Chase Me (P 2)

by Laura Florand

  Chase gave her a puzzled look. “Are those soccer teams or something?”

  “Probably Delta Force,” she decided, her eyes full of mirth. “Those guys are the best, right?”

  “They’re what?”

  “Almost as good as the British SAS or the 2e REP commandos.”

  Chase narrowed his eyes at her, fulminating.

  But he didn’t really care, because she looked so alive and happy now that she was teasing him, and all that zing was back, but with this underlying solidity, this sense of hey, we’re going to really try to make this work. She’s in it to win it with me, too.

  And when Vi was in something to win it, he was pretty sure she didn’t lose very often.

  She grinned now, so full of herself to have provoked him. “Do you even remember you have a small trident tattooed high up on your left shoulder? Are special ops supposed to have identifying tattoos?”

  No, but he’d been nineteen and bursting with pride, and so far none of his commanding officers had insisted he have it lasered off.

  “You were looking at my naked body?” He clapped his hands to cover his nipples, horrified.

  And she giggled so hard. Giggled like a girl, a young girl, who only ever knew happiness.

  I love you so damn much, Vi. You don’t get it yet. We’re lying here, wounded from a terrorist attack, and we can be this happy, just because it’s the two of us.

  He drew a deep, deep breath and let it out in an exaggerated sigh of defeat. He glanced around to make sure Elias and Brandon hadn’t come back. He leaned in close to her ear and ow, that pulled at his wound, but he couldn’t risk saying this out loud. “It’s…Chester,” he whispered.

  “Chester?” she said out loud, with that erotic precision and rolled R of hers.

  “Shhh.” He waved his hands frantically.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “For God’s sake, you people don’t know anything about names here in France, do you? I’d better name our kids.”

  “It does sound a little…presidential, maybe, for you.”

  “We’ll consider it our safe word. If you ever say it out loud, I will instantly stop making love to you and go out for a run or something to rid myself of the horror.”

  She laughed.

  “No, seriously, Vi. I mean it. My name is Chase. I stopped answering to anything else when I was four. Chase Alvarado-Callihan, to be exact. Lenoir is going to be so much easier to spell.”

  “You’re so damn cute,” she said helplessly.

  A little smugness settled in his body. It was good to be cute. “Now you have to love me to the moon and back,” he said. “You said the name was all that was stopping you.”

  She rested her hand against his cheek, splint and touch of callused fingers. Her face softened. The humor slid away, but all the happiness stayed, and it was the most radiant, warming thing. “I’m pretty sure I will.”

  Chapter 18

  Bold, squarish letters:

  How about April for a date? The bluebonnets in Texas are beautiful then.

  Under it, a drawing of two entwined wedding rings, and the signature, Chase.

  A cell phone number under his name.

  Vi looked up at Chase. Who was actually blushing a little bit. “You wrote that the first night?”

  They had just been released from the hospital, their first evening back in her apartment. Police security protected the door to the building. Chase’s identity had been kept out of the papers, but Vi’s was all over the place, and it turned out being a national hero drew an overwhelming amount of attention.

  “It was three in the morning,” he said defensively. “And you have no idea how hot you are. I was sexually depleted and possibly sappy.”

  “And right after that, you went and had my restaurant shut down without even warning me?”

  His shoulders sank. “To keep you safe,” he said.

  She glared at him.

  “To keep the world safe,” he corrected. “And all your staff. And all your guests.”

  She held up a finger. “You still should have told me about it. Keeping the staff and guests safe is my responsibility.”

  He nodded resolutely. And then added, “Going on top-secret missions that affect multiple lives is mine.”

  They gazed at each other a long, stubborn moment. Impossible really to tell who was the first one to start to smile just enough to encourage the other to smile, too. “I’m not giving in on this one,” Vi warned.

  “I know. Of course, I’m not either.”

  They both broke into bigger smiles. “You know it’s really kind of fun to box with someone who is up to your weight,” Vi said. “It doesn’t happen that often.”

