by Megan Crane
Blue registered those details, but really, all he could focus on was the pale, freckled expanse of her abdomen now exposed to his view. He wasn’t a complicated man. He just wanted a taste. Of the indentation of her navel. Or the place where her hips flared out from her waist.
Just one taste—
But he shut that down, because he was a professional. He’d been a SEAL. He wasn’t a fifteen-year-old kid about to embarrass himself in front of the first girl he’d ever laid eyes on, no matter how it might feel. He was going to have to suck this up and deal with it, because it didn’t matter that he couldn’t remember ever wanting a woman the way he wanted Everly. He couldn’t have her.
She stopped in front of him. And was eyeing him strangely, which suggested Blue’s expression was giving too much away. He cleared his throat and tried to school himself into impassivity. Something that had never before been a stretch for him.
“I’m going to teach you how to defend yourself,” he intoned, stiff and weird like it hurt him, and wasn’t surprised when she frowned.
“I thought—”
“That I was going to protect you,” he finished for her. “I am. This is part of it.”
“If you say so.” She nodded at his own athletic clothes, the exercise pants and T-shirt he’d packed so he could keep his fitness at performance levels. His plan involved waking up at four a.m. and doing a solid ninety minutes of tailored resistance exercises out in the living room every morning, but he didn’t tell her that. A man needed to preserve some mystery while he was slowly losing it. “This looks a lot more like a workout class I didn’t sign up for. What’s next? Claims that salad is a form of self-defense?”
“It’s never going to hurt you to eat something green.”
She looked wounded. “And so it begins. Karate from the inside out. I’d rather eat cake.”
Blue had a sudden, remarkably dirty vision of her lounging around with a cake and nothing else on, giving him access to all kinds of dessert—
And he shut that down, too. Because he wasn’t an animal.
Or anyway, was trying his hardest not to be where she was concerned.
“I want you to pay attention to this, if nothing else,” he told her, very seriously. Because he couldn’t let himself get distracted by cake. Or that sweet, soft belly of hers, with freckles like the sprinkles on top. “If someone chokes you, you have six seconds. Tops. It takes about three seconds for you to start seeing stars, and once you hit five or six seconds? Lights out. What do you think happens then?”
“You appear in a flash of sound and fury and save the day?”
“That’s the plan. But plans have a tendency to go awry. A better plan is not to pass out in the first place.”
She swallowed. Audibly. “I just want to clarify. You honestly think there’s a possibility of me getting choked out?”
Blue shrugged as if that very scenario wasn’t high on his list of personal nightmares. “It would be the most efficient way to move you from point A to point B, if that’s on the agenda.”
He didn’t mention that there was something worse. That being no need to move her somewhere, because whoever was after her planned to finish the job right here.
“I would rather that hurting me not be an agenda item,” Everly said.
“I hear you.” He refused to let himself get swayed by that look that was still all over her pretty face, as if the various ways she could be hurt had only just occurred to her. “But it would take six seconds to choke you so you pass out, another second or two to toss you in the backseat of a waiting car. If I’m more than seven seconds away? If I’m handling one of their friends, for example? It’s game over.”
“That . . . would not be ideal.”
“No,” he agreed, aware he sounded a lot more abrupt than necessary. He didn’t like the picture he’d painted any more than she did. Blue shifted, sliding one foot behind the other and then bringing his hands up in front of him, palms facing outward. “This is lesson one. Get your hands up.”
And for an hour, that was what she did. Blue taught her a fighting stance. Palm strikes that could inflict a whole lot of damage without requiring great skill on her part. Where to kick to incapacitate an attacker. How to operate within her fear rather than run scared because of it.
They both worked up a sweat. Blue found he was a lot more patient than he usually was when he was teaching things like this. He told himself it was because she wasn’t some guy hopped up on his own testosterone and fantasies of epic butt-kicking. But he thought it was actually just . . . her.
Everly made him want to slow down and take his time. She made him want to be certain she not only understood each move that he taught her but could execute it. Because when she did, her green eyes lit up and she laughed.
As if learning how to use her own body to protect herself was a deep, abiding joy, and one she’d never experienced before.
He couldn’t remember ever wanting another woman. He could barely remember what other women looked like.
His whole world was that smile of hers, wide and delighted. Especially when she landed a good strike or managed to evade an attack.
Blue wasn’t sure his battered old heart, black and cold for years now, could take it.
“Will this really work?” she asked him after he taught her a particularly vicious move that would leave an attacker reeling, possibly blind, and definitely on the floor at her feet.
“Absolutely. All you have to do is commit.”
“Even if it’s someone five times my size?”
“I’m five times your size and you just threw me,” he said calmly, already rolling to his feet. “Why not someone else?”
And he didn’t know, later, how he’d managed to let her wander off with that thrilled, amped-up look on her face. How he hadn’t suggested a way to work off all that adrenaline. How he’d sat out in the living room, listening to the shower run, and contented himself with blistering sets of angry push-ups instead.
