“He’s worse than Joss!” Célie said. “About deciding he knows all about your life and what’s good for you. How is that even possible?”
“Do you have some kind of radar that pings the most arrogant guy in the city for you, every time?” Lina said. “How do you even find these guys? Now you know why I like geeky, shy guys.”
A tiny flicker of Chase’s blue eyes toward Lina, just this hint of a narrowing of his eyes as if he was filing away information. But it was over so quickly Vi might have imagined it.
“I’m shy,” he said to Vi.
Oh, for God’s sake.
Chase tried to look bashful.
Vi clapped her hand to her forehead, and, once again forgetting her splint, bonked herself in her own eye. Aïe.
“Have you ever thought about opening a restaurant in Texas?” Chase asked hopefully.
“Texas?” Vi recoiled. “Nobody can catch stars in Texas.”
“Okay, you know what? I’m going to take you out on my grandparents’ ranch in the middle of the night, and then you try to tell me that again.”
Vi rolled her eyes. She’d seen real stars once in a while. Weak things in a gray sky. They weren’t that impressive. “What do they eat there, rattlesnake?”
Actually, what if she did a dish with rattlesnake and—
“We eat good beef,” Chase told her, eyes narrowing. “And I don’t think someone who thinks snails and frogs are food has room to cast aspersions.”
“Do they eat cactus?” Vi’s head tilted. “What does that taste like? You could do something kind of fun with cactus and—” She broke off.
Chase grinned, looking very pleased with himself. “And if these idiots in Paris don’t know how to appreciate you, people in Texas would find it hilarious that you food poisoned the President.”
“I did not—damn it, he hadn’t even arrived yet!”
Chase continued as if she hadn’t spoken. Kind of like the Internet. “Don’t chefs of your standing usually start opening second and third restaurants about now? No, seriously, this is a good idea, Vi. You could spin this in your favor. In fact, if you named the restaurant something like Potus’ Last Meal, you’d probably draw a crowd just because they’d respect your balls.” He paused, and his eyes lit with fervor. “Actually, you need to open it with that name in Washington. Oh, hell, that would be hilarious. People would love you. Plus, it’s a lot shorter commute to where I’m stati—where my house is, in the U.S.”
Vi could almost start getting a vision there. It would be kind of fun to take her career international. Be crisscrossing the globe, building herself into…this heady glimpse of herself ten years down the road, one of the most influential female chefs in the world. Hell, drop the female. One of the most influential chefs.
“Balls,” Vi said, instead of admitting his pep talk was working. “Always has to be something inherently male to show you have nerve, doesn’t it?”
Chase sighed. “Are you ladies going to cut me any slack at all?”
“No,” Vi said. “It doesn’t matter how little rope we give you, you still manage to hang yourself. In fact, I’m starting to think that if the only rope you had was the one tying your wrists tight to something, you’d still manage to hang yourself.” Oops. Had she just let it slip that she had multiple times imagined tying his wrists to something so he’d be at her mercy?
Chase grinned, as if he’d read right into the depths of her dirty mind. “Not that I’ve never had a fantasy about three women tying me up, I admit, but she’s got a boyfriend in the Foreign Legion”—he nodded to Célie—“and I’m monogamous now.”
“Since when?” Vi said very, very dryly.
Chase gaped at her. “Since last night! You never listen to a word I say, do you?” He scowled. “If I dismissed everything you said, I’d be taking flack about sexism again.”
Vi pressed her splint and her bare hand to her face a long moment. “I think I need to go fix my hair,” she finally told Célie and Lina. “I really wasn’t expecting company.”
“I’ve got some aspirin, if you need it,” Lina said sympathetically.
“You know, I’ve got to give you credit, Vi,” Célie said, as Violette headed toward her shower. “I thought your last guy set the record, but you have finally found the most impossible guy in the universe.”
Chase beamed and patted himself on the back.
Vi slammed the bathroom door.
