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.”