  Chase grinned at her and flexed one arm to make his biceps pop.

  She laughed and returned her gaze to the phone number he had left her from the very first, and the drawing of wedding rings. He had left that note as he left her bed to go take over her career choices with macho conviction, hadn’t he? She shook her head at the impossible tangle of emotions he evoked. “It’s a good thing you have such good survival skills.”

  “Five months and seven days left,” Chase said brightly.

  She gave him a querying look.

  “Until January 1. If I survive until then, you said. I was going to do little tally marks on the wall behind your bed like they do in prison movies or ones where people are stranded on a desert island. I get hot sex still, though, right? I mean, you’re not going to deny a man basic sustenance.”

  She laughed and shook her head at him and turned the page in her journal.

  Damn, you’re beautiful.

  XO.

  Chase.

  She looked back at him.

  He arched his head to try to see the page, and blushed some more. “That was the night you fell asleep. I was thinking I should probably go, but then…I didn’t.”

  Her cheeks felt a little heated, too. Damn, you’re beautiful. She wanted to frame the words, to keep them for years and years and years.

  She turned the page.

  Got to make a quick trip out of town. Don’t mention it to anyone, okay?

  A heart symbol this time, and Chase.

  And:

  P.S. Call me maybe?

  A funny stick figure holding a phone, giant tears arching out of his eyes and over his head an image of his heart breaking.

  A smile trembled on her lips. Funny, demanding, arrogant Chase, who apparently had never once just walked out on her without making sure she knew he’d be back.

  “I put it in a very obvious spot!” he said. “Pinned open by your alarm clock. How could you not have seen it?”

  She leaned back on the pillows, demonstrating flinging her arm out to fumble and knock an alarm clock to the floor. She still couldn’t stretch her arm out far, the movement pulled too much at her torso.

  “Fine,” he said. “Next time I’ll write it in Sharpie on your forehead so you can see it when you look in the bathroom mirror.”

  “Or, alternatively, if you want to survive, you could try the bathroom mirror itself. Or a note on the door. Pretty nearly impossible for me to leave the apartment without seeing a note on the door.”

  “I sometimes go out the window,” Chase confided. “Just to keep life interesting.”

  Vi had to grin. “You do keep life interesting, all right.”

  Chase looked smug, licked his finger, and drew a point in his favor in the air.

  She laughed. It was a happy thought, all that life and interest and challenge and a willingness always to answer her own challenges, always to pick up her gauntlets.

  “Speaking of keeping life interesting, you know what’s terrible about hospitals?”

  “Oh, I could make a really long list at this point,” Vi said, a little grimly. Pretty much the only good thing she had found about hospitals so far was that hospitals were the reason they were both alive. It turned out survival could be quite a painful, tedious process full of doctors and nu
rses with no respect for a woman’s privacy, absolutely terrible food when Lina and Célie couldn’t sneak them some, and a relentless smell of antiseptic.

  “The lack of sex.” Chase shook his head. “It’s insane what they expect a man to live without. Also, French daytime television is terrible, can I just say? There was some exercise show with the woman trying to convince other women to do step exercises in high heels. You people are nuts. Fortunately, it did give me some ideas about you and steps and high heels, but I’m saving those for a more-healed rainy day. Now for barely out of the hospital, thank God you’re alive, take it very easy sex, I was thinking…”

  “That sometimes you talk too much.” Vi put her fingers over his lips. “I was thinking…” She turned off the light, gave them just that gentle twilight of the July summer evening. “…something like this.” She drew her fingertips very, very lightly, as if he was fragile, all the way down his arm to the back of his knuckles, then took his hand and covered her breast.

  “Vi.” His voice had gone low and rough. “I’m so glad you’re alive that I wake up in nightmares about it, over and over.”