Chapter 11
Chase was having a hard time holding steady. Humor had gotten him through some tough shit in the past, so he clung to it, like he always did, but Vi was messing with his ability to compartmentalize, waking up emotions. And not fun, happy, adrenaline-charged, she’s-so-damn-hot emotions either. Those made him feel as if he’d finally fallen into one of those Hollywood action films about men like him.
No, these were the scary kind of emotions. They were vulnerable, and even though they seemed to reside in his middle and his head, he couldn’t figure out how to fit body armor and a helmet on them no matter what he did.
The swelling sense of failure—I didn’t protect her, a civilian hit by my own unit’s friendly fire—the powerful desire to fix it, this morass of other emotions that he didn’t even have names for but that swelled up at the sight of her in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, like someone who wasn’t a Bond girl right that minute but who needed a man who could sweep her up close and warm and hold her tight until all the bad went away.
He’d mentioned it, that he could try the cuddle. But she clearly realized that wasn’t in his normal skill set. She’d gone for the option he was good at—taking flack. It was such cute flack, too—slippers and pillows and a bouquet of flowers. Adorable, when compared to AK-47s.
After he’d fielded her friends’ probing questions for a while, she came back out, her straight blond hair silky dry, as if she was about to head out somewhere glamorous for the evening. She’d abandoned that fluffy bathrobe and slippers, but she hadn’t really gotten dressed, just put a bra on under her black camisole top, still wearing black pajama bottoms, barefoot.
The combination of that silky, pretty hair and the quieter intimacy of her attire hit him like a punch in the gut.
It troubled his stomach, this tumble of a fantasy a man like him never got to actually have. Women loved to date men like him, loved hot sex, loved, yes, the idea of marrying guys like him, but they never really lasted through the actual him. The man who was too tough, too impervious, too able to ride roughshod over almost everyone without even realizing it, and, of course, who was gone most of the year.
The knit camisole clung to a slim, athletic body that moved now not so much like a whip cracking, as it did when she was taking on the world, but like a dancer winding down from a long performance—the energy subdued, but all that grace and strength still obvious in the lines of her body and in every casual move.
To his surprise, she didn’t go back to sending verbal jabs his way, or throwing things at him, both things he could handle. Okay, that he enjoyed handling, except when he was too stupid and cocky a shit and his damn showing off made her end up with a boxer’s fracture.
She seemed…quieter now. Thinking. She took the bar seat across from him, pushing a couple of his makeshift vases to the side to rest her chin on her good hand.
He sliced a pat of butter, feeling weirdly self-conscious. He hadn’t felt self-conscious since he was a teenager. What the hell?
“Heat the pan first,” she said.
“What?”
She grabbed his wrist across the counter, and the pat of butter he’d been about to add fell to the stove. “Heat the pan first. It expands the metal and gets rid of any invisible porousness, so the eggs are less likely to stick.”
He smiled at her fingers circling his wrist. Hell, he was easy. But he liked having her grab his body and manipulate it however she wanted. He wished she’d do that to a lot more than his wrist. “I thought I was adding the butter so the eggs wouldn’t stick.”
“You’
re adding the butter for flavor.” She let go of his wrist.
It was all terrifyingly enticing—her sitting across a counter from him while he cooked a simple omelet. Of its own volition, his hand rose to draw a strand of her hair through his fingers. Soft and silky, still a tiny bit damp.
He expected her to bite his hand or something, but she just let that proud chin of hers rest on her fist, letting him play with her hair the same way he’d let her control his wrist and gazing at him as if she couldn’t figure out what to make out of him.
You can’t make much, he almost wanted to warn her. I am already what I made myself.
That was another thing that blocked him from those quiet moments of intimacy. Women, whether they admitted it or not, usually wanted to change a man, mold him to who they were. But he, like most of the men he knew, was just too hardened by the life, too stubborn, too confident. He had that will before which everyone else’s dissipated like ghosts.
