by Megan Crane
He was a big man, in every sense of the term.
More than that, he was in charge because he knew what to do and how to handle this kind of thing. This kind of thing was what he did. Even if she hadn’t known the bits and pieces of his résumé that her brother had shared with her, she would have been able to see his skill all over him. It was evident in everything he did. It was who he was.
She might not like it right this minute, but she was going to listen to him.
Or there was no point at all to her insane drive to Alaska. She might as well have stayed right here and let those men do what they wanted with her.
She felt a deep revulsion move through her at the very idea. Because she wanted to live.
She wanted to live.
And if Blue kept her alive, did it really matter what he said or did or how he treated her? It was ridiculous to imagine that she should feel comfortable in a situation like this. She could hardly remember what comfortable was. What mattered was that he made her feel safe, even now when she was mad at she didn’t even know what. Even now, when she felt vulnerable and exposed, all broken matchsticks and too much embarrassed heat.
As if, given the opportunity and some space, she would cry for a week.
Maybe that was why she felt so safe. Because she knew Blue could handle whatever happened. He could and he would, and that gave her room to feel all the things that had gotten shoved aside. She hadn’t shed a tear no matter how frightening it had all gotten—until she’d been with him.
“Are you all right?” he asked, and she wondered how much he could read on her face. Did he know every thought that had scrolled through her head? Or only some of them?
She had a sudden flash of that moment near her car, down by the docks in Grizzly Harbor. The aching, impossible beauty of the water and the quiet forests standing all around. The proud mountains, capped with snow from the winter that was never truly over, austere and remote.
And Blue, so bold and bright in the middle of that cool, gray morning. The brush of his fingers against her ear, and the dizzy shivers that had spread through her at even so innocuous a touch.
Something clicked then. This was deliberate, this methodical putting her in her place. He wanted her furious. He wanted her focused.
He wanted her to stay alive. Maybe as much as she did.
She had no words to describe the giddy sensation that wound around inside her, faster and faster, like some kind of internal tornado, because if this was a deliberate ploy, that meant it was entirely possible that he wasn’t as remote and forbidding as he wanted her to think he was.
And that meant . . . but she couldn’t let herself go there. Not quite.
Not yet.
“I’ll get you some take-out menus,” she said quietly instead, as if he’d cowed her.
And when his eyes narrowed at her, she smiled.
She ignored how wobbly her legs felt as she walked into her bedroom. She could smell her own familiar scents in here, as if they were new. The lotion she used on her face at night. Her favorite laundry detergent, clinging to her clothes and the comforter kicked down to the foot of her unmade bed. She took a moment to think about how strange it was to have been so far away that her private, personal space should feel strange and small, too.
She moved over to the desk she kept against the far wall, and reached for the top drawer where she kept her favorite menus, but then stopped dead.
Everly didn’t think she called Blue’s name. She didn’t think she did anything but stare, but then he was there, standing beside her with a particularly alert look on his face.
“What’s the matter?”
She didn’t—couldn’t—speak. She just pointed toward her desk.
Blue scanned it, then looked at her again, blankly. And somehow that kicked her back into gear. She reached over and pointed at the piece of paper lying on the top of her desk, in between different stacks of bills.
It was card stock, as if someone had torn off the top of a folded greeting card to use it as a makeshift postcard. And it had only one sentence on it.
Gone on trip with new guy—back soon.
“That’s Rebecca’s handwriting,” Everly managed to say, as if her heart weren’t a sledgehammer in her chest. “And, Blue. It wasn’t here when I left.”
Nine
Blue had never intended to return to Chicago. He hadn’t been avoiding it, necessarily, but he hadn’t made any effort to visit his hometown. He’d been too busy with the SEALs and then doing his thing with Alaska Force—but he knew that wasn’t the truth. Or at least not the whole truth.
He liked the city of Chicago well enough. There were pros and cons to any urban sprawl. The pros were usually the good food, with more variety to choose from; all hours or more hours of entertainment; and always more people around to make a life feel anonymous. But the cons were all those same people, everywhere, and the traffic they made. All the concrete and the trash. Cities left a man with no space to breathe.
Blue wasn’t sure he was cut out for any city after all his years in the service. He didn’t like crowds. He knew too much to relax in them. The problem with Chicago, specifically, was that it was much too close to his family.
Blue didn’t want to deal with family. He didn’t want to talk to his mother any more than he already did. A call every now and again, when he wasn’t on a mission, kept up the mirage of the mother-son relationship they’d never had. The truth was, they had nothing to say to each other. Blue had gone off and done his thing. His mother had stayed right where he’d left her. He’d made his feelings on that pretty clear when he’d been a teenager stuck in that same house with her and her bad choices. Why belabor the point now?
