Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) (3 page)

She held up that butcher knife, point straight toward him so he’d ram himself on it if he kept coming.

He sagged and scowled. “Was that necessary? That was cruel and unusual.”

She gave a very smug, mean smile, like Catwoman licking her lips.

He regrouped. “Now
I
have a fantasy about that counter.” He gave her a smile back. “I’m even down on my knees in it.”

She checked. Her eyes widened just a tad, and then flickered to the counter. And back to him. She pressed her lips firmly together, but her throat moved as she swallowed.

Yeah.
Now
they were getting somewhere. He took a step toward her.

“You are like some Jack-in-the-box on steroids,” she said, exasperated. “You just bounce up again, and again, and again.”

“Yep,” he agreed. “All night long.”

She thunked her own forehead with the haft of her knife. “Look, just tell me what you want.”

“Oh, honey, you don’t want me to get started on everything I want from you right here. You want to be lying down for some of that.”

She gave him an utterly exasperated evil look, and he laughed. “It’s your own fault, you know,” he said.

“That you’re an idiot?” She raised an ironic eyebrow.

“The—sproing.” He shielded his crotch with his hand and then made that hand spring up at attention. “You seem to have that effect on me.”

“Oh, yeah, sure, it’s
always
the woman’s fault. Tell me what you want before I kill you.”

“To inspect you from top to bottom.”

She gave him a fulminating glance.

“I mean your kitchen. Did I say you? Slip of the tongue.” He grinned. “Don’t worry, it’s not always this clumsy.”

A knife buried itself in the wall behind his head, but at least she left a generous foot of distance this time. He must be growing on her.

“I don’t really need to inspect you for my job, to be honest,” he said. “Our files on you are so thorough, I could probably tell you what kind of underwear you’re wearing.” He closed his eyes a second. “Black lace,” he said firmly, cupping his hands at his chest. “Push up. And then…definitely a black thong.”

She gazed at him a long moment, with that narrowed look to her eyes that just excited the hell out of his entire body. “So the peekaboo pink lace would be a real disappointment to you.”

He took a hard breath, as that one got in past his body armor and hit him right in the belly.

“With the little slit down the middle…?”

“Okay.” He held up both hands in surrender. “I’ll be good. I promise. And I’ll do the dishes all seven days a week, okay? That’s on top of always taking out the trash and changing the oil. Just don’t tell me more about your underwear right now, okay?”

Because he had a
really
creative brain, and right now it had just paired that nice ass in peekaboo pink lace arched just so on the back of a motorcycle, and…yeah, he might explode before her eyes.

“I’d better focus on work for a minute,” he said.

“No, really? You can do that?”

It was too good to pass up. He gave her a slow smile. “Honey, I can focus like you wouldn’t believe.”

***

The good thing about leather, Vi thought, was that it really gave
no
clue as to how much a woman was letting a certain full-of-himself idiot get to her. Panty-dampening get to her. If anybody found out, it would totally ruin her cred.

He
sure as hell didn’t need to know. He was too cocky already.

All the other men she had crushed were just fantasizing about being him in video games? Ha.

Unless…he really was an ex-SEAL or something, in which case…nah. He was just another braggart, right? The number of men in bars who had tried to pretend to some mysterious SEAL affiliation the year she worked in New York was probably greater than the number of SEALs in existence.

“Now, about this saving the world issue,” her intruder said. “I’ll admit it’s niggling at me. Honey, if you would just let me get that out of the way, after that I’m all yours.”

“Ri-ight.” She sighed. “Because you have to do that in my kitchen. Of course you’re not just a thief sneaking into the hotel from here.”

He shook his head at her with grave disappointment. “Sweetheart, you’re going to have to trust me more if we’re going to make this relationship work.”

She just looked at him.

“Have I mentioned that I save kittens out of trees? Well, one. There was this little girl crying because he was stuck and—”

“What kind of kitten?” Vi said dryly.

“An ungrateful one. That’s where I got this scar.” He drew a finger down an apparently imaginary line on his cheek.

“Well. As wonderful a character reference as I’m sure the kitten could give you, I’m afraid it’s not here to meow on your behalf.”

