by Megan Crane
But it wasn’t about him. None of this was about him.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told her, his voice even. “And that’s good. You shouldn’t. I spent a lot of years fighting in a lot of wars so that civilian girls like you never, ever need to know anything about it.”
And she was such a fragile thing. Too bony, too weak. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to protect her. That one of those goons she’d seen before would come back at her and snap her in half before he had time to react. He’d dreamed about it as he slept fitfully out here on the couch, jolting awake with images of her broken body plastered all over his mind.
At least it was an upgrade, of sorts, from the crap that was normally plastered there.
She was small and she was scared, but he had to remind himself of that when she pulled herself up to her feet. She closed the distance between them and then stood there before him, closer than he should have allowed her to get.
It took him a long, shattered kind of moment to understand that she was placing her palm over his heart.
“No one is a monster here, Blue,” she told him, soft and solemn, her green gaze steady on his. “Unless they want to be.”
And then she padded off toward the kitchen, seemingly unaware that she’d cut him in half.
Ten
Everly resumed normal life the next day, just as Blue wanted.
She woke up that morning and decided she would play the best version of the Everly Campbell she’d been before, back before all this had happened. She would view it as a voyage of discovery, hour by hour, as she tried to re-create the life and times of the person she’d been. Way back when she hadn’t been scared, she’d simply . . . lived.
Her alarm went off at six, the way it always had. She shuffled to the bathroom to shower and let the hot water wake her. She did her makeup the way she always did on workdays, using enough mascara to look appropriately awake and energized without tipping over into something better suited for the stage. She dressed in one of her favorite work outfits, a dress that was funky and professional at once, as befitted a creative person in a corporate environment, or so she’d always told herself. And she was ready to step out the door at seven on the dot, so she could stop by her coffee shop and then walk the twenty minutes or so to work.
Every step of that was part of the typical Everly Campbell morning routine—except the fact that there was a huge, entirely too beautiful man crashing on her sofa.
He’d already been awake and fully dressed when she’d come out of her room a few minutes after six, which was much too early for that shrewd, dark look he’d thrown at her as she’d mumbled something, clutched her robe tighter around her, and barred herself in the bathroom. By the time she was out of the shower, he’d had coffee brewing in the coffeepot Everly had forgotten a previous roommate had left in her kitchen, making her apartment smell like it was someone else’s. His, possibly.
A notion that she hadn’t found calming.
By the time she was dressed and ready to leave, armed with her makeup and favorite dress, she’d already had more interaction with a ridiculously attractive male than Normal Everly could expect in months.
It didn’t help that Blue stared at her when she emerged from her bedroom. And then kept right on staring as she walked over to where he sat at a stool on the living room side of the open kitchen counter.
And it was hard enough to dress herself this early in the morning. It wasn’t fair that he looked so effortlessly good. He had on jeans and a T-shirt, both of which did things to his perfect body that should have been illegal. It certainly felt illegal inside Everly.
On top of his T-shirt, he wore a shoulder holster. Complete with a very large, very dangerous-looking gun. In case she’d forgotten why he was here in her apartment, making her jittery and silly without even trying.
But he was still staring, so she jerked her attention away from the very real, not-at-all-fake weapon, and concentrated on him.
“Do I have something on my face?” she asked. Defensively.
“Yes. Makeup.”
Everly relaxed. Slightly. And kept her eyes averted from the gun, looking down into her bag instead. “Well, of course I do. I can’t go to work without makeup. I’d terrify people.”
It was a throwaway comment, so she was surprised when she looked up from a quick rummage through her bag to find him still studying her. With a look on his face that made her chest . . . hurt.
“No.” It was all he said. In a low mutter, as if the words were being torn from him against his will. “You wouldn’t.”
And Everly had to turn away to conceal the little pop of something like joy that burst in her at that. Luckily, she could mask her response by making for the front door.
“You always walk to work?” Blue asked, getting to his feet. She heard the stool scrape against the floor. But he didn’t follow her toward the door. “In those?”
“Those . . . ?” She frowned down at her feet. “These are wedges, Blue. My favorite wedges, in fact.”
“They’re four inches high and completely impractical.”
“If they were rickety stilettos, I might agree with you, but they’re not. They’re like wearing tennis shoes.” She pivoted around to shake her head at him, and her eyes locked on the gun he’d hidden beneath a light jacket. “Would you like it if I lectured you on the appropriate handguns to use in your harness?”
“It’s a holster, not a harness, and I didn’t lecture you.”
“The lecture was implied in the commentary. I get it. You don’t like any of my shoes.”
“I don’t have any feelings about your shoes one way or the other,” he growled at her, and it dawned on Everly that she was . . . getting to him. Why else would he look so annoyed with her? “My only concern, as always, is how you’re going to handle yourself if the situation deteriorates. Can you run in those shoes?”
Everly took a breath and let herself savor the fact that she was managing to burrow under the skin of Mr. Tall, Dark, and Icily Remote. Right here in her own home. Simply by walking out of her bedroom wearing shoes.