He had zero interest in speaking to the man she’d married a scant year after Blue’s father had died. The seven years he’d spent under his stepfather’s roof had been more than enough. Blue knew his stepsisters were both fine, in their way, now that they were grown up and off on their own, because his mother liked to fill the silence in their phone calls with random chatter about what Kelsey was doing these days over in Akron, or what Lauren had gotten up to lately in Milwaukee. Blue didn’t have anything against either one of them. He just didn’t have anything for them.
Blue never thought about any of this stuff. Deliberately. He didn’t give it any head space because it wasn’t an issue for him. He didn’t care if he had a relationship with his family. He didn’t appreciate the fact that being back in Chicago made him feel like he was backsliding, way back into those dim high school days when he’d wanted to escape but hadn’t understood how he could make that happen. When he’d had no perspective and hadn’t realized how easy it would be to simply leave home and never go back.
Coming back to Chicago was like signing up for an unpleasant trip down memory lane, but that wasn’t the only problem.
The other, bigger, unsolvable problem was Everly.
He hadn’t quite gotten a handle on her situation, which pissed him off more by the day. The letter from the missing roommate, with handwriting Everly insisted looked like Rebecca’s, was a curveball.
The note wasn’t the only indication that Rebecca might still be out there. It had taken Blue only a couple of calls to the Chicago PD the following morning to discover that there had been a lot of activity in the previous week. In addition to the note on Everly’s desk, there had been an e-mail to Rebecca’s workplace, talking vaguely of a last-minute leave of absence, for personal reasons left undisclosed.
“Not to mention,” the detective Blue had spoken to had said, “dead girls don’t generally update their social media.”
Rebecca had done just that. Or she’d appeared to do it. There were three posts in the last week, all similar. Short, vague, cheerful. With a few gauzy promises that all would be revealed in time. And no replies to any questions asked in the comments.
“I don’t wa
nt to tell you how to run your life,” the detective told Blue after he’d identified himself as a representative of Everly’s legal team, in a tone of voice that indicated she wanted to do exactly that. “But your client is a nutcase.”
“I’ll take that informed opinion under advisement,” Blue had replied dryly.
And he was tempted to leave it at that, suggest Everly seek out intensive therapy and good drugs, and haul his ass back to Grizzly Harbor as fast as he could.
That right there was the issue.
Because Blue couldn’t explain the flurry of messages from Everly’s lost roommate, but he knew people. He knew straight-up panic when he saw it, and that was exactly what Everly had been trying so hard to hide when they’d arrived back at her apartment. That was the part he couldn’t reconcile.
If she really was the nutcase the police thought she was, he’d expect a whole lot more drama. Grand gestures like the one she made by driving out to Alaska, sure. Anyone could fake a good story, he supposed. Even to a dubious, suspicious audience like Blue and the rest of Alaska Force. Anyone could be fooled, given the right set of circumstances. He knew that.
But it was a lot harder to fake the physical manifestations of fear. The way Everly had held herself, as if she were trying to make herself smaller. Less of a target. He’d seen the hair stand up on the back of her neck when she’d walked toward the front of her building, and when she’d looked at him, her pupils had been dilated. A fine sheen of sweat had broken out on her lip as she approached her own front door, though the hall had been air-conditioned and cold. And then there’d been the quick, shallow breathing she’d fought to keep quiet.
She kept thinking she could hide things from him. She kept trying to cover up her responses, even when they were obvious, and he didn’t think it was part of a game she was trying to play with him. He’d expect that level of manipulation from someone in his line of work, maybe. But Everly didn’t have a drop of special ops instinct in her body.
So when Blue’s first knee-jerk response to the notion Rebecca might be alive and sending notes all over the place was to pack up and get the hell away from Everly, he found it . . . disappointing.
Because the only reason he had for wanting to do that made him a giant dick.
Literally.
Blue knew the truth about himself. He didn’t pretend to be the hero people usually didn’t try to call him more than once. But he did try to be the best man that he could be at any given moment, and that did not include jumping the bones of a scared, desperate woman who was caught up in the middle of something neither she nor Blue himself could understand.
He couldn’t believe it was even an issue.
But there was something about Everly Campbell that was lodged beneath his skin whether he liked it or not. She seemed to get in deeper each day he spent with her. He didn’t like anything about it, and camping out in her apartment, waiting for the next shoe to drop, didn’t make it any better.
He told himself it was that Everly reminded him of a past he didn’t want to think about. She’d been a part of that past, now they were near their old hometown, and it was all too much. Too many ghosts. Too many memories.
The only way Blue could think of to deal with that was to want things he couldn’t have.
Because sex would make things simple. He could scratch an itch, vanquish a ghost, and be done. He could move on, do his job, and forget about Everly all over again.
He told himself it could all be that easily handled.
But he knew better. Deep down, he knew better. He doubted there would ever be any forgetting Everly, and the fact that she was all tangled up in his memories made it worse.
That was why he wanted to call this thing solved right now and leave. He didn’t want to feel all this old, ugly crap. He didn’t want to feel anything.
