by Megan Crane
“Your call.” Isaac leaned back in his chair. “It could still be a domestic situation that got out of hand. Maybe the roommate had that jealous boyfriend after all, and maybe he has a few too many idiot frat-boy buddies. You could smack a few heads together and be done with it.”
“Possible.”
Blue realized he was tapping his fingers against the tabletop, an obvious outward sign of agitation, and not normally the sort of thing he let betray him. He stopped, but he knew it was too late. There was no way Isaac hadn’t clocked it. He figured it was his continuing silence on the subject of Caradine that got him a measure of grace in return, because Isaac didn’t say anything.
Blue took that as the gift it was. “I’m not sure a bunch of drunk frat boys could engineer a cleanup at all, or in such a short span of time. And even if they tried, I don’t think they’d manage to fool the Chicago PD.”
Isaac studied him for a minute, and Blue braced himself—while trying to look as if maybe he was actually boneless. In the six months he’d lived here, working with Isaac and the rest, going on their particular missions to solve the kind of problems only Alaska Force could, he’d come to respect Isaac in much the same way he’d respected his commanding officers back in the SEAL teams. But the way Isaac was looking at him now had nothing to do with mission directives. This was personal.
“I thought you barely knew this woman,” he said. Mildly enough.
“How well do you know all the kids who grew up with you?” Blue asked. Too defensively. He tried to ratchet that back. “The ones you haven’t seen since you were seventeen? That’s how well I know her, which is not at all.”
“Have you looked around Grizzly Harbor? There are maybe a hundred people here once the weather turns.” Isaac shook his head. “I know them all, dumbass. Every last one.”
“Everly was a kid when I left. I know who she is— I don’t know her. And I’m getting tired of repeating myself.”
Blue heard his own voice and barely managed to keep from cringing. That gruff, dismissive tone that he didn’t even believe himself. But whatever Isaac might have said to that, and it looked like he had a list or two, he never got the chance. Because the door opened at the front of the café, and Everly herself walked in.
And whatever lies Blue had been telling himself about what had happened on that porch—that a woman who was basically a stranger hadn’t gotten to him, that he didn’t care what happened to Everly personally, that this was just another mission like all the others he’d run in his career—he couldn’t pretend that he didn’t feel the kick of attraction when she appeared. As if she’d lobbed a grenade at him and he’d been stupid enough to catch it and hold on tight.
Terrific.
She’d twisted her strawberry blond hair into a knot on the back of her head, messy and haphazard, and it shouldn’t have made him want to smile. She was wearing the same skinny jeans that were slightly too baggy and the same completely pointless shoes, but she’d traded the T-shirt and jacket for a long-sleeved top that looked like the kind of performance wool hikers wore, reminding Blue that summer in Alaska did a pretty good impression of a moody fall day down south. Her green eyes were sleepy as she looked around, but they seemed to snap with awareness when she saw him.
Just like he did.
Damn it.
Six
“Oh,” Everly said, coming to a stop as the café door slammed shut behind her. Her gaze was on Blue, and it was like he could feel it. Like it was her fingers on him, not her eyes. “Hi.”
And then her ears did that thing that had been driving him crazy last night, turning a little red along the tips. Blue didn’t understand how he was expected to get any work done under conditions like this. He’d never met a woman who blushed as much as she did. He didn’t know anyone could blush as much as she did.
It fascinated him.
He knew it should have irritated him. She was like a puppy, wide-eyed and beaming her innocence all over the place. Blue liked dogs, like Isaac’s entirely too intelligent dog, Horatio, who was waiting outside for him right now, keeping watch over the sleepy summer streets. Blue also liked women who looked like Everly, for that matter, especially all soft and sleepy, like she wasn’t fully out of her bed—an image he didn’t need in his head.
But he knew that, sooner or later, she was going to look at him like he’d kicked her.
Sooner rather than later, if he had to guess. That was who he was. Women—and freaking dogs—needed consistency. A man who stuck around and gave them what they wanted.
That had never been and was never going to be Blue. He hadn’t gone home since he was seventeen. He wasn’t a man who stuck.
Trouble was, at the moment he couldn’t seem to care about all the ways he’d inevitably disappoint her. Not when she was still looking at him like she expected him to jump up from the table, climb on up into the sky, and do the sun’s job for a while.
Hell, he wanted to. That was the craziest part.
She walked over to stand at the end of their table, glanced at Blue and then away in a dark-lightning sort of way he couldn’t read, and aimed a polite smile at Isaac.
“I think I met you yesterday,” she said, and maybe only Blue heard that leftover hint of sleep and a few tears in her voice. Or possibly only Blue had such an intense reaction to it. Settle down, he growled at himself. She was here for his skills, not his personal entertainment. “But I’m afraid everything was a bit of a blur.”
“Isaac Gentry,” Isaac said, grinning back at her, looking amiable and charming the way he always did when he turned it on.
He extended his hand. Blue watched as Everly took it, shook it, and then dropped it. And that tiny bit of contact still wasn’t over fast enough for Blue’s peace of mind, given the way women usually got silly at the very sight of Isaac and that smile of his.
