Chase Me (P 2) Read online

  Then she checked her phone. Yeah, that “c***s don’t belong in the kitchen” Tweet had been reTweeted 2753 times. With her tagged each time. She didn’t even want to check the hashtags. Her publicist would have to handle that one.

  Merde, now Twitter was claiming she’d food poisoned the President of the United States? That had been a prospective visit a week from now.

  She threw her phone in a long arc from the point of the Île de la Cité into the Seine, and stood there, her hands on her hips, watching that phone sink down into brown water and the mud below like her life.

  Fuck.

  How had this just happened to her? She had been at the heights and still climbing, a rising star, glowing bright and determined to keep climbing. Controversial, yes. Flamboyant, yes. “It’s pretty but is it art?”, yes. But any woman worth her salt in this field had to face that crap.

  The same way she had to face the way so many onlookers cheered her fall now and threw rotten eggs and tomatoes at her while she was down in the dirt.

  She shoved her hand through her hair and stared at a passing barge, tempted to swim out to it and beg the captain to take her away from this city. Maybe she could change her name, change her hair, change countries, and start over.

  A movement to her left, a man coming in too close to her personal space, and she pivoted so fast she nearly drilled a hole through the cobblestone with her heel. Some jerk wanted to harass her right now? Bring it.

  But it was Chase. Big, tan, easy-moving, gold-streaked brown hair, with those blue eyes and the lines around them from squinting into who knew what. Bullets?

  As cocky as ever. Checking her out, with that quick I-own-that-now flick up and down her body. Larger than life, hard-bodied, absolutely sure of himself. Except for that guilty smile on his mouth.

  A wave of memories washed over her—his hands all over her body, inside her body, his face as he looked down at her butt, his mouth on her…all while he knew he was going to bring her life down around her ears. Her fingers curled into her palms.

  “Hi, honey,” he said, just cautiously enough that she knew. She’d been his roadkill, hadn’t she? And now he had a guilty conscience.

  “You.” Her fist clenched.

  He held up placating hands, like a cheater calming down his little woman after she caught him with another girl. “Now, honey,” he started.

  She hit him.

  ***

  Chase had a split-second to control his instinct to duck, and he managed it. Took it on the chin.

  Vi’s hand connected with a force that shouldn’t have surprised him, and he shoved off with his feet for good measure, so that the punch sent him flying back into the river. He grabbed a deep breath as he flew, hit the water with a loud splash, and sank out of sight.

  Okay, let’s just hang out down here for a while, give her a chance to calm down. Given all the free-diving he’d done, he was tempted to give it a full five minutes just to panic her—best way to break through anger, right?—but he didn’t want her actually diving in after him. Well, he kind of didn’t. Ruin that leather of hers. So he came up after three, expecting to find her hovering on the edge of the stone quay, getting anxious.

  She wasn’t even looking at him!

  She was—oh, fuck, she was huddled over her hand, her face twisted in agony.

  He leapt out of the river, water flinging off him. “Honey—” He reached for her wrist.

  Her hands flew up, and he barely saved his eyes. One of her nails raked up his cheek, as she went for them.

  He grabbed both her arms, taking firm control of her. She kicked him in the groin.

  Ow. Damn it. He should have kept that vow to wear protection around her. Hunching over himself, he glared at her. “Was that the fuck necessary? Ow.”

  “Fuck you.” She clutched her wrist, her face a mask of pain.

  “Honey.” Damn it, had she broken her hand on his jaw? And he’d been so damn cocky about letting her hit him. It had never occurred to him that she’d get hurt. “Let me look at it. Please?”

  He was vaguely aware of the audience they were gathering, all the other couples or groups who had been hanging out on this stone island in the middle of the Seine now focused on them with varying degrees of fascination, wariness, and willingness to intervene to help Vi. He kept the awareness of the crowd and its potential for trouble in his peripheral, but mostly he focused on Vi.