That night he dreamed about fighting. Feats of bravery and daring with Everly at his side as she kicked and punched and took down all the shadowy creatures that dared come at her. Until it all shifted, somehow, and the attackers weren’t shadows any longer. They fused into Blue, and he wasn’t attacking her. It was a different kind of struggle.
Hotter. Sweeter.
Dangerous in an entirely different way—
And when he woke up, his heart was pounding, he’d broken out in a sweat, and he had to take an ice-cold shower at three forty-five in the morning to get his heart rate under control.
The other part of him that needed controlling required his hand.
The days rolled by. He walked Everly to work, picked her up, and taught her his dirtiest and most effective street-fighting and self-defense tactics every night. That was when he got to indulge himself. Her hands on his body. Seeing that smile. The things she chattered at him, as if they were friends. As if this was their life.
During those stolen hours, he was tempted to pretend it was.
Even though he knew better.
But the rest of the time, he did his freaking job and dug into her roommate’s life. Rebecca Lambert had been born in Winnetka, one of Chicago’s most exclusive suburbs, to an unmarried single mother who had no visible means of support that Blue could uncover. And he was very, very good at following money trails.
Rebecca had gone to a private boarding school in Massachusetts, then a snooty college in Vermont, and had spent her summers in other fancy East Coast places like Cape Cod and the coast of Maine. But she’d come back to Chicago after college. And as far as Blue could tell, she hadn’t been able to hold down a job for more than a few months at a time for years. She’d taught yoga for six or so weeks at an upscale studio. She’d spent a season interning at a magazine. She’d spent a summer working in a museum, which couldn’t possibly have paid he
r rent.
“How did Rebecca pay her bills?”
“Hello, Blue,” Everly said dryly, and he could practically see the look that went with that tone through the phone. “How nice to hear from you in the middle of the day. Are you well? I am, too, thank you for asking.”
Making Blue realize that he’d treated her like a member of the Alaska Force team, calling her at her job and firing questions at her without bothering with the niceties.
He refused to apologize.
Everly made a humming sound that it took him a minute to realize was her. Thinking.
“Uh . . . She works in PR. Worked, I mean.”
“That wasn’t the only thing she did.”
“I think she used to do a bunch of different things. I got the impression she had a trust fund or something.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“No.” He heard Everly shift in her seat, then the sound of her fingers tapping on a keyboard. There was no reason he should feel that as something intimate when it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t. And yet . . . “It’s that thing that happens. Everyone’s going along, doing the same things. Entry-level jobs, first apartments. And then suddenly some people start taking extended European vacations. Or sort of flit from job to job without ever seeming stressed about it. Or they randomly buy property out of nowhere. Or even just wear really, really nice clothes you could never afford. And you realize that it’s not that they’re doing so much better than you. It’s that they have other means of support.”
Blue had never had any support but himself. It was something he’d always prided himself on.
“Your parents must be doing pretty well,” he said. “If your mom is a surgeon and your dad was a professor.”
“My parents are doing great,” Everly agreed, an edge in her voice. “And they spend their money on themselves, as they should. They’re currently on an extended French wine tour. It involves châteaus. And they’re very supportive of whatever my brother and I want to do, but they expect us to do it ourselves. I thought Rebecca probably had some extra money, but I didn’t. I don’t.”
And Blue told himself he had no reason to feel like an ass when she claimed she had work to do and hung up.
He tried to push Everly out of his head. He sat back in the chair in Rebecca’s room, her laptop open in front of him, and tried to figure her out instead. He didn’t see anything that looked like a trust fund in her financials. Still, no matter what job she took, she always had a nice, fat, comfortable balance in her bank account. It certainly wasn’t her salary that kept her account so flush.
As far as Blue could tell, it was cash infusions every week. A few thousand every time.
Anonymous, untraceable cash.
Lately, Rebecca had actually managed to keep a job for almost a full eighteen months, which was a record for her. It was the kind of PR agency that catered to celebrities who needed fires put out left and right. Blue wondered if she’d gotten herself caught up in a blaze that burned too hot, but so far, he couldn’t see how. Rebecca had worked at the firm consistently, and her coworkers seemed to like her, but she hadn’t been in charge of any clients. Which he figured made it unlikely that one of them would have taken her out.
“Rebecca didn’t handle fire drills,” the vice president of the firm told him when he wrangled a meeting with her a few days later. Angela Martin was an overdone woman who was trying her best to cling to her early fifties and a shade of blond that didn’t become her. She was also the only one who would talk to Blue, and only after he hung around during her lunch hour and tried to channel Isaac’s sort of easy charm. “She was better with the celebration afterward, when it was all champagne and quiet donations to worthy charities. That was her niche. That and attractive young men with very nice cars, that is.”
“I wasn’t aware she dated.”
“Oh, honey.” Angela let out a husky laugh. “I’m not sure I would call it dating.”