He gave a broken-hearted sigh. “The embassy gave you a number to call, in case, right?”

“Yes,” Vi said warily.

“Call it and verify if they have a Chase Smith pre-vetting security at one of the President’s potential restaurant visits in advance of his arrival.”

“Potential?” She knew how this game worked—her own president had had to cancel twice before he finally made it—but
damn
she would love to land the American president. To be the one restaurant he and his wife chose to dine at in Paris. Sure, fine, some of the bloggers and other critics would make jokes about American taste to put her down, but she was a woman chef in a profoundly sexist field. She was used to dealing with crap.

“My company has men checking out some of his other top choices tonight, too, so that we can give a preliminary security assessment.” For a moment, Chase Smith was inscrutable. Unyielding. Serious.

Suggesting that she’d better cooperate, if she wanted to have her moment of glory next week.

She called the number. A male voice with an awkward French accent on the other end confirmed.

Oh.

“Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?” she demanded, exasperated.

“I was having too much fun, to be honest.”

Fun at her expense.

“You’re really
very
hot,” he confessed.

She glared at him. “If I don’t get to kill you, you don’t get to sexually harass me.”

He considered. “But the reverse is fine? I can keep sexually harassing you if you can keep trying to kill me? I can take that deal.”

She kind of liked it, too, to be honest. She had to put her fists on her hips to keep from thumping herself in the head.

“But it will take me a while to finish my inspections of the place,” he said. “You’re welcome to go home.”

Okay, maybe he wasn’t a burglar, but he was still crazy. Her eyebrows went up incredulously. “Nobody gets to wander around my kitchens unsupervised. Not even for a president. There are all kinds of things you could mess up.”

Chase hesitated, his eyes narrowing just the tiniest fraction.

“I’m sticking to you like glue,” she said firmly.

The narrowing of his eyes vanished. Chase gave a great, dramatic sigh of relief and clasped his hands to his heart in gratitude. “Honey,” he said ecstatically. “I knew I’d start to grow on you.”

Chapter 4

“You’re touching my ass.”

Vi jerked back a step, caught herself, and glared. No, she had
not
been.

And it had taken a lot of self-discipline, too.

Chase gave her a smile over his shoulder that invited true confessions. “It’s a great ass, isn’t it?” He was going through the kitchen at a brisk, thorough pace, opening everything—lowboys, drawers, cabinets—scanning everything, with the efficiency of an entire security team. “I tried to get it insured, but the premiums were too high.” He sighed woefully.

“All the women wanting to smack it?” Wait, that sounded a lot more erotic and a lot less like a cool putdown than she had meant it to.

It was just…it would be such a great ass to smack.

“Also.” He stopped in front of wire shelves filled with martini glasses, each with a small amount of liquid caramel in the bottom, all prepped for tomorrow when the last-minute components would be added. He was a really big guy. Vi herself was pretty tall, and her boots had six-centimeter heels on top of that, but this man just filled the space. Not only was he big, but his
presence
was big, as if he had an invisible extension of himself that just stretched out to every corner of the room and took charge of it.

His ass, on the other hand, was a tight,
fine
ass. Not big at all. But it still managed to keep dominating her attention as she followed close on his heels to make sure he didn’t mess with anything in her kitchens.

“Put that glass down! You’re getting fingerprints on it!”

“You won’t even let me have a little taste?” he asked wistfully. “That caramel looks good.
I’d
let you taste anything you want.” He pursed his lips near the edge of the glass in a very…
tastable
position.

She grabbed the glass and replaced it on the shelves. “Don’t touch anything! Don’t breathe on anything! If you sneeze, I’m killing you.”

“I’d better take care of the kids when they get sick,” he decided and moved to the walk-in. “Poor little tykes. You’re going to scare them into pneumonia with that attitude.”

“Yeah, that’s what everyone always told me. Twenty-eight, just stepping into my first starred kitchen, would be a
perfect
time to get pregnant and start a family.”

He eyed her a moment and then nodded decisively. “You’re right. We’d better wait on the kids. I’ll warn my grandma so she doesn’t harass you.”

She sighed very heavily.