  “I know.” And nightmares about everyone in her kitchens being killed, and about terrible, jagged things she couldn’t even identify before they woke her in sharp terror. She shifted his hand over her breast, stroking herself with him. The hunger that woke in her was sharp and ferocious, a tantalizing counterpoint to the gentleness with which they touched. “Tonight, let’s see if we find a way to get some sleep.”

  Chapter 19

  Healing

  “What are you doing?”

  “Planning a restaurant. I’ve got to do something while I’m convalescing. Besides, since I’m forced to learn delegation skills and how to run a restaurant while not being actually in it, I might as well put it to good use to expand to new horizons. And I’m internationally famous now. I’ve got backers. I’ve got ideas down for four more restaurants, but I’m thinking it’s probably better to open one at a time.”

  “Have I mentioned how crazy I am about you?”

  “What did I do this time?”

  “You literally take a bullet, turn it into a convenient rung on your ladder, and keep on climbing. Nothing keeps you down.”

  “Down’s not a fun place to be, to be honest. It’s pretty boring.”

  “Let me see if I can keep you entertained.”

  ***

  “Hard time sleeping?” Soft voice, in the dark.

  “Oh, yeah.” Resigned. “I just see it, you know? All the time. See the muzzle start to point toward you, see that blood all over your chef’s jacket.”

  “Yeah.” Very soft. “I know. I see things, too.”

  No other words. Just the shifts of the sheets, the touch of skin, the sounds of holding on.

  ***

  “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, I…nothing.”

  “What does that mean? Why do you look so guilty? Let me see that notebook. Chase, if you’re planning another secret mission to destroy my restaurant without telling me…”

  “No! Damn it, you have a suspicious mind. I’m thinking about what I would like to do when—if—I get out. I keep having this vision of an adventure sports organization that gets disenfranchised kids out on the slopes or up in the air, gives them a source of physical accomplishment and power and adventure that doesn’t come from violence.”

  A little breath of a pause. A voice gone carefully neutral. “You’re thinking about getting out?”

  “Well, I…it wears out your body, you know. Bullet wounds and constant joint impacts and all the other stuff. I’ll start feeling it in a few years. And I…I mean…if a man had kids, you know, he might want to…be there, and not…”

  “Are you blushing?” A gentle hand in his hair. No splint on it now. The bone had healed faster than the recovery from the bullet.

  “I’m a hardened warrior. I eat nails for breakfast. Of course I am not blushing. It’s possible I’m feeling overheated from thinking about pink peekaboo panties.”

  “You certainly didn’t blush the first time you mentioned kids. About two minutes after you met me.”

  “Yeah, but…Vi…it’s starting to become real.”

  ***

  “Why do you get all the stuffed animals anyway? That’s just sexist.”

  “Chase, they kept your identity secret. How would anyone know to send you stuffed animals? You’ll have to be happy with your medal.”

  “Well, yeah, but…you got a medal, too, and growly bears from all the kids. It’s just not fair.”

  Vi handed him a pink stuffed unicorn with big eyes.

  Chase smiled and tucked against it like a pillow. “That’s much better.”

  ***

  “Did you just look at that woman’s ass?”

  “Vi! Of course not! I was just checking for concealed weapons! You know how alert I like to be to my surroundings.”

  “Alert to your hot women surroundings.”

  “It’s the first time we’ve been out in a while! I’m just trying to see how much fashions have changed.”

  “In six weeks?”

  “Besides, Vi, nobody’s ass can compare to yours. I could probably write a poem to your ass. We’ll call it ‘Ass, a haiku by Chase Smith, alias’.”

  “Oh, purée.”

  “Ass

  High, firm, round, tempting

  Inviting the touch of my hands

  Also of my d—”

  “Chase!”

  “What, doesn’t that make five syllables?”

  “You know everyone at the other tables can hear you, right?”

  “Sorry, honey. I forgot you were so shy.”

  ***

  “Tell me a story.”

  “A story?”

  “About you. Anything, really.”

