Chase Me (P 2) Page 9

  Damn it. Had he found it cute?

  “That sounds like Lina and Célie.” His wariness and racial profiling reinforced her idea about some kind of terrorist sting. And pissed her off on Lina’s behalf. Lina was always getting this kind of crap. Sometimes she ignored it, sometimes she made ironic comments, but there were days, Vi knew, when it wore her down, and days when it made her really mad. “You know, her family has lived in France for two generations now.”

  But she was still “Arab”, while Vi, with her blond hair, was “French.” Even though Vi was no “Frencher” than Lina, of course. Her father was of old French peasant stock—farmers for centuries—but her mother was Polish.

  Chase gave a shrug of acknowledgement—not too much guilt about profiling on his shoulders. “What about the box?”

  “Célie is chef chocolatière for Dominique Richard. It sounds as if she brought chocolates.” She stared at Chase. “Do you think—wait a minute. If you think it’s a bomb, why the hell are you still standing so close to the door?”

  “To keep an eye on them,” Chase said flatly.

  “They’re my friends! Are you paranoid or what?”

  Chase glanced at her briefly. Vi had a brief, echoing sense of a vast distance between them, as if they came from two alien worlds. Caution isn’t paranoia if people genuinely are trying to kill you most of the time.

  Her lips parted, and fear wrapped a fist around her. Not for herself. For him. “They’re my friends,” she said very quietly. “Lina’s my pastry chef. I’ve known them for years.”

  Also, if you think someone might have explosives…couldn’t you come hide behind the couch or something?

  Chase gave her a rueful smile, as if his excess of caution was just an amusing quirk, and that hard I-could-kill-anyone expression vanished so completely she could almost forget it had been there. He opened the door, a friendly smile on his face.

  Célie and Lina pushed inside, frowning at him as they passed him. “Who are you?” Célie asked bluntly. She was trying to grow her winged pixie cut out, wanting to reach shoulder length, but all her attempts at styling the burgundy-red hair at the current length left her looking like a pixie who’d gone savage and been living in a thorn bush.

  “A friend of Vi’s,” Chase said at the same time as Vi said, “A jerk.”

  Célie looked back and forth between them, her eyebrows going up and her lips quirking a little. “Ah.” And then, the flicker of humor disappearing, “Merde, Vi, are you okay?”

  “Super.” Vi kicked her coffee table.

  “The team is in an uproar,” Lina said. “But you’re their hero right now, getting arrested like that on behalf of the restaurant. Also, I think Mikhail and Amar might be single-handedly waging a Twitter war in defense of the restaurant. You know how those two get.”

  Vi smiled a little. Explosive. Emotional. Arrogant. Easily insulted. Damn, she loved her team. “I’ll take everybody out tomorrow. All the drinks are on me.” She gestured as she spoke, forgetting her splint.

  “What happened to your hand?” Lina took three long steps toward her. Her thick black hair bounced in a ponytail of glossy curls. “Did you hit somebody or something?”

  “You know me too well.” Vi stared morosely at her hand. Her right hand, too. She didn’t mind throwing knives left-handed, but if she tried to fillet a fish that way, she was going to end up stabbing herself.

  “You didn’t pick a fight at the Commissariat, did you?” Lina asked warily. “No, that can’t be right, they let you out.”

  Chase returned to the flowers, gazed at them a moment, then tried shifting tall flowers for short ones to see if that improved the look of the makeshift array.

  “Where did you get that scratch?” Lina asked Chase coldly.

  “A kitten,” Chase said, with an attempt at that woeful look he’d given Vi the night before.

  “I’m not a fucking kitten!” Vi yelled, kicking the coffee table extra hard.

  “Oh.” Chase touched his cheek, discovering the scratch her nail had left when she’d tried to gouge his eyes. “That one.” He felt it a moment. “I forgot about that.”

  Vi thumped her head back against the couch. “I hate you.” Even fists, knives, scratches didn’t make an impact on him. Okay, she hadn’t actually tried, with the knives—she hit what she aimed at—but still. She could probably shoot him, and the bullet would bounce off. So how could she expect herself to make an impact?

