Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) (21 page)

He followed after her, starting to get a little indignant, and let the door close behind them. The office was glass-walled. Vi reached up and closed the blinds, then spun on him.

Chase folded his arms. “What a warm welcome.”

He’d heard about these kinds of things.
You just shot Bin Laden or something, and you come home and your wife puts your kid in your arms and says his diaper needs changing and it’s about time you started pitching in.

But he’d never actually had to deal with it, that disconnect between his job and the life that went on without him, not on such an intimate scale as the one created by a couple. He didn’t like it, he could flat out say that.

“You’ve been gone for over a week,” Vi said, tight and hard. “Without a word. And now you waltz back in during the
service
? And kiss me and manhandle me in front of my
whole team?
The second day we’re back open when I’ve got
everything
to prove to recover my reputation and the reputation of this restaurant from the depths to which you knocked it?”

“I didn’t—it—”
It was for a good cause
, he wanted to say.
The salmonella thing.
We
caught
Al-Mofti. Didn’t you hear it on the news this morning?

Probably this wasn’t a good place for that revelation. Probably she needed a security clearance. Probably no one was going to give him the okay to tell a hot blonde Frenchwoman in leather anything about anything at all. They’d all seen James Bond, too.

He focused on the one thing he could solve. “Didn’t you get my message?”

“Oh, I think I got it.” Vi folded her arms. “The one where you’re full of shit? Where you say all kinds of things when you’re horny and then you forget them entirely and go off to live your own life until you’re horny again?”

A muscle started to tick in his own jaw. “The one where I told you I was going to be gone for a while. The one where I asked you to get a new phone and give me the number in case I got a chance to call.”

Her eyes blazed. “I don’t sit by the phone and wait for
anyone
to call.”

“Vi.” He shoved his hand through his hair, hurt and anger twining inextricably. “Not even for me?”

It was a freaking cell phone, it wasn’t as if he was asking her to shut herself into her apartment and not go out with her friends. And even if he was…people had to time calls like that all the time, when they were deployed. Their one chance to Skype with each other that week, to say hi, to touch home. It was
important
when you were deployed. It was important to the people at home, too, right? Important enough for them to sit at home one night if they had to, to catch that call?

Right?

“Just because I had hot sex with a man doesn’t mean I have to change my life for him,” Vi said coldly.

He almost staggered. “Okay, what the
fuck
, Vi?” The emotions thing they’d talked about. The fragile silky cloths in all their colors? She was
shredding
them, after he’d been so brave about letting them out?

He’d only been away a little over a week. It wasn’t as if he’d gone for a golf trip.

“There are more fish in the sea,” she said, with her chin up, her eyes hot.

His jaw clenched. A little fuse in his brain just sparked, and the flame started racing down a very short line to the dynamite in the middle of his head. “That goes both ways, honey,” he said, even though he didn’t mean it, and it was the worst possible thing he could say. She’d just flipped his freaking switch so damn bad.

Her eyes blazed. “Let’s just sum it up, shall we? You think what you do is so much more important than me that it’s beyond my comprehension and you could
never
tell me what it is. You think
this
,” she waved at the blinds and presumably the kitchen beyond them, “my whole life, all my dreams, is casual road kill as you roll your tank over it to some other goal of yours. And you think my own emotions, my
worry
is so irrelevant and so unimportant that you can just disappear for a week and not even think about what I might
feel
. Just show up the first second I’m starting to put the life you destroyed back together and expect me to be thrilled to see you, no harm, no foul.”

“I
left you a message
!” Chase roared. “It’s in your goddamn journal under your stupid alarm clock with its fucking siren!”

Her eyes glittered. Her fingers flexed into her palms, forming fists and then forcing them apart. He drew a deep breath, trying to un-explode himself. He was pretty sure she was just like him. Once the yelling started, it was much easier to fight than to hear what was being said.

