by Megan Crane
He told himself he knew what he was doing. He was tired of fighting her; that was all. He’d fought his whole life—he’d made a career out of winning—but he couldn’t fight this. He couldn’t fight her. Not anymore.
Everly let out a kind of sigh. She looked down, then away. She swayed toward him, resting her hand on his abdomen, just below his ribs.
Gently. So gently.
He’d had actual sex that got to him less than that light touch, not that he could recall a single detail of it now.
There was only her. There was only this, as inevitable as a summer thunderstorm on a Chicago evening.
She smiled at him, and inched even closer—
And then she stopped short. She went stiff.
He saw fear. Panic. Ice.
“What just happened?” Blue demanded.
But he was already scanning the lobby. He had his back to the wall, but she’d looked off to the side, where there were people walking in and out of the lobby doors. Three women and two men engaged in the kind of conversation that suggested a business dinner. A businessman in a three-piece suit.
With a face he recognized.
“Don’t look now,” Everly whispered. “But they’re back.”
He got it then. He’d last seen the guy loitering near the exit—supposedly engrossed with whatever was on his phone—in Everly’s sketchbook.
And Blue had a split second to decide on a course of action. He could rush the asswipe, but that would leave Everly unprotected in this lobby, and his own words flooded through him.
Six seconds. That was all it would take.
He couldn’t take the risk.
So he did the next best thing.
“Run with this,” he ordered her gruffly.
Then he hauled Everly toward him and took her mouth with all the hunger and greed he’d been repressing since the day she’d reappeared in his life.
Twelve
His taste exploded over her, through her, like a tidal wave.
It was that huge. That devastating.
And that good.
Everly went from one extreme to the other in the space of a heartbeat. She was already too comfortable with Blue waiting for her every evening. And on their walks home, where he scanned the streets for killers and she got to pretend . . . things that she knew better than to let herself imagine.
She knew how dangerous it was to get carried away. How temporary this arrangement was and how deeply it was going to hurt when he solved her current problem and disappeared off into the Alaskan wilderness.
But her heart had clattered around the way it always did when she stepped out of the elevator and saw him with his back against the wall, there on the other side of security.
And then he’d thrown out the word boyfriend, which was such a silly word. A ridiculous word, really, when she thought about trying to apply it to a man like Blue.
It was like calling the ocean a puddle.
But then everything had frozen when she’d looked over her shoulder and seen one of the faces from her nightmares. Not ten feet away.
She understood then, with a horrible lurch, that she’d . . . forgotten.
Well. Not forgotten, exactly. It was more complicated than that. It was impossible to forget what had happened, particularly with Blue here. Living in her apartment. Teaching her self-defense every night until her fingers ached. And she never knew, standing in the shower afterward, if they ached from the strikes she’d landed on his tough, hard body or from her endless, insatiable urge to touch him in a whole different way.
She’d been lulled into a false sense of security. She’d understood that in a sudden, sickening flash—the presence of the man she thought of as Goon Number One brought it all back.
But now everything was changed. Again.
Because Blue was kissing her.
For a moment, Everly couldn’t make sense of it. His hand had gripped her upper arm, on the outside bit of her shoulder where her frilly, puffy quarter sleeve left her skin bare. She’d had a split second to register the intense heat and power in that hard palm of his, and the fact that he was touching her, and then he was pulling her toward him.
And she certainly wasn’t fighting him.
Then Blue’s mouth came down on hers and ruined her forever.
Everly expected him to be fierce, like the warrior he was, and he delivered. But there was something lazy in the way he took her mouth. A kind of deliberate, confident sampling that spiraled through her like a heat all his own. But at the same time, softer and more persuasive than she could possibly have imagined.
Branding her. Changing her.
This time, when she flushed hot and red, it had nothing to do with embarrassment. It had everything to do with Blue.
“Kiss me back,” Blue muttered, pressing each word against her lips like some kind of sensual tattoo.
Everly obeyed him. Happily. She let herself melt against him, winding her arms around his tough, hammered-steel torso. She tipped her head back, and couldn’t help letting out a moan when he angled his head to get a better fit, using one of his big, hard hands to cup her jaw and move it where he wanted it.
It was blistering. She felt as if he singed her, head to toe and back again. He licked his way into her mouth, his tongue dancing with hers, over and over and over.
And when he pulled away, Everly wasn’t certain she knew her own name.
Until Blue said it.
Three times.
“I’m sorry,” she managed to say at last. She was tingling, everywhere. Her legs felt weak beneath her, and she was at a complete loss to describe the chaos winding around and around inside her.
A sweet, delirious sort of chaos that she knew had altered everything.
They could never go back. She could never go back.
“What did you say?” she asked.
It took her much too long to blink away the fog before her eyes, and when she did, her heart sank.
