Vi loved this quarter. The kind of place where students and young people just starting their careers could still afford to go out, where the theaters were full of music and comedians and small, quirky plays.
Screw the critics. She had her faithful. They’d come back.
She didn’t cook for the critics of the world anyway. Nor for the president of the United States and his First Lady, however nice that would have been. She cooked for the people of this quarter. The workers and the children of immigrants and the artists and the actors, the young people with good jobs starting to move in as the quarter got more and more expensive, the people who came here to hang out because the other side of Paris was too pale, too fake, too BCBG and bourgeois for them. They wanted to keep it real.
“Thanks, guys,” she told her team. “It’s nice to have you on my side.”
Up on the rooftops, she caught a glimpse of four silhouettes running and leaping and smiled a little. Des traceurs de parkour. It was always fun to catch a glimpse of them. Like a glimpse of luck. Of energy. Movement without rules. She should do some kind of dish that evoked parkour. Height and vertigo and no limit to the lines of movement.
No limit. And if you had a bad fall, you picked yourself back up.
And avoided the kind of man who pushed you down mid-leap.
She nodded to herself firmly. Avoid him.
And let that be a lesson to you: the next time you catch a burglar red-handed, don’t sleep with him. As ways of meeting men go, the fact that he’s breaking into your kitchens is never a good sign.
Chapter 14
“What part of go away do you not understand?” Vi demanded, keeping the chain on the door.
“I brought something.” Chase held up a small backpack.
“Did you do something to Quentin?”
“Quentin?” Chase looked vague. “Small guy, kind of scrawny?”
“He always seemed big to me,” Vi said dryly.
“It’s funny how many different perspectives there are on size and power, isn’t it?” Chase smiled at her happily.
“He called me, screaming about me siccing criminals on him.”
“Must have a guilty conscience if he’s that paranoid.”
“Chase!”
Chase shrugged. “I may have provided him a quick demonstration of what it’s like to be struggling in the hands of someone bigger and more powerful who can do whatever the hell he wants to him.” Just for a second, that cool, grim, lethal look showed under his easy charm.
All the hairs on Vi’s nape rose in response to that look. Then Chase winked at her, the look entirely disappearing.
“Did you hurt him?” It wasn’t her fault that a greedy I hope so clenched in her at the question.
“Well…hurt.” Chase shrugged and spread his hands. “People have such a wide range of pain tolerance. I didn’t cut his balls off, at least. Not this time.”
Vi was probably supposed to be relieved about that.
“I wanted him to have something to look forward to,” Chase explained. “In case he ever thought about trying to mess with you again.”
“Chase! Damn it. Starred chefs move in a small world, you know. I have a reputation.”
“For being someone a man shouldn’t mess with unless he wants his ass kicked?”
“For kicking those asses myself! For not needing some man to handle my problems for me!”
Chase considered that. “That’s a really good point, honey. To explain my own point, I thought you did handle that problem yourself. I hadn’t even met you when you gave him a concussion and fired him. I just wanted to reinforce your point. We don’t know who else he might have assaulted in his life. He probably didn’t start out with the entitlement to take on someone like you. Probably went smaller and more vulnerable until he built up his sense of impunity.” He frowned as he thought about it. “Actually…maybe I should go ahead and cut his balls off.” He half-turned back toward the stairs.
Vi had never really thought about possible previous attacks in Quentin’s past either, and now that she did…it was an ugly, ugly thought. Vi had been a pretty, female, teenage apprentice in a kitchen full of men on power trips herself. That was when she’d taken to making sure she had a knife on her.
She caught Chase’s sleeve. “Maiming a civilian sounds like a career ending move to me. At least it would be one in our military, I’m pretty sure.”
He hesitated. Frowned. Subsided. Then remembered: “Not that I have to worry about that any more now that I’m a civilian.”
Vi fought the urge to wrap two hands around his throat and just strangle him. “Look, other than driving me crazy, was there something you wanted? If you say sex, I’m going to shove you down the stairs.”
He smiled. “Honey, if you want to say no to sex to me, no shoving is necessary. I’d be sad, and my heart would be broken, and my life would be ruined, but still…you’d be okay.”
Damn it, how did he manage to be so funny and so annoying and so damn solid and reassuring all at once? “Chase. Why are you here?”
“I told you.” He held up his backpack. “I brought something.”
“I don’t care.”
“Also some food.” He held up take-out that clearly smelled of the Chinese restaurant down the street. “In case you haven’t eaten again today.”
“It’s one in the morning.” So the night was still young.
“Yeah, but this is the first time your light has been on when I’ve swung by. And certain people are far too fussy about crossing ethical lines when asked to ping the location of your phone.” He scowled.
“My phone is in the river. What people?”
Chase coughed. “Oh, you know…hacker buddies.” He changed the subject quickly. “Honey, also, please don’t take this the wrong way, but if you don’t want to let a man into your apartment, you shouldn’t open the door at all. I could break that chain with one shove.”