“She’s not, like,
obsessed
or anything,” he hastened to reassure her. “She’s got plenty of great-grandchildren. It’s more my mother you have to worry about.”

“Did any of your commanding officers ever try to beat you over the head with a sledgehammer?”

He smiled and opened the walk-in. “Brr. I don’t suppose you’d consider coming closer to keep me warm?”

“I thought your hot body temperature was supposed to be one of your few attributes.”

“I think it’s like having a fever. I’m so hot that the slightest chill in the air makes me shiver.”

“The sledgehammer probably bounced off,” she decided grimly. She braced herself at the walk-in door and folded her arms. “I don’t care how obnoxious you are, you are not getting me to stalk off and leave you a chance to do something in my kitchens I can’t see.”

“Obnoxious,” Chase said in a very sad, small voice. He gazed woefully at the crates of cream as if about to ask them for sympathy, and then his gaze changed, and for a second that narrow, dangerous look was back on his face. “This where he cornered you?”

That bastard Quentin. Vi smiled. “He regretted it.”

“I’ll just double-check to make sure he got enough bruises,” Chase said in a soothing, reassuring tone. “Sometimes it’s good to have a second opinion on these things. Is that gluten?” He pointed randomly.

“You’re probably more likely to find gluten where we keep the flours. As opposed to where we keep the fruits, vegetables, butters, and creams.”

“Is that safe?” He pointed at some slabs of butter.

“What do you mean, ‘safe’?” Vi asked warily. “It tastes good. Please, dear God, don’t tell me that your president is on some weird diet plan where he can’t eat butter.”

“He’s vegetarian.” Chase sighed and shook his head. “Hard to believe people voted for that guy.”

“
Vegetarian?
” Vi recoiled, grabbing the edge of the door for support. Then her eyes narrowed. “No, he damn well isn’t. The embassy would have said something when they called!”

Chase grinned at her.

“Okay, you know what? You can get out of my kitchens now.”

“Nobody could get sick from it, right?” he said. “The butter?”

Vi stared at him. “What, you mean like
food poisoning
?” she finally realized, outraged. “No one is going to get
food poisoning
from my kitchens!”

Chase held up a hand. “Just doing my job, honey. Just doing my job.”

She glowered at him and tapped her foot. His gaze drifted down her body all the way to her tapping toe, and he closed his eyes tight and gave himself a hard shake.

Then he bit back a tiny, wicked smile and bent from the waist. “What about here?”

Vi stared as his black pants pulled tight, tight, tight as he slowly bent, and then snapped her gaze away. “Of course not!”

“Anything up here?” He straightened to lift one of the heavy crates completely off an overhead shelf, holding it above his head at an angle that showed off biceps so sculpted and so perfect that they looked hot even through his shirt.

“Did you ever do any modeling?” she asked him dryly. “Or do you just practice that pose in front of the mirror?”

“It was for charity. They harassed me into it. And can I just say that I am entirely ready for this male calendar charity craze to be over? What’s up with that? Why can’t you women pose naked if you think it’s such a good idea for charity?”

Violette’s lips parted. “Like…are you
nude
in a calendar?” Her eyes tracked over that big body, most of it hidden far too thoroughly by clothing and body armor. But he had those biceps. And those buns of steel. Kind of suggested that once the vest was taken away, there wasn’t going to be much of a bulge to his belly.

“My private parts are discreetly covered in it,” he said loftily. And then winked. “With dog tags.”

“That’s all it took?”

He stopped still. “
Plus my hands
,” he said outraged. “And the angle of my thigh! That—I—” For once words failed him in his indignation.

Vi gave him a sweet smile. “Just checking.” Because it was much better to have in her head an image of a man whose private parts could be covered by dog tags rather than an image of one whose private parts
couldn’t
, where the dog tags and chain artfully draped and entirely failed to hide the…she coughed.

He narrowed his eyes at her. Then he slowly set the very heavy crate back on its high shelf, biceps flexing, and reached even farther so that his shirt and vest drew up from his waist, showing a line of tan skin. He gave her a second with that view before he wobbled, toppled, and grabbed her shoulder for support.