And so he kept being him, and…well, here he was. Not divorced yet, which was something of an accomplishment in his field. Surrounded by a band of brothers. But…alone.
He hadn’t felt lonely the other night, when he met her. He’d felt cocky and sure of himself, quite willing to take her dares and ask her to marry him.
But seeing her vulnerable this evening made him vulnerable, too.
He didn’t know what to do with vulnerable. Pull on body armor? Crack a joke? Bring up his weapon?
He gazed down at the pan.
“You know what would be good with an omelet?” Vi said. “Truffles.”
Chase’s contact with truffles was confined to the chocolate ones his mom made for Christmas and which had always turned splotchy brown and grainy by the time they reached him in Afghanistan. He’d hide with them inside his hooch anyway, eating them slowly and closing his eyes as tight as he could to try to pretend he was home for Christmas.
Célie’s and Lina’s eyes lit up when Vi pulled an open plastic zip bag out from her refrigerator and unwrapped a dark, dirty looking lump. A pungent, earthy smell filled the room immediately. “A real one?” Célie said. “It’s July!”
“From Australia,” Vi said smugly. “Top grade, too.”
“Australians grow truffles?” Lina said doubtfully, as if Vi was suggesting something sacrilegious. “Real ones?”
“Taste it.” Vi started to slice off a sliver and cursed as her splint made that awkward. Instead of letting that stop her, though, she pulled out a cutting board and braced the mushroom on it, clumsy but managing. “I’m not sure we could ever use them in Au-dessus, because critics would have hysterics, but maybe Texans wouldn’t care.” She cut Chase a sardonic glance, but then focused on cutting three very fine slivers and gave one to each of them.
Her face had changed. Her eyes were glowing with pleasure to offer this.
Chase’s sliver was rich and earthy and unlike anything he had ever tasted before. But he knew to say, “Mmm,” and to use about the same tone he would have if Vi had just wrapped her hand around his dick.
Besides, it tasted rich, full, amazing—and it made Violette’s eyes glow.
“Wow,” he said, for good measure.
“Wait until you taste it in an omelet.” She began slicing fine slivers, hands still amazingly deft even with one partially immobilized.
“Want me to slice it?” Chase touched her wrist.
Vi yielded the knife to him with the ease of someone used to delegating to sous-chefs. “Slice it fine. Very fine.” She bent to pull out two more skillets and set butter to melting in one, white wine to reducing in another, while Chase sliced. He eyed her sidelong. She was smiling a little as she worked, relaxed.
Well, hell. He’d finally figured out how to calm Vi down. Give her food to work with and hungry people to feed. That was what made her happy.
And she hadn’t been able to do it today, in her moment of crisis. Because he’d had her restaurant shut down. So he’d been party to not only the worst thing that could happen to her, career-wise, but to eliminating the way she dealt with bad things that happened to her. Her cooking.
She added flour to the butter, a rich, nutty scent rising off it, then whisked in the reduced wine and something that looked like sour cream but that she called crème fraîche. She dipped a spoon in it and put it to his lips, to make him taste the difference.
He smiled, loving the fact that she wanted to put flavors straight into his mouth.
She took the bulk of the truffles he had sliced, grabbed the knife and minced them even finer, then dumped them into the sauce, putting the skillet on the back burner to warm gently. “Now for the omelet.”
So he melted the butter with a sizzle and started to pour the eggs in.
“You’d better let me do it,” Vi said.
Seriously? He couldn’t even make an omelet right? “You should see me work a grill.”
Vi actually grinned. “For an omelet?”
“Everything is better with a grill,” he said loftily.
She laughed. And slipped between him and his pan, so that he got to stand with his chest brushing her back and one hand against the lower counter by the stove, framing her like they were…together or something, her body shifting against his as she rapidly twirled the pan with the egg in it rather than pushed the egg around with the spatula. Her hair smelled really nice, so fresh from the shower, and the warm, hungry scents of butter rose from the pan and mixed with white wine and truffles.
