She closed her eyes a moment. “Chase. You should really be more careful about saying that.”
“Why?” he asked, baffled. When had he ever been careful about his life? They were lying here both with bullet wounds in them, and she wanted him to be careful about words?
“Because I could get hurt!”
He blanked. And then ice slipped over his soul. “You mean, being with me could make you a target? Did they say that was why those two came after Au-dessus?” He’d let hints of who he was slip out to Vi’s friends to stir the pot, to maybe shake something loose with some rumors, but had that made Vi the focus of retaliation?
“Not physically hurt! My emotions!”
He stared at her indignantly. “Good God, Vi, I can’t protect your emotions! How the hell do you expect me to do that?”
“I don’t expect you to protect me at all!” she retorted, equally indignant. “I fight for myself. All I’m saying is—oh, forget it.” She stared at the ceiling, exasperated.
Chase’s lips parted. “You still think I’m full of shit, don’t you?”
An ironic side glance.
“That I’m just some arrogant jock who hits on any woman he sees without thinking too much about the consequences.”
No comment. Just that ironic gaze.
He huffed out a breath. “Fine. Yes. I pretty much never saw a hot woman I didn’t go after. Monogamy is going to be a tiny bit of a switch for me. But Vi…you make me go Wow. Every single cell in my body lights up, every time the thought of you even crosses my mind.” He took her splinted hand and rubbed his chest with the two free fingers. “Understand?”
She looked dubious.
“Vi. It’s not as if you have a confidence problem. You’ve got to know you can beat out every other woman, as far as I’m concerned.”
She tilted her head. Apparently that angle worked quite well on her.
He smiled a little. “Damn, I love you.”
Her green eyes were skeptical, challenging. Wanting him to pick up the gauntlet and prove her wrong.
Well. He loved picking up gauntlets. He kissed her fingertips again. “I’m surprised I didn’t betray the whole mission when we took out Al-Mofti, I was glowing so much. It’s amazing your fellow Parisians even let a radioactive man walk around on the street like that. Maybe that explains some of the looks I get. I was beginning to think Parisians were just rude.”
She shook her head at him. But her eyes were crinkling with flattered laughter.
“So how could you get hurt?” His eyes flicked involuntarily over her hands and the thick bandages around her torso, and abruptly all the cocky persuasion went out of him. He just flattened, a balloon sucked free of helium.
Vi tried to grip her hair with exasperation and winced away from how much that hurt, pulling her gauzed hand free immediately. Chase winced, too, taking that sign of pain hard in the belly. “Because!” Vi said. “I only just met you and already…” She faltered. “Already, when I imagine you not alive, it’s as if this bright, hot power source that warms my whole life gets extinguished. Everything grows cold and dark. And I have a good life, Chase. I made it good. Nothing about it felt cold and dark before I met you. What’s going to happen to me if suddenly I need you as my power source?”
“Oh.” Chase could only look at her. “Oh.” Yeah, of course. This happened to his buddies all the time. Women just couldn’t take the thought of investing their emotions into someone whose job involved so much risk of death. “Oh.”
He didn’t know what else to say. How did a man respond to his dismissal from someone’s heart because he might die? That risk of death had always made every single living moment of his life seem that much more valuable to him. It was one of the reasons he loved the risk so much—how alive he felt. How valuable his life felt.
“You know I can’t count on you.”
Well, yeah. Yeah. Even if he stayed alive, he’d be deployed and shit, and she’d need help with a plumbing problem or something, and…actually, it was very hard to imagine Vi not able to handle a plumber. Maybe he was going off on the wrong tangent.
“That’s a terrible amount of power to give to someone who chases any blonde in leather he sees,” Vi tried to explain.
He’d thought she was going to say to someone who might die. His eyebrows flicked together. “But I don’t do that any more. You blew all the other hot blondes out of the water. Actually, I think you’re so hot that you boiled all the rest of the water dry and those other blondes just wilted and died, unable to take the heat.”
“You’ve only known me a few days, Chase! You started chasing me the instant you saw me.”