If she could have marinated in the moment forever, she would have.
“Two things,” she said after a beat or two, because she might want to enjoy this, but she was also close enough to see the temper he was clearly fighting back. She didn’t really want to tempt fate. Too much. “One, I don’t think you actually know what a practical shoe is or isn’t. Because, two, I could run a marathon in these wedges, the same way I could in those flats you also hate.”
“Somehow,” Blue said, hard and low, “I doubt that.”
“I believe you know a lot about a great many things. But ladies’ shoes and their varied uses are not among them.”
“Great,” he clipped out at her. “I’m wrong. Noted. Let’s hope we don’t get ambushed and need you to run that marathon, after all.”
Everly didn’t comment on that. Because she bit her tongue to keep from commenting on it.
And it was all hilarity and wit until they were in the stairwell.
Because Blue wasn’t cranky or grumpy or fighting off his temper as they took the five flights of stairs down to the lobby. Or if he was, he hid it—because he was working.
The switch in him made every hair on Everly’s body seem to stand straight up.
It reminded her—a little too forcefully—that while she might feel she was playing a role today, Blue wasn’t. This was who he was. It was why he was here.
He was the man who prowled ahead of her down the stairs, blocking her from whatever might lurk in wait with his body. He was the trained operative who melted soundlessly down one flight into the next, every part of him honed and ready. He didn’t have his gun out, but Everly had no trouble imagining that if he needed to draw it, he’d have it in his hand in a flash.
She felt a whole lot less en
tertained when they pushed through the doors in her lobby, out into the street. It was a typical summer morning in Chicago, not too hot but muggy. Everly felt that same prickling sensation, as if someone was watching her, but forced herself to simply walk.
Blue roamed there next to her as she walked down the block toward her coffeehouse, which made it difficult to pretend any of this was actually routine. She thought it would be less noticeable if she were prancing around with a lion on a leash. And potentially less dangerous, too. For her.
By the time she had her daily skinny mocha latte in hand, she’d managed to get herself back into the right mind-set, she thought. It didn’t matter what she felt. All she had to do was play the part of herself, as if she hadn’t seen what she’d seen in her living room.
She told herself it was simple.
Blue, on the other hand, was complication on a whole different level.
“This is how you walk to work every day?” he asked as he kept pace with her, making their way toward her office building, located on the other side of her Lincoln Park neighborhood. One of the only Chicago ad agencies she knew of that had settled outside the Loop, the city’s central business area.
“In the winter I walk up to Fullerton and take the bus,” she told him, and then tried to imagine a man like Blue, all threat and portent, on a Chicago Transit bus during rush hour. She bit back a smile. “Because it’s not Alaska or anything, but winter here is no joke. So when the weather’s nice, I walk.”
He gave her that intense look he used when he was considering things, but said nothing. He only escorted her to her office and left her at the security checkpoint in her lobby.
And because she was only playing the part of Everly Campbell, she had a good day. Because any day that involved her alive and not in a crumpled heap somewhere was good by definition. She hardly minded it when she had to suffer through a tense meeting with her boss ten minutes into her first day back at work, because it turned out that the week of sick leave she’d taken with no warning had not exactly pleased him. Or anyone else.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t fire you for leaving us in the lurch,” he demanded.
“Trust me, Charles, I was doing you a favor,” she replied, with the confidence of someone who really had spent the last week waiting for death, if not precisely in the form she’d claimed. “You would not wish this stomach flu on your worst enemy. I hope I’m not still contagious.”
Charles, a nitpicker of the highest order, who could milk a grudge for years and often did, backed down at that.
If she’d been herself, actually located inside her own skin, lying to her boss might have worried her. Upset her, even, because she’d never been a liar. She prided herself on doing her job well and following the rules, not bending them to suit herself.
But it was hard to care about things like office rules and the right way to talk to her prickly supervisor when she didn’t know if she’d make it home tonight. Or live through the night. How could she care about any of the tiny things that had consumed her before when she honestly had no idea if she’d live long enough to see the leaves change?
“It’s surprising how much easier everything is when you don’t care about it,” she told Blue that evening. “Pleasant, even.”
“What don’t you care about?”
“Everything. Except, you know, staying alive.”
He was waiting for her right where he’d left her, down in the office lobby. He leaned against the wall with a pair of Ray-Bans on and that fierce set to his mouth. Everly saw more than one woman nearly trip over her own feet at the sight of him. She was pleased that her extended exposure to him had prepared her, so she walked in a straight line.
Her pulse might have gone crazy and her stomach might have hollowed out and plummeted to her toes, but she didn’t trip.
“Staying alive is good,” he said, and she wished she could see his dark eyes.
But his sunglasses were mirrored, and all she could see was herself. Her cheeks, which were too red. And her eyes, which were much too bright.
She shoved her own sunglasses onto her face and followed him outside.