Because Blue wasn’t looking at her with any of that heat or fire she still felt storming through her body. On the contrary, Everly had never seen him look so cold or forbidding. And that was saying something.
“We have to go,” he said again, stern and harsh.
And he didn’t wait for her to respond as he slid a hand around to rest impatiently between her shoulder blades. She looked around for Goon Number One and didn’t see him, which made something jostle unpleasantly deep in her belly. But Blue was hustling her out of the lobby of her office building and into the street, so there was no time to explore her reaction.
Her lips felt swollen. She felt swollen. Everly didn’t know how to put that into words, so she simply followed where Blue led her, distantly amazed at the fact he’d had the presence of mind to pull out his cell phone and summon a car.
She doubted she could answer her own phone right now, much less use it to do something.
The car was there when they got to the curb, and Everly was grateful for the simple set of tasks before her. Open the door. Climb into the backseat. Throw herself to the far side of the car, so Blue could follow after her. Simple, easy things that didn’t require thought. She didn’t have to worry about it; she just had to do it. She didn’t have to analyze the whys and hows.
She didn’t have to wonder what the hell she was going to do now.
“Blue—” she began, aware as she spoke that her voice was much too husky. Too revealing.
“Not now.”
Terse. Dismissive.
And it was a measure of how thrown she was, half-giddy and half-hollow, that she didn’t push him.
Instead, she sat there beside him in a daze as their driver navigated the evening traffic and delivered them to the front door of her apartment building in what felt to her like record time.
Though it could have taken a lifetime. She did
n’t think she’d be able to tell the difference.
Once inside her building, Blue was all grim, focused business as he hurried her across the lobby and into the stairwell.
And still, Everly didn’t think to stop and have it out with him. Not out in the open.
She didn’t even pause. She ran up the stairs the way she’d been doing every day, waiting at the top of each flight until Blue—always there in front of her—nodded to let her know it was safe to proceed. She did the same at the heavy metal door that led to her hallway, and waited an extra beat for her breathing to calm down. She could have pretended that it was the stairs that had gotten to her, but she knew better.
Walking up the stairs often left her winded—it was true—because she wasn’t a career warrior like Blue. But tonight she’d been winded going into the five-flight climb.
And that kiss replayed in her head, over and over, in case she was tempted to tell herself she didn’t know why.
She could still taste him, she thought, as he jerked his head to indicate that the hallway was clear. She could still feel the way his palm had fit there on her jaw, as if he’d left a mark.
But all she did was follow him down the hallway. Then she stood there mutely as he fished out the keys he’d made copies of one day while she’d been dutifully pretending she was the same Everly Campbell she’d always been, and let them into the apartment.
My apartment, she reminded herself. Because she’d managed to forget that lately.
The way she was forgetting too many things, it seemed.
She stood inside the door, the way he’d taught her. She didn’t watch him as he roamed from room to room, checking closets and looking under beds the way he did every time they returned home. She stayed where she was and tried to control her breathing before Blue commented on it, the way he liked to do.
But her heart was still pounding. Her pulse was still elevated and wild.
And there was a fire in her, burning almost too bright to bear, one she had no idea how to put out.
Blue appeared in her bedroom door, always his final stop. He propped himself there with one hand on the doorjamb and his gaze darker than usual when it met hers across the living room.
“Good job,” he said.
Everly hardly registered the words. It was his tone that got to her, because it was so . . . neutral.
Aggressively, bizarrely neutral.
“Thank you,” she replied, almost by rote. She straightened, there in the foyer. “Which job do you mean?”
“It’s good to know you can think on your feet,” Blue said in that same tone. It wasn’t a slap, she cautioned herself. It just felt like a slap after they’d shared a kiss like that. As anything would. “You went with it in that lobby, and it worked.”
That comment, on the other hand, felt like he’d used his fist. Her heart slammed against her ribs, hard, and she was surprised it didn’t knock her to the ground.
“Oh?” She sounded distant. Far away to her own ears, but Blue didn’t seem to notice. “In what way did it work?”
“There’s no way a bargain-basement ’roidhead like that looks at me and doesn’t know exactly who and what I am. He probably clocked my military training before he walked through the glass doors.”
Blue moved from her bedroom door to the space beside the couch where he kept his things, stacked so neatly it felt like he was making a statement, and squatted down beside his bag.
Busy busy busy, Everly thought. Not nicely.
Because it was almost as if he was trying to keep himself as busy as possible rather than look at her again.
“And that works, because I’d prefer he go back and tell whoever he works for that you got yourself a dangerous man as a lover, not a bodyguard.”
“A lover.” Everly echoed him as if she’d never heard that word before.
She was still standing a foot or so inside the front door. Frozen in place. Because she thought that if she allowed herself to move, she knew just enough self-defense that she might imagine she could hurl herself at him and hurt him.