  “Who the hell is this guy?” Célie handed the box of DR chocolates to Vi and stood between her and Chase, her hands on her hips. “Oh, purée, Vi, did you fall for one of the police officers who arrested you? I saw that video. They looked pretty rough with you to me.”

  “They did?” Chase’s eyes narrowed. He scanned Vi’s body.

  “I’m fine,” Vi said. She was mostly extremely pissed that the police had been able to handle her body as if it was their right to control it. But she hadn’t resisted arrest, just tried to force her way into her own restaurant. “And he’s American, Célie. Clearly he’s not police here.”

  “Well, where did you meet him? Why is he still in your apartment if you hate him and think he’s a jerk? Since when do you go for military men?”

  “Civilian.” Chase tried to slouch his shoulders. “I swear.” He didn’t seem that intent on convincing them, though. He seemed more amused by the pretense than anything, except for a tiny second when his eyes flicked to Lina and there was something narrow and cool in them, assessing her reaction.

  Célie looked at him a moment. Her eyes narrowed, and her head tilted. “Since when?”

  “What makes you think I was ever in?” Chase said.

  “I recognize macho military when I see it.” Since her boyfriend had just gotten out of the Foreign Legion, she certainly should recognize it. “It’s a whole different look and swagger from macho non-military.” Another look Célie should recognize, given her boss, Dom Richard.

  “I used to be in the military,” Chase said firmly. “But now I’m a civilian.”

  “How long ago did you get out?” Vi asked. “Forty-eight hours ago?” Just in time for a black ops mission in an allied sovereign country that would be illegal if he was still in the U.S. military?

  He gave her a bland look.

  “Why don’t you bring one of those glasses over here, so I can see the pretty flowers?” Vi asked tightly.

  “No. Then you’d just throw it at me, I’d have to clean up glass shards, I’d miss a tiny shard, and sometime in the night when you came to get a drink, you’d forget your little slippers and you’d cut your foot. And think how guilty I would feel.”

  Vi took off a slipper and threw it at him.

  He caught it and gazed at the cute brown bunny face on the toe for a second bemusedly.

  “You see how damn patronizing he is?” Vi asked her friends between her teeth.

  “Oh, yeah.” Both other women folded their arms to gaze at him, and Vi felt an instant’s relief.

  Because Célie and Lina got it. They had worked their way up through macho kitchens just like she had. They’d fought for the junior international title together, three women on a team who’d had to prove they weren’t some symbolic gesture to appease the media, that they hadn’t been “given” the place on the team at the expense of inherently more qualified men. Lina, with a double whammy, had had to face down the belief that she was symbolic diversity and a symbolic female and in no way a real, high-achieving person who could kick ass.

  Lina and Célie knew exactly how infuriating it was to literally hit a man to try to get revenge for his destruction of your life…and end up with your own hand broken while he patted you gently on the head and tried to look after you.

  And pretended all of this was too much for your pretty little head and wouldn’t even tell you what the hell was going on.

  “How am I patronizing?” Chase asked incredulously.

  Célie and Lina rolled their eyes and looked empathetically pissed off.

 
“Nothing I do can even hurt you,” Vi said. “The little woman.”

  Chase gazed at her a moment, and then walked over to her, a white flower still in his fingers. With her on the floor and him standing straight, his size loomed over her.

  “That hurts me,” he said quietly, gesturing to her position on the floor and finishing with her splint. “That hurts me a lot.” He crouched, slipped her bunny slipper back on her foot with a gentle, callused touch of her ankle, laid the white flower carefully over her knees, and then straightened and moved away from her again.

  Vi sighed and scrubbed her forehead with her good hand. What he had just done did not change the sexism here at all—in fact, it just underlined his inherent belief in his own strength versus her fragility—but…there was a sweetness to it, too, that just kind of wormed its way inside her anger and wiggled in there, in a troubling way.

  “Also, this is kind of sore,” Chase said, from the counter, rubbing his jaw where her punch had landed. “How bad is the bruise?” He angled his jaw toward nearby Lina with a pitiful, anxious look.