She was messing up his ability to compartmentalize. She was accessing all the emotions he set aside in a box for when he was back home.
And some new emotions he had no idea what to do with, since he and the men he spent his life around dealt with their deepest emotions by pretending they didn’t exist.
Might as well take the appearance of unicorns in stride as handle the emotions that rose up when a slim, proud woman stood with her hair brushing his chin as she worked in the circle of his body, holding a spatula with the thumb and finger she could still move with that splint on, where she had broken it on his jaw. Broken it because, to her, he had destroyed her life as if she was nothing.
She would never understand that he’d been protecting her life, as if it was everything.
What did you do with those emotions? When you’d spent ten years trying to box them up in a little carton labeled “impossible things” and pack them out of the way?
He knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to let his head slowly tip forward until it rested on her head and sigh some of his size and strength out so that he was small enough to fit in this space and just stay there a moment, with his eyes closed, breathing her in.
Just as well that she’d probably elbow him in the ribs or something if he did. Kept a man on his toes.
In what was so deceptively close to the shelter of his body—he felt like he was sheltering her, but she probably didn’t feel that way at all—Vi dribbled the truffle sauce down the center of the omelet, folded it, sprinkled it with a pinch of some special sea salt, and slid it on a plate for Célie and Lina. Then she set about making another one.
“Let me try.” Chase brought his other arm around before she could shift away, taking the pan and the spatula and holding them around her, so that she was captured by his body while he worked.
Mmm, yeah. Nice. A man could really enjoy learning how to cook this way.
And she still didn’t elbow him in the ribs or anything.
“Like this?” Rather than move the spatula around the pan to spread the eggs, she had held the spatula pretty still in the middle of the pan and twirled the pan rapidly to get the eggs to spread. So he tried that, just clumsy enough that she made a little sound of protest and placed her hand over his bigger one to guide him.
He grinned down at the back of her head in triumph and caught sight of her friends eyeing them with a great deal of thoughtfulness. Go away, he thought to them. You’re…whatever that French word is. De trop. I want this time. Me, mine. You’re messing it up.
; Plus, Jesus, the last thing a man feeling this vulnerable and this full of emotions needed was an audience.
But he didn’t say that.
In fact, after they ate the most delicious omelet he had ever had in his entire life—it took omelet to some phenomenal level, and she’d managed that in only a few minutes’ work—he ended up washing the dishes in the background and then settling himself on the floor on the margins as the women drank wine and he frowned over the French label on Violette’s pain medication and tried to figure out how dangerous mixing the two was. Probably less dangerous than running off on a motorcycle with a strange man who had just broken into your kitchens, but still…at least that risk had had a very high reward potential, right?
She ignored him, so it took him a while to realize she hadn’t even opened the damn bottle of painkillers yet. Too tough, hmm? Well, he’d seen some friends go down a bad road that started with painkillers, so maybe just as well.
She did drink a couple of glasses of wine, and he just watched the gathering and kept his mouth shut, except when the sympathy from her friends seemed to be starting to prey on her courage. Then he would say something randomly provocative to make her spine stiffen again.
He smiled, sipping his own wine in his corner. He did like that straight spine of hers.
Mostly he kept out of it and didn’t try to grab that intimacy for himself because…well, he remembered.
All the times he had gone over to a married buddy’s house after one of their own was killed, all the times they’d hung out on a deck drinking beer and reminiscing about the stupidest, funniest, craziest things that friend had ever done, while the wife put the kids to bed and brought out a couple more beers and maybe squeezed her husband’s shoulder and gave Chase a sympathetic I-hurt-for-you-too look but let them have that time.
He wondered if Vi would ever do that for him.
He wondered if talking her into marrying him meant more than hot sex and fun challenges and finally having his own kids to play with but was…deeper. Quieter. More…there.
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