And certainly not this, he thought, about twenty-four hours after they’d touched down in Chicago, as he stood there in Everly’s pretty, overtly feminine living room, all sage greens and soft, inviting creams, looking down at her as she sat on the brightly colored sofa and scrolled through Rebecca’s posts.
He watched her cycle through hope, then suspicion, then despair, and he was too tense. As if he were feeling it all for her. He wanted to jump in and fix it, fix her, fix whatever the hell put that broken look on her face. And maybe slap it around, too, while he was at it. He wanted things he didn’t know how to name.
He wanted.
That was the problem with this whole thing.
“You must think I’m crazy,” Everly said quietly. She set his tablet beside her on the sofa as if she thought it might bite her if she picked it up again, and she laced her fingers together on her lap. “I’ll be honest with you. I kind of think I’m crazy, even though I was here and I know what I saw, because that’s the only explanation. Isn’t it?”
She was sitting in the dead center of her couch, stiff and still. And her knuckles were turning white, telling him she was gripping herself much too hard. Something about it—about her—made his chest hurt.
“I don’t think you’re crazy.”
He wasn’t lying. He didn’t think she was crazy no matter what the Chicago detectives thought. But there was a big part of him—and bigger by the moment—that wanted to accept that explanation.
It was the part of him that had joined the navy and never looked back, he realized with a sudden jolt now.
He really, really didn’t want to make that connection. But he’d never tried to fix things with his mother or anyone else in that house. He’d never tried to find a way forward with the only family he had left. He’d just disappeared.
He wanted to do the same thing now. And not because he didn’t think he could help Everly. But because helping her was the least of the things he wanted when he looked at her.
He wasn’t thrilled with what that said about him. What any of this said about him.
Everly was still talking. “But that’s the thing about a psychotic break, isn’t it? Would I even know if I was having one? Isn’t that the whole deal? You just . . . break? And the next thing you know, you’re imagining murders and driving across the Yukon?”
“I’m pretty sure I’m not having a psychotic break.” Blue had to cross his arms over his chest to keep from going to her and doing something that made absolutely no sense. As if touching her would make that haunted, broken look on her face go away. Or was he hoping it would make that ache in him disappear? “And I don’t have to be a computer genius to know that anybody could have left a note here. Just like anybody could have sent an e-mail or posted a few things online. Proof of life has been suggested, not established.”
“I don’t know if that’s comforting or terrifying.”
Neither did Blue. But he didn’t think it would exactly inspire confidence to admit that.
“Here’s the plan,” he told her instead. “You’ll jump back into your normal routine tomorrow. We’ll just . . . wait and see what happens.”
“Okay.” She looked at her hands, still threaded there in her lap. “So if I turn to you one day and tell you I see a dragon in the corner, psychotic break it is.”
“If the dragon in the corner is some idiot with a gun, maybe it’s something else. Either way, I’ll take care of it.”
She studied him for a minute, those green eyes of hers too intense. Too sad, as if she already knew this would all end badly.
It killed him how much he wanted to promise her it would all be okay—but Blue wasn’t sure if he’d be talking about this situation of hers or himself.
“Tell me what a normal week looks like for you,” he said instead, and it felt like his jaw was made of granite.
“Pretty boring,” Everly replied. She lifted her shoulders, then let them sink down again. “I work long and irregular hours. Then I come home, where I eat food I suspect you would not approve of and watch television tha
t I feel, in my heart, you would hate.”
This would be a lot easier if he didn’t find her entertaining. “I don’t have to like your routine. I’m not here to improve your life, Everly. I’m here to make sure you have a life to waste on bad food and mindless reality shows.”
“And what a life it is,” she said softly. “Isn’t it funny that it only takes a few near-death experiences to make you contemplate how lucky you are to have a life of long hours and late-night television binges in the first place? I had no idea how much I’d miss it.”
“Funny isn’t the word I’d use.” Blue was still standing there, but he couldn’t let himself move. Not until he knew which way he planned to go. Toward her or away from her? “As you pointed out to me, you didn’t choose this. When this is over, you get to jump right back into the life you had. Or change it if you want a different one. You can do whatever you want.”
There was a kind of recognition in her gaze that made Blue feel something like itchy. Bothered. He had to force himself to stand still.
“I take it that doesn’t apply to you.”
“The truth about the world is that there are monsters pretty much everywhere,” Blue told her, far more fiercely than necessary. “There have to be people to hunt them, or they win. But it turns out the only way to fight a monster is to become one.”
She was shaking her head before he finished, those finely cut strawberry blond strands dancing toward her shoulders. “I don’t believe that.”
“The thing about the truth is that it’s just as true whether you believe it or not.”
“Every person on this earth has a hundred reasons at any given moment to consider themselves a monster. You don’t have to believe it, Blue.”
She was so earnest. So sincere. It made him feel like his skin was on fire. He didn’t know whether he wanted to wrap her up in protective material and try to keep her safe from all the nightmares in the world, himself included. Or if he should take the opportunity to show her what a monster really was.