  Vi rolled her eyes, but in there with that wiggly, annoying sweetness there slipped his damn humor again, making her want to laugh.

  And her life was shattered around her in utter ruins.

  He was so annoying.

  “So what’s the deal?” Célie put her hands on her hips and stood, braced in a position so that Chase would have to get through her or jump over the coffee table if he wanted to touch Vi again. “Do you want me to hit him?”

  “I’ve been doing that. He enjoys it.”

  “I can call Joss if you want me to,” Célie said.

  Lina and Vi frowned at her.

  Célie held up her hands. “You’re right. You’re right. We can handle him ourselves.”

  Damn straight they could.

  “Who’s Joss?” Chase asked.

  “My boyfriend,” Célie said.

  Chase nodded politely. Like a man who might be willing to let another man get in a punch in order not to make him look bad in front of his girlfriend.

  Célie frowned. “Foreign Legion,” she said menacingly.

  Chase cocked his head. “Really? Some of those Foreign Legion guys…what regiment?”

  “2e REP.” Célie held his eyes. “Commando.”

  Chase’s eyes lit. “Real-ly. Now that might be fun.”

  Vi sighed.

  “Not that you aren’t fun, honey,” Chase said quickly. “It’s just a…different kind of challenge.”

  “Will you go away?” Vi said.

  “No,” Chase said indignantly. “When I got here, your eyes were red and puffy. Now look at you. You’re breathing fire again. I barely know your friends. How do I know they’re not going to coddle you and cry over you and let you sink back into despair again?”

  Célie and Lina stared at him, outraged.

  Vi wanted to kill him. He’d seen she had been crying? And he’d had to go and tell the whole world about it?

  He hid behind upraised arms. “Okay, don’t everyone start throwing things at me at once. I might not be able to duck all of it.”

  Célie pointed a finger at him. “You need to be quiet.”

  “Good luck with that,” Vi muttered.

  “And you need to tell me all the details.” Célie pointed at Vi.

  “He broke into my kitchens, I threw a few knives at him to teach him the error of his ways, he got scared—”

  “I what?”

  “—and asked me to call the embassy. They swore he was just part of their advanced security check, and you know…I really wanted the president to come next week, so I…well, I fell for it. Like an idiot. But I did watch him like a hawk the entire time. And made sure he couldn’t go back to the kitchens after I got him out of there.”

  “Oh, is that what you were doing,” Chase murmured idly. “Watching me like a hawk.” A little smile curved his mouth as he inspected a long lily and finally gave it a glass by itself.

  Vi shot him a bird. He slipped his middle finger into his mouth and sucked the tip of it absently, studying the flower.

  Grrrr. She needed more things to throw.

  “And this morning I woke up to the food poisoning story.”

  “There are rumors on some of the Arabic language channels that American special ops are moving on extremist groups here,” Lina said.

  Chase gave her a quick, assessing look. “Are there.”

  “You know, you can read Arabic without being a terrorist,” Lina told him darkly.

  Chase said something Vi couldn’t follow, but it sounded vaguely like the Arabic she heard in the Métro often enough and occasionally when around Lina’s grandparents.

  Lina looked at him blankly for a moment, then raised one eyebrow. “Your pronunciation is terrible.”

  Chase sighed deeply and gave the flowers a look that begged them for sympathy.

  “You speak three languages?” Vi said, impressed despite herself. To master French and English seemed pretty normal to her, but Arabic was a whole other level.

  “Apparently not,” Chase said dryly. “Apparently I only read them.”

  “Are you really from Texas?” Because nothing she had ever heard about Texas indicated that its denizens did anything but wear cowboy hats and guns, ride horses, and act macho. Oh, and there was the oil thing. They definitely didn’t interest themselves in other languages or in anything outside Texas, she was pretty sure of that. Unless Spanish? “Do you speak Spanish, too?”

  Chase smiled at her and said nothing.

  Hunh.

  Vi contemplated that a moment. “Say something in Spanish,” she said suspiciously.

  “Toda la noche soñé con las cosas que te podría hacer con la lengua,” Chase said promptly.