But un-exploding himself was hard to do. He felt as if he was trying to catch jagged shrapnel of his self-control and stuff it back into some semblance of a brain while it was still flying outward from the pressure of the blast. “Look. Vi. My job is really demanding and really important and sometimes—”

“And
mine’s not?
” Her own fuse lit. He could see it happen. Just see the explosion as she lost all possibility of hearing him or rational discussion. “You
bastard.
Just get the hell out! I. Am. Working.”

She jerked her office door open and strode out, slamming it behind her.

***

The glass walls weren’t nearly sound-proof enough, and everyone lifted heads to stare at her as she strode back into the foment of activity.

She cast one fierce glance around, all it took to redouble her staff’s activity. Energy radiated off her as if she was a radioactive core. She could not believe that jerk Chase. Disappear for over a week and then show up now,
now
of all times, when they’d just re-opened after a disastrous scandal, when there were at least three influential critics at the tables, and she was still clinging desperately to the increasingly slim possibility that Secret Service would suddenly flood the place and give her a half-hour warning that the American president was about to arrive.

But of course when had Chase ever for one moment really considered that
her
job was important?

She was twenty-eight years old, a Michelin two-star chef, and yet to him, just like to every other man, she was still some cute little woman whose career could never possibly be anything but fluff, easily brushed away when the man’s
important
job took precedence.

A man who considered his job so important he couldn’t even
tell
her about it. What the hell had he been doing this past week? Had he had anything to do with Al-Mofti’s death that had been all over the media that morning? Was it coincidence that the dropping of the salmonella investigation happened at the same time? Could anyone possibly tell her
what the hell was going on
that put her restaurant at the center of this? Was the connection some figment of her imagination?

Lina came by, carrying an open bucket of liquid nitrogen, vapor rising off it as she called, ironically, “
Chaud, chaud, chaud! Chaud devant!
”

Mikhail shaved red tuna with a knife so sharp each slice was transparent.

One of their newer cooks dropped slices of beef into a pan with three centimeters of hot oil, and Vi leaned over him, grabbing the handle. “Not yet. Like this. Watch—”

And a wave ran through the kitchens, a stiffening in shock, like the moment when a lion appears and every member of the herd responds to the reaction of the first gazelle to spot it. In that alert kitchen, reaction time was probably shorter than half a second.

Secret Service? Vi spun and—

Black mask. A man struggling with a machine gun as if something was wrong with it, yelling at everyone to get down, and…

Holy fucking shit.

She swept the pan she was holding around in one hard arc and threw it, oil and all, at his head. Lina heaved that whole bucket of liquid nitrogen straight into the man’s chest. Mikhail reversed his knife and threw.

And…oh, shit, there was another man, surging behind this one, and his gun was
not
jammed, and…

Vi leapt across the counter toward him, grabbing more pans as Lina threw herself on the floor and toward his legs and Adrien grabbed a blow torch, lunging in from the side as he squeezed out flame, and…

The second masked man staggered again, again, again, his machine gun giving a little spurt—her brain managed to process that she was seeing the impact of bullets on his body. And then she heard the bullets, in strange delayed echo in her brain, sounds it was finally identifying. She’d never heard bullets except on film. And at a distance that night…that night in November when…

“Vi, get the hell down!” someone was yelling. “Get
down
!”

But she’d already slammed the pot she held as hard as she could into the second man’s face.

He went down, and she went down on top of him, her legs going right out from under her as if she’d slipped or something.

She landed in a seated position on his body as it hit the ground, his gun bony and hard under her butt.

“Is he wearing a vest? Vi, get the hell out of the way!” Chase was surging into her view, gun in hand. He grabbed her shoulders and literally threw her over the nearest counter. She bumped and slid and fell hard, and there was a lance of pain up from her side through her whole body.

“Thank Christ.” Chase’s voice. Then: “Two attackers. Everyone needs to go on full alert. This may not be the only location. Let me know when the streets are cleared and get me back-up as soon as you can. You, lock the door. Everyone else,
get back.
”

Vi dragged herself up—which was
ridiculously
hard to do, anyone would think she was a wimp or something—and managed to get an elbow onto the counter and pull herself upright enough to look over it.

