Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) (7 page)

He grinned, thrusting into her hand in luxurious pleasure. So she squeezed.

“I must have a guardian devil,” he breathed. “And he’s finally beaten that damn guardian angel off my other shoulder.
Thank you
.”

That
thank you
seemed to be directed more toward the guardian devil than to her, but she smiled, feeling about as smug as a woman could who had just had two orgasms and was no longer in a rush herself but ready to thoroughly enjoy driving a man out of his mind. She squeezed and drew her hand up the length of him and then back down.

He flipped her over, lifting her hips. She smiled as she braced on her forearms and arched her back.

He breathed a series of awed curses. She lowered her cheek to her pillow and rubbed it there, just for the pleasure of the texture as she savored his delight.

His hands caressed her butt almost worshipfully, as if she was fragile, those calluses shivering up through her body everywhere. Then he bent and bit her butt, just hard enough, with just enough tickle from his jaw, to make her yelp a little and laugh.

He rubbed his hand between her legs from behind until he could slip a finger into her sex in a slow, luxurious exploration and a verification that she was ready. She squeezed all her inner muscles against his finger.

He gave a low, burring sound of pleasure, thrusting again and then again, working her, making sure. She stretched her arms awkwardly behind her, taking her own weight on her face and shoulders, as she grabbed for his butt and managed to reach his thighs, pulling against those great muscles.

He arched her a little farther to make his access easy and then with a sighing
fuck
of delight thrust into her.

Mmmm.
She pulled on him harder, bringing him deeper. “Don’t stop.”

“Please tell me that’s not a challenge,” he said as he thrust deep, deep, deep enough that she gave a little gasp and had to relax her muscles again. “Don’t you dare ask me to keep this up for a damn hour.”

She smiled into the pillow. “All right, then, hurry up.” She tugged on his thighs as hard as she could from that angle.

He bent over her back, his voice that deep, luxurious drawl. “How about I take my own sweet time?” He drew a callused hand down her spine.

She shivered with pleasure. After an intense day on her feet, controlling everything, there was perhaps nowhere on her body hungrier for touch than her back.

“Like that, sweetheart?” he murmured, broadening his strokes of her back to her shoulders, then tightening his hands on her shoulders as he thrust deep into her again. And deep again.

God, he felt good. She bit into her lip with the pleasure of it, shaking her head a little against her pillow as every texture, cotton sheets, skin, pressure inside and out, became delicious. He stroked down her arms, found her hands, and threaded his fingers with hers, locking her hands to the mattress. “And that?”

She nodded against the pillow.

“I have died and gone to heaven.” He thrust harder, his fingers tightening on hers. “Well…maybe not heaven, but somewhere a lot dirtier and more fun.”

“Don’t stop,” she whispered into the pillow.

“I tell you what, honey. I can’t promise not to stop. But I sure as hell promise you I’ll do it again.”

And, by God, he did.

The second time was in the shower, in this long, slow, mercilessly sensual stroking of water and helplessness, too much sensation everywhere, while he laughed low in his throat and lifted her and kissed her and manipulated her body every way he wanted to, until he finally pressed her wet against that wall, with the warm water pouring over both of them, took her mouth with his, and fucked her senseless.

Almost literally. She was limp and somnolent from exhausted pleasure as he carried her and a bundle of towels to the bed and stretched her out on it, patting her dry with a kind of possessive smugness. And it was 2:50 a.m. when she fell asleep.

***

In the dark room, Chase propped on his elbow a while, smiling as he watched her sleep. She’d turned away from him, and her blond hair spilled over the sheets and her back, her arm flung out to the edge, her knee drawn up. She wanted to take
all
the bed, didn’t she? It was
hers.

He rolled onto his back, with one hand behind his head, and checked his watch. Three o’clock. The smile slowly faded. If Vi had been awake, she would have seen his face go faintly grim, inscrutable, a blank, lethal contemplation. In the dark, where no one could see, he looked like a hardened killer anticipating battle.

But, of course, if she had been awake, he wouldn’t have let her see that face.

Time to go.

