he eased his body down between the back of her couch and her. After all, she was smaller, and if he wanted to break free, he could just move her. If he locked her in, she couldn’t get free unless he let her, and she would hate that.
She didn’t hit him or anything when he lined his body up with hers. Either he was growing on her, or she was just exhausted. He was kind of tired himself. He hadn’t slept in over thirty-six hours.
He laid his arm over her waist, shifting them gently until her back was nestled against his chest, her butt against his groin—nice—and he could smell her hair without being suffocated in it.
He checked her expression. Ironic.
Ha. She expected him to try to turn this into sex, didn’t she?
Well, he would just show her.
He caught a firm grip on his will. That didn’t stop him getting aroused, because even his will had limits.
But he didn’t do anything about it. He held her. Quietly.
And it really was kind of like a HALO jump. After you got yourself out of the plane and started free-falling, it was both adrenaline-filled and peaceful.
Maybe it was even more like a HAHO jump. You got your chute open early, right after you left the plane, and then just floated through beauty for forty miles, until you had to land and go kill somebody.
No. It’s not like anything that involves blood or guns at all. He adjusted his compartments in his brain sternly. Sometimes it would help if he had a greater variety of references. For all that he had done pretty nearly any impossible physical challenge known to man, since the age of eighteen all of his own training in those physical exploits involved guns or explosives at some point, or possibly knives.
He wondered if most of her experiences involved at some point getting burned.
His finger touched the splattering of dots of paler skin on her forearm. Grease, probably. He reached the black splint and traced over it gently. “I’m sorry about this.”
“Sorry that I hit you?” Vi asked incredulously.
He nodded. It made his nose brush her sweet-smelling hair. Made him damn grateful he still had his sense of smell. A lot of guys had lost theirs. IEDs or even minor things…turned out that sometimes even small impacts on the head could mess up the sense of smell. One of the many things that, once lost, you never got back. “I was being an ass. You never could have landed that punch if I hadn’t let you.”
Vi stiffened indignantly. “Let me?”
“You telegraph, hon—gorgeous. And that whole thing about staying under on purpose to make you worry about me, when your whole life had just fallen down around your ears? Yeah. An ass.”
“Staying under?” Vi said blankly.
Hey. “You did notice I went into the river, didn’t you?”
“My hand hurt.”
“I was under three minutes!”
“You showered off since then, right? Because that thing is filthy.”
“I’v
e been dragged through worse,” Chase said wryly.
To his surprise, Vi touched his hand. With her good hand, she traced over one of his knuckles, all the way down to the tip of his index finger. She touched a scar and then another small scar, the kind a man picked up from all kinds of things when it got so hot he didn’t want to wear his gloves—the gravel flying up in rotor wash, a slide down a rough slope. She took his hand and turned it over, studying the calluses from handling weapons and weights and climbs. “Yeah. I’ll bet,” she said so quietly it was almost as if she was talking to herself.
Her words gave him the oddest feeling. As if she could almost understand things about him. A woman who’d been challenging herself in tough conditions since she was fifteen. As if they might come from opposite worlds and yet somehow…like spoke to like.
She had her own calluses—the pads at the base of her fingers and the smooth, tough skin where a knife handle fit between her thumb and index finger that was not too different from the ones he had from handling guns. He traced them. “You’ve got great hands.”
She gave a startled twist of her head, trying to catch his expression.
“Strong.” He closed his hand over her unbroken one in a solid claim of it. “Pretty.”
She forced her head around farther, finally far enough to stare at him. Jesus, first she had no vases for flowers, and now a compliment on her hands surprised her? “Do you have really lousy taste in men or something? Who the hell have you been dating before me?”
Her lips parted in astonishment.
He bit down hard on the urge to lean forward and kiss them. He was not going to turn this into sex. Her expectations of him were way too low already.
That would teach him to have sex on the first date. It was hard to sell a woman a cow when…
“Well…not you,” she said finally, a little wryly, as if him summed up something pretty…unique.
A warm glow tried to swell under his breastbone, like a bubble he was a little afraid might pop and do something unpleasant to him. He’d never had to fight dolphins to the actual death, but he’d been on deep water training exercises against dolphins defending harbors, when every time a dolphin punched the hell out of you with a tagging device, it meant that in a real attempt to infiltrate an enemy harbor you would have been given a dolphin-delivered embolism, instantly lethal. She was like a dolphin—fast and sleek, and she’d hit him out of nowhere.
Okay, and it would be so helpful right now if he had any metaphors that didn’t involve somebody getting killed.
“I’m just going to go ahead and reset your bar for men a little higher.” He snugged his arm around her more firmly. This whole cuddle thing felt fantastic. He was glad he’d gotten himself to jump out of that safe plane into it.
“For the next man?” Vi said, constrained. She relaxed her head back onto the arm of the couch so she wasn’t looking at him any more.
He frowned down at the top of her cowardly head. If he was braving this, damn it… “My grandmother would kick my ass if I ever got a divorce. So no. Not for the next man.”
Tough it up, Vi, hell. I’m trying to let down my guard.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she muttered. But she didn’t try to elbow her way free of him or anything.
He smiled, dipping his head into her hair to hide it and just to enjoy her scent at the same time. Damn. This cuddle stuff was really addictive. He might should go easy on it.
But he didn’t pull away, shifting their hands so that he half held hers and she half held his, running his thumb over the soft spots and the callused ones, the inside of her knuckles, the lines of her palm.