  Vi frowned at him. Lengua, the only word she could guess at in the sentence, either meant language, which would be a perfectly normal subject of conversation right then, or…tongue.

  He smiled at her beatifically.

  Vi slumped deeply and stared at her bunny slippers. Energy tried to defy the slump. She was starting to get the urge to leap up and start pacing around again.

  “So,” Chase said. “How hard is it going to be to recoup your reputation as a chef?”

  And there went her spirits again, down, down, down into the depths of a dirty river. “Impossible.”

  He held her eyes, raising his eyebrows just a little. “How hard is it going to be if you give up?”

  She stared at him. Her eyes narrowed. “Really impossible.”

  He grinned at her. “So ‘impossible’ is a pretty flexible word.”

  “Can I have my knife roll?” Vi asked.

  His grin widened. “Only if you can get past me to get it.”

  She came to her feet.

  He looked delighted. “Don’t mess up the flowers, okay? I’m just getting them to look right.”

  Everyone in the room looked at his flowers. Stems of mismatched length flopped in random ways in wide-mouthed glasses.

  “What?” he said defensively.

  Célie and Lina bit down on their lower lips. Vi put her hands on her hips. Energy was starting to course through her, now that she was on her feet again. She kind of missed her boots. “This isn’t the kind of thing a chef can come back from, Chase.” Well…she was planning to, one way or another, but that didn’t mean he should make light of how hard it would be. “Think about it like if you were to shoot the wrong guy. Maybe it’s the same.”

  “Not quite,” Chase said quietly and evenly. His eyes met hers, and for just a second she had one of those disorienting glimpses of depth and seriousness. “Because when I shoot the wrong guy, he’s dead. And he never comes back from that.”

  Oh.

  For a second, all three women were still, this little shock wave at the hint of a job they could barely begin to imagine.

  “That’s why I went into private security,” Chase said blandly. “No actual shooting ever comes up, and the pay is much better.” He smi
led at them, full wattage. “You girls hungry? When’s the last time you ate, hon—Ms. Lenoir?”

  “Yesterday,” Célie said when Vi didn’t answer. “Come on, we all know that. That’s why we’re here.”

  Chase reached into the basket of brown eggs Vi had on her counter and started cracking them into a bowl.

  “Being a top chef is all about reputation,” Vi said, still trying to get the degree of damage done to her through his thick head. “You build your reputation on your abilities, but if people can get hold of anything to destroy that reputation—something like this—then it’s gone. This would knock even a top male chef all the way back down the ladder, but as a woman, people have been looking for me to fail from the start.” Since she was born, in fact.

  Célie folded her arms across her belly, protecting her guts in visceral sympathy for the blow Vi had taken to hers, nodding. Lina looked grim. As pastry chef, the blame didn’t stop with her the same way it did with Vi—her name didn’t front the restaurant—but she still felt the responsibility, and it could even quite easily turn out to come from the pastry side of the kitchen. The eggs, the custards, the sauces.

  Chase nodded, too, matter-of-factly. And held Vi’s eyes. “So you’re going to quit?”

  Vi stared back at him. Her lips pressed. “Do you have a death wish or something?” Quit!

  “Why is he still alive?” Lina asked Vi curiously. She shook her head in some wonder. “Either this whole food poisoning thing is slowing your reflexes, or you must really like him.”

  Hey! Shut up, Lina.

  Chase perked up, giving Lina a hopeful look and then eyeing Vi again, like a puppy starved for affection.

  “I feel sorry for him,” Vi said. “He’s a civilian. Easily scared by a few thrown pots.”

  A little crease showed in Chase’s left cheek. He smoothed it out. “I should have tucked my tail between my legs and run right then.” He met Vi’s eyes. “But I didn’t have it in me.”

  Vi’s teeth snapped. “If you don’t quit implying that I might have it in me if you don’t give me this little pep talk, I might have to kill you.”

  “Seriously, you hooked up with this guy?” Lina said.

  Vi flushed. She hadn’t realized it was quite that obvious that she’d actually hooked up with him.