He rolled out of bed smoothly and silently, dressing without a sound. Vi didn’t even move in her sleep. He pulled open the drawer of her nightstand. No paper. But there was a journal lying on top of the stand. He opened it, flipping past what seemed mostly menu ideas to a blank page. It was one of those expensive journals he hated to rip up, so he hesitated a moment over it, pen in hand, then smiled a little as he wrote quickly. He set her alarm clock on top of it to hold the journal open to the page, so that she would spot it when she turned that alarm off.

Then he strode out without looking back.

Chapter 7

“So how did your fishing expedition go?” Mark asked with a crisp edge to his words, as if they’d spent too long on a temperamental grill. Being team leader of a group of men like them who had been sitting still for far longer than their temperaments could handle was not for the faint of heart.

Chase leaned back in his chair, locked his hands behind his head, opened his mouth, closed it…and a great, beatific grin spread across his face.

“I’m going to kill him,” Jake informed Mark. “God damn it. I spent the whole fucking night on a roof in forty degree rain. Isn’t it
July
?” Half Irish and half God knew what—mountain lion, probably—Jake had golden red hair and skin that should currently be deeply relieved to find itself in a rainy climate. The dense layering of dust-toned freckles on his skin had pretty much left no non-freckled space, after the Middle East.

“I had to keep her distracted!” Chase said. “Her brain scrambled. You know.” He grinned, feeling so big he was going to explode any moment. Hell, she was fine. “Who wants to be the best man?”

From the doorway, Ian snorted. “No woman is dumb enough to marry you. She was just using you for sex.” There was a grain of truth to that which snuck under Chase’s skin. Special ops always did have more trouble getting a woman to marry them and stick with them through deployments than finding someone to have sex with.

“It’s true love,” Chase said loftily, instead of admitting that. “You’re just jealous.”

Possibly true. The gods had showered multiple ethnic blessings on Ian, as if each race in his ancestry had assigned him his own personal fairy godmother at the christening to try to form the ideal twenty-first century man, and, in consequence, he found it even easier than the rest of them to pick up women. He had possibly gotten a little bit spoiled, therefore.

Near him, their French RAID liaison, Elias, gave Chase a jaundiced look. The tall, black-haired, and bronze-skinned member of France’s elite counterterrorism unit had been born of an Algerian father and a French mother in one of the poorer
banlieues
outside Paris, and he had reacted to the 2015 attacks kind of like someone might react to discovering his brother had turned into a raging zombie cannibal and was eating out the brains of their parents.

In which case, Elias had chosen the role of Rick Grimes.

“Did you come here to help protect the civilian population or inseminate them?” Elias asked coolly.

Chase grinned at him. “Worried about protecting your womenfolk?”

Elias just raised one eyebrow. How did French men manage that damn eyebrow thing? Chase tried it, involuntarily—he
always
had to try physical challenges as soon as he thought of them—struggling to wiggle one eyebrow over the other, and sneezed.

“I know you don’t know much about restaurants in America, but trust me, a twenty-eight-year-old two-star chef can protect herself,” Elias said dryly.

Chase’s grin widened. Damn, she’d been hot wielding those knives. “She sure as hell can.”

“So I’m just going to assume she has lousy taste in men.”

Hey. “Maybe she’s desperate.” Chase yawned and stretched and rubbed his knuckles against his chest. “Real men, you know. She probably never met one before, growing up here.” He shot Elias a bird.

“Well, she’d have to be desperate if she thought you were one,” Ian said from the doorway. He folded muscled arms across his chest and gave Chase a competitive look. “Or exhausted.”

“Ego depletion,” Jake said judiciously. “Eighteen hours handling a top kitchen. Decision fatigue, man. Give her a chance to sleep and she’ll wonder what the hell she was thinking.”

Chase scowled, slouching a little in his chair. It was not that he thought they were right,
obviously
, but still…

Damn it. They were probably right. Part right. They
all
knew the research on decision fatigue, kind of essential to anyone in special ops. Shit.

“I’ll go introduce myself to her, and
then
she’ll wonder what she was thinking,” Ian said and grinned. “But that’s okay. I don’t mind giving her a second chance to find the right man.”