“But then I’d knife you.” Vi smiled sweetly.
Chase rested his head against the jamb and smiled a little. “I’m so crazy about you.”
“Yeah, well, I know this is going to be a hard one for you to absorb, but just because you want me doesn’t mean I have to give you what you want. That’s because I’m not a thing.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry about the jacket. I shouldn’t have done it. I was a stupid, arrogant ass.”
Okay, well, they agreed on that. She gazed at him a long moment and sighed. “Fine, you can come in.” But only because she still had absolute faith in her ability to handle him. Also because that big, hot body, those blue eyes, and the way he looked at her, like she was his personal gift from heaven, just got down into her middle and heated her all up from the inside out. “But don’t touch anything.”
“I’ll try not to sneeze, too,” he said solemnly.
“What?”
“You already forgot?” He clutched his heart. “Our first meeting?”
“When you broke into my restaurant, planted salmonella or something, and ruined my career?”
He ignored that. “It was so romantic. ‘Don’t touch anything! Don’t breathe on anything! If you sneeze, I’m killing you.’”
“I had good instincts when I first met you. The sad thing is how fast you turned me into an idiot.”
Chase licked his finger and made a sizzling noise as he touched it to his shoulder.
“Oh, purée.” Vi strode back into the apartment, leaving the door open. Although it was really true about that sizzle. He fried her brain, that was the damn problem.
Chase strolled in behind her, his size and his presence immediately taking over the whole apartment. “Can I touch your jacket?”
“You’ve done it enough damage. I threw it away.” When she’d come home, she’d stuffed it into her trashcan so she could go ahead and get that wound over with and never think about it again.
Chase got the jacket out of the trashcan, and when she frowned at him, he pretended to stifle heavy sn
eezes, casting terrorized glances at her with each one.
“Quel imbécile,” Vi said. But already she was trying not to laugh.
Chase smiled and sat down on the floor in front of her coffee table with the jacket. Digging into his backpack, he began to pull out tools of some sort—things that looked like they could punch holes, and things that looked like they could pound and clamp and…were those sewing needles?
Lining them up, he pulled out an iPad and searched something. She peered, unable to contain her curiosity. Instructions for sewing leather.
Her jaw dropped.
He turned the slashed jacket sleeve inside out and began to run some kind of grooving device over a cut edge.
Vi stared.
“Might as well take your shower,” Chase said. “I’m not sure how long this is going to take, and you’re making me self-conscious.”
“You can get self-conscious?”
He shrugged.
She did want to wash off the scents of the bar. She went into the bathroom, keeping her shower quick, very aware of how safe she felt doing that with him in her apartment. She didn’t even feel as if she needed to lock the door.
Slipping into her yoga pajama bottoms and cami, she came back out to sit at the kitchen counter and watch him.
Like the night before, just having him here started to work on her. His presence slipped in, twining its way with the comfortable feeling of her pajama bottoms and the relaxation of her shower, as if not only could he feed her need for adrenaline rushes but he could be the way she eased off that adrenaline, too.
As if he was making himself part of her quiet. That time when she wasn’t ready to face the world, when she wasn’t ready to take on all comers. When she let her guard down, replacing a chef’s coat and knives or leather and boots with pajama pants and bare feet.
She couldn’t figure that out. This guy was hot sex on a stick and trouble all over, and he was obviously excellent material for a hook-up—if he didn’t ruin a woman’s life the next day, exactly what she should have expected from an arrogant male. But a woman clearly would be an idiot to let down her guard around him.
The last man on earth you’d want to have see you battered and tired and defeated. She ran her fingers through her hair, to try to make sure it didn’t look battered and tired and defeated.
He didn’t pay any attention to her, stubbornly setting up the two sliced edges of that sleeve in a clamp and now trying to thread a needle with his big fingers. It took her a while to realize that there was the faintest tinge of color on his cheeks.
“Do you want help?” she asked finally.
He shook his head.
“Do you want to eat?”
“It’s one o’clock, honey. I ate a while ago.”
She voice-activated a little music, her wind-down playlist. He tilted his head a second and then smiled a little. “Pink?”
Vi found herself grinning. “I’m still a rock star.”
“Yep.” He said it simply, giving her one flick of a glance that was like being licked with a flame. The heat of respect, admiration, attraction. “How did it go today?”
Not awesome.
“Fine.”
His smile faded. He looked at her a long moment, waiting.
“I mean…you know…great.”
His lips twisted. He waited.
“It was great to get out with my team. They needed it, and I needed it. But…” She shoved her toe against the counter. “I just can’t do anything. The restaurant is closed until the inspections are over. So I just have to sit there and take it. I can’t cook anything. I can’t make flavors come alive and send them out to all those would-be critics to tell them now say something else. I can’t focus on my work and my world, on doing what I love, and just forget all those damn yappy dogs out there exist. So I just get…torn down and torn down, while all I can think about is how my life is getting sucked down the drain. I hate it. God, I hate it.”
He gave a grimace of empathy.