  Who had all her rage focused on him, green eyes like two of her own knives. “You ruined my life. Go to hell.”

  “I didn’t! It wasn’t—” He bit his teeth together over the words.

  I didn’t come up with the food poisoning thing.

  But he was the one who had said the restaurant needed to be shut down.

  “You didn’t ruin my life?” she said very precisely. “I’ve been climbing my way up through macho kitchens since I was fifteen. I run a two-star restaurant. I worked eighteen-, twenty-hour days for the past thirteen years. And now this will be the only thing the world remembers about me. What the hell do you think you haven’t ruined?”

  He shoved his hand over his face. “Can’t you still do all that? I mean—those people who give stars don’t even like the American president, right? They’ll probably give you an extra one for poisoning him.”

  And she hit him again.

  Or she tried. This time, he did duck, shifting with her attack so that her body flew half past him, guiding her wrist, bringing her back up so that he locked her against his body, back to him. “Honey—”

  She stomped on his foot. With that stiletto heel. Fuck, that hurt.

  He hefted her up so that she couldn’t reach it.

  She kicked him in the shins.

  Ow. “Will you stop?” He let her go, putting some space between them. At least she wasn’t as likely to break her foot on him as her hand.

  Phones were out in the crowd around him. Yeah, this was definitely ending up on film, and some people were bound to be calling the police. Wonderful. If he got arrested, there were some people higher up his chain of command who were going to skin him alive.

  If she got arrested a second time in one day, they might actually keep her in jail.

  “Honey, we need to get your hand looked at, and—”

  “If you call me honey one more time, I will kill you.”

  He hesitated. “Hon—bab—sweetheart, listen.”

  “And not sweetheart either!”

  He frowned at her. “Mademoiselle Gorgeous, then, fuck.”

  “Mad-moi-selle!” she shouted.

  “What?”

  “You pronounce it mad’moiselle!”

  Wasn’t that what he had just said? This damn language. “You’re getting hysterical.” And thank God she didn’t have her knives on her. “Will you just—”

  “Hysterical?” Her fist clenched.

  Oh, hell. He took the coward’s way out and just went ahead and threw himself back in the water before her fist could actually make impact.

  He came up starting to get just a little mad himself and gripped the edge of the quay, glaring up at her. “Are we done yet?”

  Her eyes narrowed to slits, and she gave a look at his hands that made him jerk them back from the edge, just in case she decided to stomp on them with those stilettos. He gripped a ring halfway down the stone wall of the quay instead, out of stomping reach. Some people in the crowd were starting to laugh and applaud her. “You can swim, right?”

  She took a very wise step back from the edge. Which she probably thought put her out of easy grabbing reach. Sometimes it was a real temptation to show her what he was made of, but he should resist the urge to toss her into the river herself to cool her off.

  Really.

  Resist.

  Hard.

  Although the expression on her face when she came up would be—

  Resist!!

  “Oh, we’re done.” Vi spun on her heel, striding away.

  He leapt out of the water and caught up with her, also res
isting the urge to grab all the phones he passed and throw them into the water. It would only escalate the situation. If he got in a fight with a mob of civilians at four p.m. in the middle of Paris, he was going to ruin his own career.

  And he’d put far too much blood and sweat and effort into his own career to—

  The thought faltered. He looked down at Violette’s head, his eyebrows drawing together. Remembering the burn scars he’d seen on her arms and hands, when they made love. The calluses from handling knives.

  He’d joined the military when he was eighteen. She’d been doing this since she was fifteen. Fifteen. He was pretty sure his voice was still cracking on him at embarrassing moments when he was fifteen.

  Within his team, reputation was everything. You were a badass, and you kept your shit wired tight, or you got forced onto another team, and your career was over.

  Reputation.

  He looked down at her proud face, the way she fought to keep from showing her pain.

  “Hon—swee—Vi. I’m sorry.”