Blue kind of wanted to put himself out of his own misery after an afternoon spent listening to what qualified as a “fire drill” to people who trafficked in famous people’s worst moments and public shame, but no matter how he tried, he couldn’t come up with a convincing narrative to suggest why someone might want to kill Rebecca for being caught up in anything the agency handled. The usual triggers—affairs, embezzlement, drugs—were the agency’s stock-in-trade.
And apparently, Rebecca’s idea of an entertaining night out. Though whatever she got up to, she tended to keep it out of the apartment she shared with Everly.
“I guess I forgot that while I was busy out there trying to defend the American dream, these people were back here crapping all over it,” Blue griped at Isaac in one of their daily status-update calls.
“That’s what civilians do,” Isaac agreed cheerfully. “Pretty much as their full-time job.”
Blue agreed. But he had his own full-time job, and he needed to do it—and fast, so he could get out of Chicago and away from the woman who was making him crazy.
It took him longer than it should have to find a number for Rebecca’s mother, which he couldn’t help but think was yet another red flag.
He left Annabeth Lambert a message on her voice mail, asking her to call him because he had information about her daughter. It was the kind of message that usually got a call back within the hour.
But Rebecca’s mother didn’t take the bait.
Blue accepted that he was going to have to hunt Annabeth Lambert down. She was another woman with financials that didn’t make any sense, and he needed to see if two puzzle pieces that didn’t make any sense apart made sense together. He bet they would.
And in the meantime, there was Everly, who was on track to drive him around the bend long before he got to the bottom of what had happened to her roommate.
“I have to have an explanation for who you are,” she announced that night when he picked her up from work. “It’s been a week.”
One week was edging toward a second, in fact, and all Blue had discovered so far was that Rebecca Lambert lived beyond what ought to have been her means with money he couldn’t explain. As far as he could tell from scouring the laptop in her bedroom, she hadn’t been doing anything more illicit than streaming movies for free. If she was secretly a call girl or selling her organs, he couldn’t find any evidence of it. The Alaska Force computer geniuses couldn’t, either—and they could find anything.
“It’s not normal to have a bodyguard,” Everly was saying.
Blue stopped trying to figure out Rebecca Lambert and focused on Everly instead. Tonight she was wearing one of those outfits of hers that he thought was designed to cause him actual grievous bodily harm. A pair of trousers in a cute pattern that showed off entirely too much of her legs and butt, with more of those high wedges she ran around in that made her calves look like heaven. He could torture himself for hours imagining those legs tossed over his shoulders or wrapped around his hips—and did. Add a frilly blouse that offered the odd impression of her lacy bra beneath and he was barely able to stand upright.
But he managed. Somehow, he managed, even though every day he thought she was so pretty and so cute it might actually succeed in taking him apart. When all his years in the navy, under attack by enemy forces, hadn’t cracked him.
“It’s not anybody’s business who I am,” he said now.
Clearly she was no longer in awe of him, because she rolled her eyes. “It’s not about whether or not it’s someone’s business. It looks weird. Because it is weird.”
He’d spent enough time in this lobby over the past week. He could tell when the people walking by were her coworkers by the side-eye and speculation they threw her way as they headed outside into the summer evening. And she wasn’t wrong. There were more of them by the day.
“I get that your office is a little out-of-the-box,” she said, as if she were trying to manage him. He
was almost entertained. “Try to imagine how you would react if suddenly one of your friends showed up with some other, random person who was always right next to them. I think you’d find that strange.”
“Then make up a story,” he suggested. “Tell them I’m your—”
“Brother?”
“Sure,” he drawled, because she was turning pink. Watching her blush was one of his new favorite things, and he never seemed to get enough of it. “Call me your brother if you want.”
“That would never work.” She sounded fuzzy, and Blue liked that, too. “Everyone knows my brother is a doctor who lives across the country. He would hardly have time to follow me around like a shadow. I mean, maybe for one day. As a visit. But not, you know, for weeks on end.”
“Then tell them I’m your boyfriend.” He let his mouth curve. “And I’m possessive.”
The pink turned to red, and that was even better. “Who would believe that?”
She laughed. Nervously.
Blue did not. “You don’t think I look like boyfriend material?”
“I think that the term boyfriend implies the kind of relationship that is significantly less intense than . . . this.” Everly waved her hands at him. “You don’t look like the kind of man who becomes a boyfriend.” As if she were afraid that might hurt his feelings, she hurried on. “To me, I mean.”
He studied her flushed face. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Too skinny, for one thing,” she threw back at him, too quickly. “A stick figure, I think you said.”
“Let’s clarify something,” he drawled, though he shouldn’t have. He knew he shouldn’t touch any of this with a ten-foot pole or two. “I said you looked too weak to fight off bad guys. I didn’t say that was unattractive. Particularly if a man wasn’t looking for a fight.”
Everything went still, and it was as if the whole of the world fell away, leaving nothing but Everly. But if Blue was honest, that had been true since the moment she’d roared up in her car and changed everything.