Adrien was the one who had been sent to lock the door. Oh, God, in case there were more attackers. Chase was speaking into something, some kind of communication device she couldn’t even see but it was obvious he wasn’t talking to them, and he had ripped the second guy’s shirt open. There was blood
everywhere.

Human
blood. Vi was used to blood. Most of her best dishes held some kind of meat. She sliced up flesh and caught the blood from roasts all the time. And her brother had a farm these days, had escaped Paris suburbs to seek their grandparents’ peasant roots. She’d seen living animals butchered. She knew where her food came from.

But…this was like when a cow was butchered only…human.

“That’s not a vest?” Adrien’s voice sounded strained.

Vi
felt
strained. First of all, she couldn’t seem to stand upright, and second, that looked
exactly
like suicide vests in the movies.

“It’s C4.” Chase’s voice was clipped. “And he didn’t detonate it.” He yanked something out as he spoke. “If it had been TATP, we wouldn’t be here. Will you people
get the fuck clear
?”

He looked up at Lina as if he was about to grab her and throw her after Vi.

Lina reached down suddenly and ripped the mask off the first man.

Vi stiffened. Was that Lina’s weaselly, creepy, rapist cousin Abed?

He’d
tried to shoot up her kitchens?

He’d
tried to hurt her people?

“Vi, stay the hell down!” Chase yelled, but it didn’t even penetrate as she threw herself back over the counter—everything hurt like
hell
—and threw herself at Abed.

“You pathetic coward asshole
putain de merde de connard de
…!” Vi kicked him, the nitrogen-fragilized sweatshirt fragmenting under the toe of her stout kitchen shoes, and Lina was kicking the other side of him, yelling at him, and…

A pounding on the door. Chase spoke, not to her team, and then ordered Adrien to let them in. A surge of male military might into the room, several people grabbing her and Lina, pushing and carrying them to safety.

Clearing and securing the room, clearing and securing the bodies—one body and Lina’s cousin, who was groaning. Vi struggled, feeling unusually helpless, as a man in a black RAID uniform just hauled her all the way to the opposite side of her own kitchens as if
he
was in charge of them.

“Chase, you’re hit,” said a crisp, calm voice. A man who looked freckled all over but moved like a mountain lion in a killing mood. “We need an ambulance.”

“We’ve got more injuries here,” the man who had hauled Vi to the other side of the room called.

“Triage,” someone ordered, while the freckled man sliced Chase’s shirt off him with a lethal looking knife.

He was bleeding. Shit.

Vi looked at her fingers, wondering how his blood had gotten there. Had she grabbed him when he threw her?

Merde
, she’d done something sloppy. Her chef whites were
all
bloody. She couldn’t go around looking like that. A chef worked
clean.

Damn, her hand hurt. Oh, yeah, the oil from the pan she threw, right. Blisters were already rising.
Merde
, both hands out? She had no luck. Seriously.

“Is everyone okay?” she yelled, and jerked against someone’s hold, trying to free herself. “I need to check on my team.”

The hand firmed. “Mademoiselle, we need you to lie down,” a black-uniformed man said.

Chase’s head jerked around.

“It’s just the liquid nitrogen,” Lina said. “I’ve had burns before. I’ll be okay.”

Lina’s chef’s coat had done its job—any nitrogen that had splashed when she threw the bucket hadn’t soaked into the cloth but rolled off it and evaporated. Her hand was cold-burned a bit, probably more from punching Abed’s nitrogen-soaked shirt than from the splash of nitrogen, which would have vaporized at the heat of her skin.

Abed, now, was wearing a cotton sweatshirt—he was going to have some serious burns over his torso. Not to mention the knife wound from Mikhail, and the splash of oil over his face from her pan.

Good.

Vi wanted to kick him again. She hoped she’d broken several ribs. She hoped they took him to Guantánamo and interrogated him for
years.
“You fucking asshole!” she shouted at him, just in case he’d been ignoring her the first time. “Adrien, is everyone else okay?”