“Yes, but…” Chase logged into Twitter and found #audessus #vilenoir. Oh, shit. A sick feeling grew in his stomach. What the fuck? Had some asshole just called her a “dumb c***”, with a “women don’t belong in a real restaurant” added on? He was going to kick somebody’s ass. “Can you retract it? Correct it?”
“Chase,” Mark said firmly. “You have to hold it together. We’ll run ‘salmonella tests’ for a few days, follow any leads we might get, and later we can say the salmonella cases were traced to something else and nothing to do with the restaurant. I hope I don’t need to remind you that stopping Al-Mofti is our top priority.”
A vision of Flight 997’s family members, the screaming agony of the mother of the little girl who’d flown by herself for the very first time to see her grandparents and now would never be coming home. “No,” Chase said, feeling sick. “No.”
“And do not tell her,” Mark said. “We still don’t know what, if any, connection her pastry chef might have with any of this. We need doubt. We don’t want anything certain to slip out.”
Fuck.
Chapter 9
By four that afternoon, Vi had one thing on her mind: Chase Smith.
If she ever found that slimy bastard again, she was going to kick him so hard in the nuts he wouldn’t even be able to look at a woman he wanted to screw for months without wincing.
Not that she knew what the hell was going on, but she knew how a man’s eyes flickered when she caught him out. Like, You’re married, aren’t you? Or Navy SEAL. She knew what normal health inspectors looked like, and she knew they didn’t bar her from her own restaurant. And she knew what it was like to be screwed by a man who didn’t see her body as anything more than an enjoyable byproduct of his running his tank right over her life.
You’re lucky you snuck out without leaving your number, you bastard. She rolled her right shoulder and touched her right cheek, where both had been bruised when the police had to forcibly remove her—pushing her against the wall by the restaurant back door and cuffing her. More good fodder for the cameras.
Putain, she might have broken Twitter.
Fortunately, her arrest had been a catch and release deal. The police had just wanted her to calm down and give up her own restaurant into the hands of imposter health inspectors. One of them had even told her a pretty woman like her shouldn’t get so upset, she should show more class. And she hadn’t even been able to deck him, because all the power was in his hands, and he would just have arrested her again, and this time kept her locked up.
She glared back at the Commissariat, the main one on the ?le de la Cité, where she was pretty sure she’d been taken just to put more distance between her and her restaurant in the Tenth.
Then she checked her phone. Yeah, that “c***s don’t belong in the kitchen” Tweet had been reTweeted 2753 times. With her tagged each time. She didn’t even want to check the hashtags. Her publicist would have to handle that one.
Merde, now Twitter was claiming she’d food poisoned the President of the United States? That had been a prospective visit a week from now.
She threw her phone in a long arc from the point of the ?le de la Cité into the Seine, and stood there, her hands on her hips, watching that phone sink down into brown water and the mud below like her life.
Fuck.
How had this just happened to her? She had been at the heights and still climbing, a rising star, glowing bright and determined to keep climbing. Controversial, yes. Flamboyant, yes. “It’s pretty but is it art?”, yes. But any woman worth her salt in this field had to face that crap.
The same way she had to face the way so many onlookers cheered her fall now and threw rotten eggs and tomatoes at her while she was down in the dirt.
She shoved her hand through her hair and stared at a passing barge, tempted to swim out to it and beg the captain to take her away from this city. Maybe she could change her name, change her hair, change countries, and start over.
A movement to her left, a man coming in too close to her personal space, and she pivoted so fast she nearly drilled a hole through the cobblestone with her heel. Some jerk wanted to harass her right now? Bring it.
But it was Chase. Big, tan, easy-moving, gold-streaked brown hair, with those blue eyes and the lines around them from squinting into who knew what. Bullets?
As cocky as ever. Checking her out, with that quick I-own-that-now flick up and down her body. Larger than life, hard-bodied, absolutely sure of himself. Except for that guilty smile on his mouth.
A wave of memories washed over her—his hands all over her body, inside her body, his face as he looked down at her butt, his mouth on her…all while he knew he was going to bring her life down around her ears. Her fingers curled into her palms.
“Hi, honey,” he said, just cautiously enough that she knew. She’d been his roadkill, hadn’t she? And now he had a guilty conscience.
“You.” Her fist clenched.
He held up placating hands, like a cheater calming down his little woman after she caught him with another girl. “Now, honey,” he started.
She hit him.
***