  That long stride of hers faltered on a rough paving stone. She flicked a glance up at him.

  “I would never,” he said quietly, “in a million years have caused you harm.” Except that I did. And it was at least half my choice. And even right now, I could lessen the harm if I broke security and told you the truth. But I won’t. Because it’s my job to save the world.

  And you…you’re strong enough to handle this.

  I bet you’re strong enough to handle anything.

  It was an amazing thought. He’d never met a woman as strong as he was. Hard to wrap his mind around when she kept looking so much smaller.

  “I didn’t know—” He stopped and pressed his lips tightly together and shook his head. He grabbed a deep breath, as if going underwater for another long dive. “Vi. Will you please let me look at your hand?”

  She scowled and looked away from him, cradling her wrist.

  Okay, now she was just being stubborn. But he knew all about stubborn. Stubborn wasn’t even an adequate word for the sheer bullheaded, don’t-yield-to-anything-ever determination of the men he worked with. It made it confusing to go out among ordinary people, actually. He kept expecting to run up against granite wills, and instead he just walked through everyone, their wills so flimsy they were almost immaterial. Most of the time, it took conscious effort to even notice that the average person actually did have a will of his own.

  A wisp-of-fog will, easily ridden over or through by a man in a hurry.

  And yet those same men who would ride over the wills of average people and never even notice would also throw themselves toward a suicide bomber for average people and put their own glorious wills entirely out, forever…and never think twice about that either.

  He’d done so much damage to her. And yet it really had been for her own good. To save the world. Her.

  “Please,” he said again. “Just to make me feel better.”

  “I don’t want you to feel better,” Vi said. “You should feel like shit. I hope you feel like shit for the rest of your life.”

  Well, all right then.

  “Just to make you feel better then,” he said. “Damn it, Vi, I think it’s broken.” It was starting to swell alarmingly.

  “If you try to lay one finger on me ever again, I will stab you,” she said.

  Well, a guy knew where he stood with Vi, didn’t he? No game-playing. In fact, a man used to running right through everyone else like wisps of fog hit her like a brick wall.

  He liked it—liked the nice, resounding smack of his will meeting hers. But it made getting a woman to do something just a little more complicated when she refused to let him take charge of her situation.

  “Are you just going to ignore it?” he demanded, starting to get desperate. She was clearly in agony and too proud to show it.

  “I’ll get it taken care of myself.” She strode on.

  He sighed. “Fine. I’ll just walk along with you in case, at any point during the process, you need to hit me again. Don’t aim for the jaw next time, okay?”

  ***

  Vi managed to get him kicked out of the hospital room, by the simple process of telling the staff that she didn’t want him in the room with her. So he had to sit in the waiting room, thumb-fighting himself, feeling big and stupid and useless, for what seemed like hours.

  See, this was why a lot of the married guys preferred to be downrange. On the job, they were used to being the baddest shits on the planet, taking names and kicking ass, the best of the best of the best…and then they got home, and they turned into these big, useless lugs. None of their skills fit, and their wives were giving them sad, woeful looks because they’d forgotten the anniversary of the day they first kissed or something.

  On the thought, Chase pulled out his phone and put the previous day’s date in his calendar to pop up as an annual reminder. Yeah, that was one mistake he wasn’t going to make.

  He searched “Violette Lenoir” on his phone and winced at the titles that now filled the first five pages. He paged forward, finding older articles and blog posts about her as the chef of Au-dessus. Some critics hated her, but others loved her, and one thing her food did was make people talk. The energy in it, the sense of passion, the way it evoked the city and the life of her quarter.

  The web showed images of dishes where the artistic dots and squiggles and lines of sauces on a plate he associated with fancy restaurants had been taken to a whole new level. Instead of fine lines so elegant that it seemed as if looking at the food would make it faint, she had plates where color splashed across them with the drama of a young, rebel artist flinging paint. She had plates that spoke of graffiti and rebel theater and the artists’ workshops that filled her corner of Paris. A plate called “Belleville”, which evoked, apparently—he checked the blog post explanation—the funky glass studios in that area, with blown sugar for the glass. Oh, that one had come from Lina Farah, her pastry chef. The one with the suspicious cousin.