Everly nodded toward the plate Jonas had cleared and the coffee he’d barely touched. “Is someone sitting with you?”
“Oh, that’s just Jonas,” Isaac said, still grinning like he was made of nothing more frightening than local honey. “He’s like our own personal ghost. He comes. He goes. You never can tell what he’ll do or where he’ll turn up.”
“So more of a friendly ghost, then,” Everly said, and her smile warmed a bit, getting less polite and a little more real. “You know what I mean. More charming antics, less blood and fear.”
“I wouldn’t try to conduct a séance with him,” Isaac advised her with a hint of a drawl for good measure. Blue wanted to kick him. And didn’t much like himself for the urge. “He probably wouldn’t take that well. Also, he’s heavily armed.”
When she laughed at that, Blue figured he was getting a glimpse of the real Everly. The Everly she’d been before that night in her apartment. The one she’d be again when he did what he did and cleaned up the mess that had dimmed that smile of hers. Made her cry. Made her shake the way she had out on the porch at the cabin when she’d thought he didn’t see, and made her come all this way to seek him out in the first place.
Not, of course, that he planned to stick around to see her bloom again. He wasn’t that guy. He fixed things, handled the trouble, and then left. That was what he was good at. That was what he knew.
It’s all you’ve ever done, a strange voice deep inside him chimed in. He shoved it aside before he was tempted to imagine it sounded far too much like his stepfather, Ron.
Because like hell was he wasting any brain cells remembering that guy.
Everly sat down at the table, gingerly. She didn’t take Jonas’s abandoned chair, opting instead for the one next to Blue. He pushed back and told himself it was so he could look at her directly. Not because he could smell the soap she’d used in her morning shower, making her skin smell almost unbearably fresh.
“Are you sore?” he asked her.
When she shot him an odd look, he realized that had come
out a little abrupt. And more than a little weird.
“You’re holding yourself like you’re stiff,” he muttered darkly.
He did not look across the table at Isaac.
“I am stiff, actually,” Everly said, as if the fact he’d noticed something so obvious surprised her. She tried that smile again, but it didn’t look as easy as before. “I guess that happens when you drive for days on end.”
“There are hot springs here in town,” Blue told her. He contemplated stabbing himself with his own fork to . . . Just. Stop. Talking. But didn’t. “A nice bathhouse with women’s hours, if you want a soak. It might help.”
Everly was much too close to him. She smelled like soap and shampoo, and her eyes were the green of all the pine trees that stood proud on the mountainside and helped him breathe, most days.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. As if something was happening between them and she could sense it as well as he could. “Maybe I will.”
“What do you think of Grizzly Harbor so far?” Isaac asked Everly then, dispelling whatever weird hush had taken over the table. Thank God. Blue was sometimes tempted to forget how good Isaac was at this. Exactly this. Putting on this assumed identity he cloaked himself in so well when he moved among regular people.
Affable. Charming. As if he were nothing more than an easygoing, friendly, approachable local tour guide who was lazy and relaxed and usually funny, and who just happened to be among the deadliest men on earth.
“Isaac grew up here,” Blue told her.
“So be very careful what you say next,” Isaac said with another easy laugh. “I might take it personally. My family’s been here since the eighteen hundreds.”
“I’ve never been to Alaska before,” Everly said, smiling again. “Is it all like Grizzly Harbor? So . . .” She broke off, as if she couldn’t find the right word. “I’ll admit I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
“And you won’t,” Isaac agreed happily. So happily, like he wanted nothing more than to chitchat about sightseeing and local history forever. “There’s a reason people come to Alaska and never leave. That’s basically the story of the Gentry family right there.”
“When’s the last time you ate?” Blue asked Everly. And instantly regretted it.
Isaac gazed at him in a kind of amazement that boded all kinds of ill. Blue could already hear the crap-ton of BS he was going to get about this. In the gym. On missions. For the rest of his time in Alaska Force. It was inevitable. He’d just outed himself as some kind of cozy, protective den mother, for God’s sake.
If it had been anyone else, he’d have led the BS brigade himself.
“I . . . I don’t know,” Everly replied after a moment, blinking as if she were confused.
She couldn’t possibly be as confused as Blue, who had until this moment imagined himself about as nurturing as a hungry mountain lion stalking its prey, but that didn’t change the fact that Everly looked pale and a few shades too skinny.
“If you don’t want to keep passing out,” Blue growled, “you’d better eat. Unless you like waking up in strange places with no memory of how you got there.”
Everly’s delicate brows rose. “Thanks, Dad,” she said, with a whole lot more calm than he was currently displaying, and that mildly sarcastic slap besides. But if she thought she could shame him, she was in for a big surprise. “As a matter of fact, I’m starving.”
Blue set his jaw, ignored the expression of pure, unadulterated glee on Isaac’s face, and lifted his hand to get Caradine scowling in his direction from her usual place on a stool behind the counter, where she liked to hover like a storm cloud when she wasn’t cooking.
“Pay no mind to this one’s attitude,” Isaac drawled as Caradine stomped over. “Her bark is worse than her bite. Loud, sure. But harmless.”
