Well…it wasn’t that it didn’t count, exactly. It seemed terribly…wrong, at the minimum, to say that a man’s willingness to die for you didn’t count. But…but…she thrust her hand through her wet hair, frustrated. How was it that a man could die to save your life and still not respect that life? How did they do that in their screwed up heads?
“Honey—I mean Mademoiselle Gorgeous—I can’t tell you what’s going on. I was brought in to test security, that’s all. The rest was just an excuse to keep flirting with you. But I will say that I’m pretty damn sure that nobody, not even the stupidest idiot on the planet, weighed your life against one other life, even the President’s, and thought it wasn’t worth as much. Now they might—and I’m just theorizing here—have weighed an ignorant little lie they didn’t realize would affect you against a few thousand other lives and, yeah, sold you out. But I couldn’t say for sure, because I’m just inventing all this off the top of my head and have no idea of anything.”
“A few thousand?” she said numbly.
He shook his head, his lips pressing together until just for a second he looked like that grim, lethal man she’d glimpsed when he heard about Quentin. He stuck his lilies in the glass, saying nothing.
“Was someone going to blow the restaurant up?”
He said nothing. The firm line of his lips changed him radically. He looked trustworthy, even, and…scary. Like someone even she might not want to mess with.
Well, that would explain why they would want to clear the restaurant. It might even explain why her career had been sacrificed to do it. But…this was Paris. Why would Americans have been involved in stopping a terrorist attack here? In warning of one, yeah, sure, but French special police would have been the ones to take action.
“Was it some kind of sting? You caught somebody? Some kind of arms-trader or bomb-maker or financial handler for al Qaeda or ISIS or something?”
He said nothing.
He looked different, with that tough, tight expression on his face. Her fingers touched her mouth. “Have you killed anybody in the past twenty-four hours?”
A flat, blank glance. “I’m just in private security, honey.”
Private security for whom? The CIA?
“Mademoiselle Gorgeous,” Chase corrected himself.
“Did your president ever plan to come to my restaurant at all? Or was that all just part of some sting?”
Chase said nothing.
“Putain de merde.” She beat the pillow against the back of the couch, slamming it multiple times. “I can’t believe my whole career was ruined over some fucking—stupid—cover-up.” She slammed the pillow again. “Americans don’t have the right to intervene here. I should take this to the media.”
“Take what? Sounds like a pretty wild-eyed story to me. The kind of thing a woman chef who bit off more than she could chew and then failed would come up with to try to cover for her own inability to handle a man’s job.”
“Merde, I hate you,” she said viciously, her hand fisting in the pillow.
“Yeah.” He sighed, and just for a second, both the cockiness and the grim lethalness slid off him, and he looked…sad? Not the puppy-eyes sad thing he did when he was playing her, but real emotion. “You’ve mentioned.”
Vi slumped down onto the couch. It took a lot to make her slump. She’d thought she’d gotten it out of her system in the shower. But her day sank on her, the weight and the frustration of having her whole life randomly ruined just when she’d thought she was reaching the stars, so heavy and so dark a weight that sometimes even her anger couldn’t fight it, and it settled on her like unending despair.
Her butt slid slowly off the couch, because she just couldn’t bear to sit that high up, and she slumped on the floor against it, burying her head in her hands. Well, in one hand, and in one chunky splint.
“I hate this,” he said. “I really hate it. It does matter to me, Vi.”
Not enough to tell her the truth or anything, though. “Go to hell.”
A knock sounded. Vi lifted her head and gazed wearily at the door, and after a second Chase went to it himself. He gazed through the peephole. “Do you have a friend who’s Middle Eastern? A girl? Shorter than you. Pretty. She’s with another woman with dyed red hair who’s kind of curvy and cute and is carrying a metal box that has DR marked on it.” His face had gone grim. That expression he had when he forgot to keep joking, that always raised the hairs on her arms. As if a superhero had dropped his genial secret identity and suddenly she was in the presence of lethal force.
The kind of lethal force that let her throw knives at him because he thought it was kind of funny.
Damn it. Had he found it cute?
“That sounds like Lina and Célie.” His wariness and racial profiling reinforced her idea about some kind of terrorist sting. And pissed her off on Lina’s behalf. Lina was always getting this kind of crap. Sometimes she ignored it, sometimes she made ironic comments, but there were days, Vi knew, when it wore her down, and days when it made her really mad. “You know, her family has lived in France for two generations now.”