  He found a three-minute video of the kitchen in full swing and watched it with some fascination. The reflexes and precision, the way those knives moved across a cutting board or sliced through a fish, the constant intense physical action. Interesting the careers people chose. A lot of these guys would probably have made good soldiers, maybe even elite ones like him if they tried, but they’d focused on feeding people instead. That worked, he guessed. They were both important jobs for keeping people alive.

  And damn but Vi was hot, running that kitchen. The way she moved, the way she cared about every single thing that happened, the way she took control, with confidence and authority and no hesitation to make demands. That three-minute video clip was way too short.

  More photos. There were dishes that used honey from the rooftop beehives and rosemary gardens Vi and a couple of other chefs had set up in a cooperative above their street. Dishes that honored a director friend’s ambitious, indie theater project with its dramatic, slashing style. Dishes that made him think of leather and studded boots and maybe a piercing in an unexpected place, of tattoos, of laughter and impractical ambitions and funky art.

  In her hands, food wasn’t elegant and refined and as fragile as fine china. It was glorious, the source of life, abundant, rebellious. It was in love with her part of the city, with the people in it, and it was something you could sink your teeth into. Exactly the opposite of what every other three-star restaurant was doing.

  And people loved it, or hated it, and said she should lose the stars she had, or said they hoped she would get her third star, that the culinary establishment had gone down the wrong path with their elegant wisps of food a long time ago, and it was time for a new generation, time for Vi Lenoir.

  Or that was what they had been saying.

  Now, of course…he arrowed back to the first pages of the search results. Now all they could talk about was catastrophe. “Is this the end for Vi Lenoir?” “Can Au-dessus survive?” And those were the formally written pieces. Unfort
unately, Twitter was one of the first search results, and it was full of sniping, constant 140-character chatter, of ugliness and misogyny but also of people who were furious about that misogyny: “It could come from the spinach leaves! Why are you blaming the chef? #becauseshesawoman”.

  He bent his head and rubbed his shoulder. Fuck.

  After a wait that shouldn’t have seemed long to a guy who had been through sniper training but which somehow lasted ages, Vi finally came out with a black splint that immobilized all but the thumb and index finger of her right hand. Chase leapt up, coming to her.

  “Broken, then?” He tried to reach for her forearm, so he could lift her hand up for a better look, but she jerked away and cold-shouldered him.

  He cursed. “I should have ducked.”

  She spun on him. “You know what you should have done? You should have not played the cocky shit who can have anyone and anything he wants, when all that time, you were planning something that would ruin my career. You’re no better than Quentin.”

  He stopped stock still. Quentin…the guy who had tried to rape her? The guy who had assaulted her in her own walk-in, so that she had to bring a case of milk bottles down on his head? Kicking his ass so bad he never even looked at another woman again without flinching in fear had been next on Chase’s to-do list.

  “I was not planning anything that would ruin your career,” he said between his teeth. “You were secondary.”

  She swung on him, and he dropped into a squat just in time for her splint to fly over his head.

  “Will you stop?” he yelled. “You’re going to hurt yourself again if you keep this up!”

  “I need my knives.” She stalked off.

  He followed. “Secondary wasn’t the right word.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I mean, it all—it had nothing to do with you, okay! I just…happened to run into you and didn’t want you to call the police.”

  “I will kill you,” she said, in a monotonous scary voice, like a relentless robot, striding out the hospital doors.

  “Vi! Damn it.” She hailed a taxi. “I can’t talk about this. Just—can you trust me that I had nothing to do with the food poisoning thing?” Well, maybe nothing wasn’t quite the right word, but…but… “I never meant you to get hurt!”