“Okay, you know what—?” Chase started to stand.

“If we could focus on the main subject,” Mark said with that too-long-on-the-grill note to his voice. Long, lean, dark-haired Mark had a quiet manner and a bony angularity to him that always managed to convey the impression that he was a nerd, which was kind of hilarious considering his physical abilities. The iron man geek. Who had the nerves to deal with men like Chase, Jake, and Ian.

Chase subsided, Ian relaxed back against the wall, Jake gave them both a sardonic glance, Elias gazed heavenward, and they all paid attention.

“Chase. Other than chasing tail, anything?”

And Chase settled down. Way down. Into that cold place, where his heartrate dropped, where his focus was perfect. He didn’t think he was a psychopath, like people always liked to claim about special ops, because his emotion switch was usually full on. But he knew how to turn it off. That empty, calm clarity that took over his brain and body when he did.

“Nothing,” he said. “But…” And he dropped his head back, staring at the ceiling. “Is there any more on that ricin rumor?”

SOCEUR, United States Special Operations Command, Europe, was coordinating special ops with the French for one primary reason. Obviously, SOCEUR, too, would do anything and everything in their power to help prevent additional attacks on French soil, and they’d been instructed by the President himself to assist in any and all ways they could to track, punish, prevent.

But Al-Mofti was their highest value target now, and the reason SOCEUR had more or less crowbarred their way into operations here. Al-Mofti had been the mastermind behind the attack that took down a Paris-New York flight over the holidays, full of hundreds of French and Americans going to visit families, usually with their little French-American children with them on their way to see grandma. There had been a symbolism in the attack, to hit both France and the U.S. at the same time, a strike right at the heart of where the two were most vulnerable and most united.

And every person in the room and all the way up their chain of command to two presidents would kill that motherfucker if it was the last thing they did.

Mark shook his head grimly. “They’ve gone entirely dark.”

Chills prickled up Chase’s arms. He hated it when terrorists went dark. Especially when several of them in Paris and Brussels went dark together. Especially after the word
ricin
had been picked up by the CIA. Especially when one of the men they were tracing on his return from Syria was the cousin of Violette Lenoir’s pastry chef and had been seen on the street of the restaurant, using a phone for a purpose they hadn’t been able to trace. Damn encrypted chat apps.

Fuck, that kitchen was a nightmare. Jesus, they had shelves and shelves of half-prepped desserts sitting there overnight. Someone with a code, which probably covered all the upper levels of staff, could come in early and…

…and the first they’d know about it was when people started to get sick. And there was no cure for ricin.

They had
nothing
on the head pastry chef, nothing at all except the relationship with that very problematic cousin.

But what if…

That was what a counterterrorist unit had to deal with. That huge, horrible what if.

Who would be on the front line if the crazy bastards did manage to use ricin?

Violette Lenoir and all her staff. Handling all the food. Tasting it before it went out.

“We need to shut it down,” he said abruptly. “Find some excuse that gets the kitchen closed until after the President’s visit or we nail the bastards. Something that doesn’t tip them off. A plumbing problem or something. Rats?” No, shit. Vi would be
pissed
about rats. He’d seen the way those critics reacted in
Ratatouille.
Watched it during one fucking cold winter in Kandahar, where even a rat’s vision of Paris had made for an enticing contrast. “An electrical issue. Small fire.”

“That’s your call?” Mark assessed him steadily.

There had never been a successful mass ricin attack. But Chase had seen far more than his share of aftermaths of attacks with bombs and AK-47s, and they crowded up in his brain suddenly, sent ripples of horror down his skin. “Yes,” he said flatly. “It’s too big a risk.”

“The chef can’t know what happened,” Elias said. “She’s got to be left as much in the dark as anyone. We can’t risk tipping them off.”

Chase’s jaw tightened grimly. Yeah. He knew. “Fuck, she’s going to be pissed. She was really excited about the President’s possible visit.”

Elias was watching him. That sardonic look had faded beneath a certain tough sympathy. “Don’t worry. She’s a Michelin two-star chef at the age of twenty-eight. Trust me. She can handle anything.”