“I talked to the owners, and…they’re not blaming me or anything. They’re trying to be supportive. But they took a huge risk on me, because they were excited about me, and…” She shrugged, no words to convey how much she hated to repay them with this.
Chase grimaced again. As if he understood. “Why don’t you own your own restaurant? You know you’re the kind of person who would really rather the buck stop completely with you.”
“The cost, in Paris. I’m twenty-eight, I’ve been climbing fast already. Owning my own place is my next step. I might not even have any choice about it. This might knock me right down the staircase, so I have to start back up from the bottom and open my own place even to get a chance to cook again.”
Chase said nothing for a moment, his face grim as he worked. But then he said: “You know what I like about you, Vi? One of the things. You take it for granted that you will start climbing back up. You’re not going to stay down there defeated.”
She shrugged, not understanding the compliment. Of course she was going to start climbing back up. How could anyone be willing to stay at the bottom of anything? “If only I could just cook again. Act. Then I’d barely even care, you know?”
Chase nodded and focused on his stitching for a couple of careful double stitches. “Once,” he said suddenly, and his voice choked oddly and he stopped. He took a breath and rolled his shoulders, doing a stretching thing with his neck as if to loosen up his throat. When he resumed, his voice was steady again, although lower than usual. “Once a team of ours went down in the Hindu Kush. They were overrun and…I was one of the two men on the QRF. The quick reactionary force—that’s the back-up, if a mission goes wrong. We got on that helicopter so damn fast, ready to go. To save them or go down trying. I know that sounds…sacrificial or something, but that’s not really what it feels like. It’s just the way we’re made, you know? You’d be the same. You’d find it way easier to be taking bullets and at least giving out some of your own than sitting on the sidelines helpless.”
Her body tightened all through her at the shock of what he was saying. He was talking about real bullets. Not movie bullets. Real bullets, aimed at his body. That strong, warm, human body and that skull that might seem thick enough to stop a bullet, but…wouldn’t. Her breath froze in her chest. She stared at him.
“The same way if you were on a team that was losing badly, you’d way rather be out there with your teammates giving your all to turn it around than sitting on the bench,” he tried.
It’s not exactly like a sports team, Chase. If you’re fielding bullets instead of soccer balls. If you might die. If your teammates do die. God, her heart hurt all of a sudden. As if someone was stretching it in two big hands and it was starting to tear.
“And the fucking assholes in command kept the helicopter grounded,” he said low and viciously. “They wouldn’t let us fly out. They said they didn’t want to risk losing another chopper and even more men and that it was too dangerous during daylight, and we had to sit there all the fucking day listening to them call for help over the radio until the last one died.”
His knee jerked up into the table as he made a hard movement, the crack of the contact sounding through the room. He caught himself and took a deep breath, bending his head. No, it was more than his head. For a moment, he hunched into himself, as if his stomach hurt.
Vi stared at him, beyond words. She felt dizzy, as if she was spinning over vaguely formed mountaintops in another country, trying to peer down through her own fuzzy inability to imagine them to what death and violence looked like in their…snow? Tundra? She handled a lot of dead animal bodies. Did exposed human flesh and bone look the same? Nausea rose up in her.
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry.” Her voice puffed out of her harshly, stuffed and strangled. She came off the stool to go kneel across the table from him.
He shoved her words away with a push of his hand, then shoved that same hand across his face and through his hair. Rolled his shoulders. Then shook his head
once like a dog shedding water and smiled at her, that easy smile of his. “It was a long time ago,” he said, and only a little roughness under his voice belied the relaxed tone. “I’m a civilian now.”
“Oh, yeah, what the fuck ever.” She put her hand over his, because all words sounded lame, and just held on tight to that callused, scarred hand.
He bent his head and gazed at their joined hands a moment. His eyes closed, and he took a deep breath, his thumb shifting to catch her hand and keep it around his.
“The November attacks,” she said, low. “I mean…I went to the Bataclan all the time. It’s just a couple of streets over. Nobody even knew what was happening, and then…all you can do is leave candles and flowers. When you want to hit someone, to rage. We try not to think about it too much, because…we want to be alive, we want to be Paris still. But…yeah. It’s horrible to have nothing you can do. You don’t know how many people enlisted in the French military the week after those attacks, in order to try to do something.”
“Oh…I have some idea,” Chase said with an odd somber wryness.
When had he enlisted? He must have been a young teenager for the attacks on New York. Too young to enlist yet, but it would have marked him.
His hand tightened slowly on hers.
“I’ll survive this,” Vi told him, her tone adamant. “There’s no doubt about that.”
His eyes opened, and light came back into them as they ran over her. Genuine light, that vivid blue pleasure. “I know you will, honey,” he said. “God, you’re so alive. Life just comes right off you like electricity.” He cupped his free hand just shy of her hair, as if he was savoring the buzz. “Damn, you’re gorgeous."
“You are, too,” she said, and instead of grinning cockily, he flushed a little and gave her a funny, awkward smile.
Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) Page 13