  “Well…once there was a young man who met this really hot blonde and decided he was going to get her. This woman was so hot that nobody could get her. So obviously she had to put him through some tests to make sure he was worthy. She threw knives at him, and he survived. She threw him into a deep river, and he survived. And then she thought, that was way too easy for him. He’s going to win too fast if I don’t think of something really hard. So she thought really evilly, and she figured out the very hardest thing to do for that man, and she said he had to do it: he had to wait. But he was strong-willed, and he was brave, and he was stubborn, and he did that, too. And then she had no choice. She had to keep her word. So…”

  Vi buried her head in his side, laughing. There was really maybe nothing quite as perfect as two people stretched out on the same couch, on a quiet evening, tucked together. “But I meant a story I didn’t know.”

  “Oh, so you know the ending, too. You’re just pretending not to.”

  She pinched him. But not really enough to sting.

  “Okay, what kind of story?”

  “Just any story. Maybe a story you like to tell. Or maybe one you never tell, because you wanted to, but you didn’t know who to tell it to.”

  “Comedy, tragedy?”

  A little pet of fingers against his chest. “Anything.”

  He took her hand and ran his thumb up her work-toughened fingers. “We can take turns. You tell me some, too.”

  She nodded into his side.

  He thought and thought. “Well…once there was this young man who saw people fall from tall, tall towers. And it hurt his heart, because he couldn’t catch them, and he watched the towers crumble to the ground. And so he tried to make himself into someone who could always do something, never just watch a television helpless again. And…I don’t think I can tell this.”

  Vi squeezed his hand. “I’ll go for a little bit. You grew up on a ranch, and my grandmother and brother have farms, right? Let’s start with that.”

  ***

  “Does this package contain what I think it does?”

  “Oh, look at that! More fan mail. Now I wonder which of your fans could have sent you pink peekaboo
panties?”

  ***

  “Wow, you look happy, even for you. What’s going on?”

  A big grin. “I’m cleared for action again. You would die of jealousy if you knew the training they’ve got us on for the next month. It’s in Corsica, with your 2e REP, SAS from Britain, and the KSM. They said this time the imperative really was for us to learn how to cooperate and not try to beat all the other forces, but we’ll see how that goes.”

  A faint smile, green eyes watching him very alertly. “This just revs you up, doesn’t it? You love your job.”

  “It’s my purpose, Vi.”

  She came to stand in front of him and rested a loose fist on his chest. “Have fun. Kick ass.”

  “Will you miss me?”

  “Of course I’ll miss you. But I’ll be busy kicking ass, too.”

  “It will get harder,” Chase warned, warily. “I’m with SOCEUR right now, but they don’t have to keep me there. The next deployment could be six months in a war zone again.”

  “Is this the part where you realize you need the kind of woman who can pack up her life and follow yours around?”

  “No. This is the point where I know how good it is to be with a woman who has a full, good, happy life without me. So I don’t have to feel guilty about my own life choices. But it will still be hard. For both of us.”

  “Chase. Please try to wrap your mind around what it means to apprentice in a starred kitchen at fifteen and work my way up to my own two stars by twenty-eight. I. Do. Hard. Things.”

  “Damn, I love you.”

  “I love you, too, you arrogant idiot. Now go kick ass.”

  ***

  “Vi! Vi! Wake up! Guess what day it is?”

  “It’s…is it four in the morning? Merde, Chase, we just got to bed an hour ago.”

  “It’s January! I survived!”

  “You might be premature on that.”

  “Too late! I made it. Pay up, Gorgeous.”

  Vi rolled over slowly. In the dim pre-dawn of her brother’s farm house, where they’d gone to celebrate New Year’s Eve, Chase’s big body was propped over hers, his hand shaking her shoulder. He looked as pushy and unstoppable and eager as a kid at Christmas. Which she should know, having been dragged out of bed at this hour only a week before by his nieces and nephews when they spent Christmas in Texas.