Out on the street, twilight was just bleeding in as the sun inched toward the horizon, and the temperature was dropping. There was a breeze coming in from Lake Michigan, stirring up the heavy summer air and suggesting that Chicagoland’s typical thunderstorms couldn’t be far behind. She could feel the charge of coming storms in the air, making her skin feel too tight for her body.
Then again, that could just be Blue, walking beside her like a caged thing, ready to burst free at any moment.
Everly didn’t think that could possibly look anything like her normal routine to anyone who might be watching her—and who had seen her actual normal routine over the course of the previous weeks—but she wasn’t complaining.
Instead, she talked, as if Blue were picking her up from work because he wanted to and not because he was trying to keep her safe.
“I shrugged my way through what should have been an upsetting business meeting or four today. I told my boss I had the stomach flu last week and was so convincing I almost believed it myself. There’s a woman I work with who’s had it in for me for years, and she didn’t bother me the way she usually does. She said her usual passive-aggressive things, and I just smiled and asked if she’d gotten enough sleep.”
“Is that supposed to be an office takedown?” Blue sounded aggrieved. “You might notice I’ve gone out of my way to live a life that never, ever involves stray office chatter, Everly. If you start talking about intrigue over a watercooler, I might punch myself in the face.”
“I’m sorry not everything can be life-and-death and Alaskan retreats.”
She didn’t realize how tight a grip her temper had on her until she almost ignored the changing lights at a busy intersection. It was Blue’s hard hand on her upper arm—hauling her back a step—that saved her.
Everly wondered who saved him. If he let anyone try. He was so lethal, so hard and tough—but she could still feel the way his heart had kicked there beneath her palm last night. She knew it was there, whatever he did to convince the world, and maybe himself, otherwise.
But she was wise enough not to say something like that, out here on a Chicago street with commuters streaming all around them.
Instead, she smiled at him. And saw only herself reflected back at her in the mirror of his sunglasses. That and the faint line between his brows.
“I’m trying to say that everyone in the office treated me much better than they would have if I’d cried or gotten emotional or apologized all over the place.”
Whatever happened, she thought, she would always remember Blue in that moment. The late summer evening spread out around him, air thick with coming storms and the usual humidity, and his mouth a grim slash in that jaw he still hadn’t shaved.
He took his time letting go of her arm, never looking away from her. She’d never felt so safe. And, at the same time, so seen. Because she knew he didn’t miss a thing. Not the state of her hair and makeup after a long day at work. Not the fingernails she’d chewed on today despite her attempts to beat back the habit. Not even the glob of salad dressing she’d tried to scrub off her dress after lunch, which even she would have had trouble seeing if she didn’t know where it was.
She knew he saw all of that and more, everything happening around them. The street and the traffic. The man next to them on his phone. The two women doubling over with deep belly laughs and clinging to each other as they did. A pack of college students, probably involved in nearby DePaul’s summer sessions.
If she asked, she was sure Blue could tell her about every single one of them.
“Never apologize for things you’re not sorry about,” he told her now. “That’s rule number one.”
“There are rules?”
“Everly.” There was a hint of a curve in that
hard mouth then, and it made her pulse quicken. “There are always rules.”
“Rules for what, exactly?”
But she didn’t care about that, either, for once. The rule-following good girl who’d never quite been good enough had died with Rebecca a month ago, and Everly wasn’t sure she missed her. Too much had happened since.
She wanted the summer evening to last forever and this walk home to go on even longer than that. She wanted to walk beside him, carefree and much too giddy, until her feet gave out. And Everly didn’t want to remind herself how stupid it was to get her heart involved in a situation that was all about fear.
Or how fleeting her time with this man was going to be, whether she lived to see fall or not.
“Rules for being a badass, obviously,” Blue told her, as if that should have been obvious. “That’s a side benefit to my being here. You stay safe, and I teach you how to be even safer.”
That curve in the corner of his mouth widened, becoming a grin. And her heart did a flip in her chest that she was sure she could see in the mirror of his Ray-Bans. And the truth was, Everly couldn’t bring herself to care. She didn’t even blush.
She was pretty sure what she did then was surrender.
Completely. To whatever came next.
“In fact,” Blue said, sounding like he knew it, “we’re going to start with a few lessons tonight.”
Eleven
An hour later, Blue was feeling pretty great about his decision to teach Everly a little down and dirty self-defense. It made sense to give her a few tools she could use to combat her own fear—and, if she had to, stun a bad guy in the unlikely event one got to her before Blue could.
He continued to feel great about it as he pushed the furniture back in the living room and made a space for training. And then Everly walked out of her room wearing nothing but yoga pants and a sports bra, and he about swallowed his own tongue.
For a beat, there was nothing in his head but a kind of . . . sizzle.
Every last drop of blood he had in his body left whatever it was doing and pooled exactly where he didn’t want it. She kept walking toward him, clearly oblivious to the effect she was having on him. Her strawberry blond hair was scraped back in a ponytail at the nape of her neck. She was barefoot.
