Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) by Laura Florand

definitely try the cuddle.”
    “I hate you,” she said. “Go away.” But she didn’t try to close the door on him again, just turned around and trudged back into her apartment. Her slippers shuffled.
    All her proud stride, with her clicking boots, reduced to a shuffle. Oh, hell, and were her eyes red? Could he tell she’d been crying?
    She spun around, ready to attack him with flowers again to prove her strength.
    He moved lithely past her and into the small kitchen area, setting the gloves on the bar and reaching up into her cabinets. Failing to find vases, he made do with some of the larger water glasses, making a mess of the bouquets as he tried to divide them so that they would fit.
    He ended up with every single water glass she owned spread across the counter, each holding as many stems as it could, and gazed at the awkward deconstruction of the beautiful bouquets a moment, framed by red boxing gloves, then sighed.
    He did look kind of…cute, over that disarray of flowers.
    Damn it, Vi. She kicked a slipper against the floor in lieu of kicking herself.
    “Has no one given you flowers before?” he asked incredulously. “Where the hell are your vases? Wait, don’t tell me, let me guess. You broke them over the last guy’s head when he pissed you off, and that’s why he’s not around any more.”
    She mostly didn’t date. She looked like she did, she knew that. But the reality was that men hit on her, of course, and then when she actually took them up on it and went out with them, they quickly turned into wimps who found her too much to handle. She didn’t give into them enough, she fought for too much space for herself when they wanted all the space and wanted it by automatic right, not by virtue of any effort.
    She’d gotten kind of tired of men who thought she made a great sex object but not such a great, pliant girlfriend, and she’d mostly given up on the dating thing recently. Ever since she took over a two-star kitchen, she didn’t have time for a social life anyway.
    Which was probably why she’d been so deprived she’d taken up with the jerk in front of her and been willing to play his sex object. “Did I mention I hate you?”
    He picked her knife roll off the counter and set it on top of the kitchen cabinets, where she would have to climb up on something to reach it. “It’s come up a few times.”
    “Then why are you still here?”
    “Well, I’m hoping to talk you round before the wedding. Otherwise, if you try to knife me when the minister says ‘You may kiss the bride’, it’s going to cause a hell of a scandal in my family. Not as bad as the one at my cousin Ty’s wedding, but still.”
    Wow, what had happened at his cousin Ty’s wedding? She bit back on the question, furious with herself for being tempted to ask it just to see what other B.S. he made up. Damn it. This man was impossible.
    He had ruined her life . And here he was acting like that was no big deal, because of course to him it wasn’t.
    “It doesn’t even matter to you, does it?” she said.
    “What doesn’t?” he asked blankly, and she grabbed a couch pillow and threw it at him.
    It knocked over half the glasses, and he flung himself to catch them, managing to make sure not a single one hit the floor.
    The flowers and water, of course, spilled everywhere, and he got quite wet. “Damn it,” he said plaintively, looking at the mess of flowers. “You sure do take a long time to calm down.”
    He tossed the pillow back to her gently and patiently started reforming his awkward bouquets in all the glasses, adding water carefully and setting the array back in a line on the counter.
    “My life,” she said between her teeth. “That doesn’t even matter to you, does it? It was never worth anything in the first place. Compared to yours.”
    He stopped messing with the flowers and just looked at her for a long moment, holding two lilies. “I’d take a grenade for you without a second thought. So I guess it