He could incapacitate her in a few seconds and without much effort, she knew. Oh, she knew. But maybe it would be worth it if she drew some blood first.
Blue slid a dark look her way, as if he could read her every murderous thought, and then returned to whatever the hell he was doing in his duffel bag.
“If it causes some confusion, good. That’s what we want.”
“Let me make sure I’m following you,” Everly said, very carefully. Very deliberately.
Possibly also very aggressively.
Blue sat back on his heels, his eyes narrowed. “Don’t start down this road, little girl. You don’t want to go there.”
“Little girl,” she repeated. And there seemed to be no containing the incredulous laugh that burst free of her then. “You do realize that every time you say that, it does the exact opposite of what you think it does, right?”
“You have no idea what I think.”
“I’m sure it makes you happy to believe that,” she said through clenched teeth. “But every time you go out of your way to diminish me, it makes me wonder why you think that’s necessary. And guess what, Blue? I can only come to one kind of obvious conclusion.”
She could see he didn’t like that. Good.
“I’m not trying to diminish you, Everly. I’m trying to save your life. If you’re not happy with the way I’m doing that, I’ll remind you that you’re the one who drove three thousand miles to find me.”
“And you’re the one who decided to act like we were in a bad thriller and throw the bad guys off our trail with a big, bad kiss. Has that ever actually worked?”
Blue stood. It was more of an unfurling, rolling up from where he’d been squatting, and Everly certainly didn’t miss the inherent threat in that.
She just didn’t care.
“I did what I had to do to confuse the issue and buy us some time,” he said, sounding like he was delivering a dry military report. And managing to imply that she was being . . . something. Unreasonable. Childish. Something.
“Why can’t you just admit that you wanted to kiss me, so you did?” she demanded. “Would it kill you?”
“What I want or don’t want has no place here.” He was coiled tight and about to explode. She could feel it. But she refused to let that stop her. “This is the job.”
“You’re such a liar.” She was whispering, because she was too mad to keep her voice level, but it didn’t matter. He jerked as if she’d shouted it directly into his face. “If you were in the exact same situation with a six-foot-four, burly truck driver as a client, would you have solved the problem in the same way? Would you have run through all the available scenarios and come up with that particular solution? I don’t think so.”
“You want to think you’re special,” Blue said in an even, placating kind of way that made every part of her stiffen in outraged resentment. “And I get that, Everly. I do. But if you want to survive this, you need to get your head on straight.”
“Right. Or I might find myself accidentally kissing more random men in the lobbies of office buildings and pretending that it’s crack detective work. Huh. I wonder if anyone will believe that excuse?”
“What do you want me to say?” Blue threw at her, no longer sounding even or placating.
It struck her that it was a remarkably foolish thing to do, to push a man like this until he cracked. What did she think she was doing?
But she knew. This was what she wanted. Exactly this.
Blue reeling and uncontrolled. Blue outside himself and uncertain how he got there.
Just like she was.
“Tell the truth,” she suggested, not backing down, though if she was smart, she’d run and hide. “Maybe there was a tactical, strategic advantage to kissing me like that. But that’s not the whole r
eason you did it. Just admit it.”
Blue looked at her for what felt like an eternity, a solitary muscle flexing in that rough jaw of his, and too much fire and electricity in the space between them.
“You want things from me that I can’t give,” he said eventually, dark and low. “I don’t know how. And I don’t want to learn.”
And Everly found herself taking a step toward him. Then another one, temper and something like betrayal too forceful inside of her to ignore.
“Is this the part where you let me down easy?” she demanded. “Don’t patronize me, Blue. You don’t know what I want from you. Neither do I. The difference between you and me is I’m not playing games of make-believe with my own intentions.”
“That’s not the difference between you and me.” His voice was harsh. Unyielding. “You have no idea the kinds of things I’ve done. And I’m not planning to clue you in. All you need to know is that you drove three thousand miles to hire a monster to chase after other monsters. That’s what I do.”
“You are not a monster. I thought we covered this.”
His lips twisted, and something inside her did, too. “You can put your hand on my heart and tell me pretty things, but it doesn’t change the facts. You want tonight to mean something. You want a kiss to be a fairy tale. Well, wake up, Sleeping Beauty. There’s no fairy tale here. There’s no happy ever after. There’s me, solving a problem and then getting the hell out of your sweet, soft civilian life. The end.”
Everly made herself breathe before she keeled over. But she ignored the pounding of her heart, focusing on Blue instead.
“Cinderella. Little girl. Now Sleeping Beauty.” She didn’t realize she was moving again until she’d made it within reach of his hands. And she could feel the danger coming off him in waves. What was the matter with her that it didn’t terrify her? But it didn’t. He didn’t. “What would happen, I wonder, if you let yourself see me as a grown woman for a minute? Not a kid who lived across the street from you a hundred years ago. What then?”