“You’ve got pretty nice hands yourself,” she said suddenly. The warm bubble inside him spread, not like a lethal embolism, but dissipating through him in this fuzzy, golden glow. Hell, she’d paid him a compliment. A direct, sincere one. “Strong. Capable.”
“I’m late for my manicure, though,” he said sadly, turning his hand over to stretch out his fingers and display the lousy state of his cuticles.
She gave a little choke of laughter, and his arm squeezed her in involuntary pleasure. Ha. He’d gotten her to laugh again.
He closed his hand around hers again, holding onto it. He wondered if one of those French guys she was used to dating could get away with kissing her hand. Because, well…he kind of wanted to.
His cheeks heated, and he bent his head into her hair again to hide them, even though there was no one else to see.
“Hey. Vi,” he said, low.
She didn’t say anything, but she gave what might be interpreted as an inquiring squeeze of her hand.
“I’m not so good at the poor, pitiful you stuff. Where I come from, a man’s life isn’t over unless he’s actually dead. And you don’t seem pitiful to me. You seem brave and beautiful.”
A little breath moved through her body, and her hand tightened on his.
“So I guess what I’m trying to say here is…if you need someone to kiss your skinned knee, I’m actually pretty lousy at that. But”—he gave her a little squeeze, pressing her more snugly against his chest—“I’ve got your back.”
He braced for her to say something satirical like “and a knife ready for it?”
But she didn’t.
She must really, really be tired, was all he could figure.
Her fingers linked with his, securely, as if she was claiming him. A little sigh ran through her body. He waited a while, running through all the other things she probably wanted to talk about and trying to think what he could say besides “just in private security, honey.”
And then finally realized that she had fallen asleep.
Hunh.
He stared down at her blond head. Now he felt all backed up with things he wanted to talk about, but…
For Christ’s sake, what was wrong with him? Couldn’t he just appreciate that he’d been saved by a snore?
But still, just…sleeping like that. Letting herself go completely vulnerable.
With him there.
He couldn’t quite adjust to the impact of trust. He kept staggering under it.
Either she was incredibly naïve about human nature in general and men specifically—which didn’t seem quite Vi’s modus operandi—or…it was him. She could go to sleep around him.
He lay there forever trying to wrap his mind around that.
Chapter 12
“Do you always get up this early?” Chase covered his eyes with his hand and stumbled to the blinds to peer outside, then flinched back. “Good Christ, the sun’s still in the east.”
“It’s already seven!”
“Jesus.” He pressed his hand down. “The first time the sun comes out in this damn country, trust it to do it at an hour like that.”
“What is wrong with this country?” Vi asked, instantly indignant.
“Oh, don’t even get me started.”
Vi put her hands on her hips and glared at him.
He peeled his hand back a little to eye her. “Look,” he said appeasingly. “It’s better to work this out before the wedding. That alarm, honey. Please dear God that’s got to go.”
She winced guiltily and searched his face. She needed the siren alarm clock to jerk her out of bed, adrenaline rushing to her sleep-deprived rescue. She’d learned that as an apprentice. But this morning, when the siren went off, he’d rolled out of bed, grabbing her as he went and slamming her to the floor between the wall and the bed, his body crushing hers as he looked around, keeping her covered and keeping low as he tried to figure out what was going on. Her good hand had gotten trapped against his heart, and she’d felt it pounding madly. It had taken her a few tries to get through to him that it was just her alarm and everything was fine.
Now, of course, he was playing the clown.
“All I’m asking is that you tiptoe out of the room and keep the blinds drawn, okay? Unless you’re wearing pink peekaboo panties, in which case it’s okay if you wake me up.”
“What are you even
doing in my apartment at all?” And in her bed? The last she remembered was the couch, and she couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the fact that she’d apparently fallen asleep so deeply with him there that he’d been able to lift her body and carry it into another room and she’d never even noticed.
“I couldn’t just leave!” He acted as if she had impugned his honor. “You needed your sleep. And I had no way to lock the deadbolt behind me.”
“That didn’t stop you last time.” Not that she was bitter about him sneaking out of her apartment while she was asleep last time at all. She’d knocked her alarm clock and journal to the floor in her scramble to turn it off that morning, before it ruined his morning, and then she’d realized…oh.
Oh.
He wasn’t even there.
And that had not been a letdown. Not at all. It had been exactly what she’d expected. This morning, now. This morning was weird.
“You had a much lower chance of having drawn the attention of crazy people last time! I thought the knob lock would be enough to hold off the hordes of attackers for three hours.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for not overstaying your welcome.” But her mouth turned down despite herself.
For no good reason. She’d been entirely relieved that morning, of course. Nobody wanted to face the consequences of a wild hook-up the next morning.
Nobody. Definitely not Vi.
Chase rubbed his eyes with one big hand and then slowly lowered it and studied her a second. “Hey. I had to get to work.”
“Yeah, security has really crazy hours,” she said dryly.
“Says the top chef.”
She found herself biting back a smile. Damn it. If only she wasn’t so susceptible to his complete inability to be crushed or defeated by anything.
The man would be hell to live with. He would never be willing to lose an argument.
Not that she was in any way thinking about living with him. She knew he was just bullshitting her about the marriage thing, and anyway, who wanted to live in Texas? They had rattlesnakes there.
Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) Page 11