Caradine crossed her arms and smirked when she reached the table, but didn’t lower herself to snipe back at Isaac. Which Blue thought was a deliberate slap all the same.
But if Everly was wise to the undercurrents zapping back and forth between those two, she didn’t show it.
“Can I see a menu?” she asked.
“There are no menus,” Caradine replied. Her dark brows rose. “I told you that yesterday.”
“Oh. I thought you were just . . . saying that.”
“There are two things I never do,” Caradine said, sounding almost friendly. For her. “Waste my breath or suffer fools.”
Blue didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t the grin that spread over Everly’s face. She folded her hands on the table and aimed it straight at Caradine.
“I’m not much for fools,” she told the other woman. “Or suffering of any kind. I haven’t eaten anything in days but stale trail mix from a gas station, entirely too many Skittles, and energy bars that taste like sawdust. I want something—anything—delicious.”
“You city girls like all that quinoa and egg whites and whatever else,” Caradine replied. “Skinny latte surprise, milk wrenched from poor, unsuspecting nuts, and a side helping of self-hatred, as I recall. I don’t serve that.”
“I like food,” Everly told her solemnly. “A lot of it. Preferably with a whole lot of butter.”
Caradine didn’t blink. Her smirk reappeared—except Blue thought that maybe it was an actual smile. As impossible as that seemed.
“Food I can do,” she said.
“Is it that hard to be nice?” Isaac asked her, and he still sounded lazy, though Blue thought even Everly could hear the sharper edge beneath it.
“I don’t respond well to demands,” Caradine replied sweetly. “You of all people should know that, Isaac.”
And then she sauntered away, leaving Blue no choice but to pretend he hadn’t heard a thing, because he valued his own neck, thank you.
Later, when Everly had eaten her fill of the meal Caradine had prepared for her and Isaac had taken off, possibly because his easygoing act was beginning to chafe, Blue threw some money on the table and ushered Everly into the newly bright morning.
The streets in Grizzly Harbor were different from streets in other places, and not only because they weren’t really streets so much as dirt paths here and boardwalks there, with a fishing village jumbled all around. Everything was built right on top of each other, because no one wanted a long walk from the general store to the bar once winter hit. Blue remembered his first take of this town. How small it had seemed to him. How alien.
And in six short months it had come to feel more like home than any other place he’d lived, including that house across the street from Everly way back when.
“It’s different here,” he said. “From Chicago.”
He felt stilted. Awkward, almost, which was enough to horrify him down into his bones. Blue did not do awkward. He did not do stilted. That was the kind of thing that could get a man killed. The only form of social anxiety Blue tolerated in himself was the occasional need for particularly strong whiskey to deal with the inevitable nonsense some people liked to spew. Particularly if the people in question were . . . him. It didn’t change the nonsense into anything palatable, of course. Whiskey just made it go down easier.
It was barely eleven a.m. and he was already jonesing for a drink. Because Everly Campbell made him feel what he imagined shy felt like. Something like . . . silly.
He was going to have to excise that, with his own fingers if necessary, because it was unacceptable.
Luckily, Everly really didn’t seem to notice that he’d appalled himself into a shocked silence. She was too busy looking around at the village, down the narrow streets that all led to the docks, one way or another. At the last of the morning fog that still clung to the mountains across the sound but had already eased its grip on the harbor. At the bright blue of the inn where he’d stashed her last night and the peeling yellow of the post office across the way.
Grizzly Harbor had been considered a sacred site by native Alaskans thousands of years before the Russians had turned up. Then the American prospectors had come, like Isaac’s ancestors, swarming up from Seattle and San Francisco to see if they could claim their share of gold from the Yukon—and when they couldn’t, because most of them never found much of anything except hardship and endless winter, they’d settled in out-of-the-way, relatively safe places like this one. The village was a jumble of color, bright against the habitually gray Alaskan skies. A red house here, a shocking coral or green one there, and it all gleamed in the bit of midday sunshine that lit up the protected cove.
“It looks like a postcard.” Everly tucked a loose strand of her strawberry blond hair back behind her ear, to keep the wind from playing with it, though it wasn’t only the wind that wanted to. “I can’t tell you how nice it is to walk around a postcard for a change. For one thing, nobody’s lurking behind every tree. Watching me.”
“I know every single person on the street right now,” Blue told her. He held her gaze, and willed her to trust him. He didn’t ask himself why he needed that. He told himself he wanted it, that it would make the job he was about to do a lot easier, but it didn’t feel like want. It felt a whole lot more raw. A lot more like need. “The next ferry won’t show up until Friday. Most of the tourists who came in with you yesterday are out whale watching or fishing or hiking along the shore. I saw one guy down near the general store with about seventeen pounds of camera equipment strapped to his back, wrestling with a trail map. But that’s the only stranger anywhere near you at the moment. I think you’re safe.”
“How do you know all that?” Everly looked startled. She cast a quick look around them, down toward the tourist and his cameras, then returned her attention to Blue. “I mean, I know this is what you do, but I didn’t even see you look.”
