by Megan Crane
She threw the lock immediately, indicating she’d been standing right there on the other side of the door. Possibly even pressed against it.
“I barely heard a thing,” she said, craning her head to look past him.
“That’s because I handled it,” Blue told her, too gruffly.
Because she wasn’t dressed the way she should have been. He saw her jeans on her bed behind her and a pair of Converse next to them, but Everly was still wearing nothing but the T-shirt she’d been sleeping in.
Blue knew exactly how little was under it because it had been hiked up around her waist when he’d rolled into that bed with her.
Which he was definitely not thinking about, because he was a grown man who could control himself.
Everly pushed past him, her head swiveling wildly on her neck as she looked around the living room, like she expected to see evidence of the fight imprinted on the floor. She switched on the light next to the couch, and that didn’t help matters. Maybe she could see better. But the trouble was, so could Blue.
The light gave him a much better view of the long sweep of her legs, for example, in case they weren’t already burned into his brain. Perfectly formed. Just as pale and freckled as her belly, God help him. And worse, the hint of her butt right there where the hem of her oversized T-shirt flirted with the tops of her thighs.
She was killing him.
The puffed-up gym rat hadn’t been much of a challenge, but there was a distinct possibility Everly Campbell was going to take him down with a nightshirt.
“Do me a favor,” Blue gritted out before he well and truly lost it. “Go back to bed. Try to get some sleep. Because in the morning, we’re out of here.”
She was still staring out at the living room. At Rebecca’s door, Blue realized in the next second. As if she were reliving what had happened there all over again. What she’d seen that had caused all of this in the first place.
“I guess using me as bait worked.”
“I guess it did.”
“But you didn’t catch him.”
“I hurt him.” Blue didn’t work very hard to keep the satisfaction from his voice. He heard the little breath Everly pulled in at that, but if she thought he was a violent savage, he couldn’t really bring himself to care. Because he was one, and proud of it. “And the thing about a guy like that is that he’s never alone. He’ll be back, with friends. You can set your clock by it. We need to be somewhere else tomorrow night.”
“That’s comforting, thank you.”
Everly took her time turning back to face him, and Blue braced himself for what he was sure he’d see on her face. Because it was easy to talk about heroes in the abstract. The same way it was easy to support wars that took place overseas, out of sight, where no one had to face the consequences of daily engagement with the enemy. Everybody loved a decorated war hero in uniform when he returned from battle unharmed and stoic. Few people wanted to deal with the physical and psychological cost veterans paid when they were back home, out of uniform, and alone. Blue had lost as many friends after their tours of duty had ended as he had in battle, because some wars never ended. Some wars stayed with a man. And a lot of his friends had fallen on that internal battlefield, supposedly safe at home, as surely as they would have to an IED.
Heroes were much better on paper.
Everly had come to him because she wanted the kind of hero who looked good in comics and in the movies. Blue knew she had no idea what that actually meant.
He’d told Everly he was a monster. She should have listened.
But when she finally faced him, her expression wasn’t what he was expecting. She didn’t look disgusted or horrified. She looked . . . worried, almost. Everly reached over and ran her fingers over the back of his hand, then took it in hers, and Blue had to fight to keep from jerking it away from her.
She looked up at him, and it dawned on him that this woman wasn’t worried about any gorilla thugs coming back tomorrow night. She was worried about him.
Something inside him seemed to shift. As if he lost his balance, though he knew he hadn’t. He didn’t.
“Are you hurt?” she asked softly.
“Of course not.”
But the truth was, Blue hadn’t stopped to take an inventory. He did it then. There was a tender spot on his jaw. A little bruising and some scrapes on his knuckles where he’d landed a few good blows. And a faint hitch in his thigh, where the douchebag had landed a kick. That was it.
He got hurt a lot worse regularly in Isaac’s gym of pain.
“This guy was low-level muscle at best. Too dependent on his gun, which didn’t help him much when I relieved him of it. And he was used to his size solving problems to his satisfaction, which also didn’t help when I took him down.”
Everly was still holding his hand between her palms, as if she were inspecting it for signs of worse damage.
And maybe if Blue kept telling himself this was a clinical moment with medical overtones—not that Everly had ever indicated she had any training in that area—it would start to feel that way.
“He could have killed you,” she said, in a hushed, solemn voice that made him feel even more off-kilter than before.
“Always a possibility.” He didn’t know why he was talking in that low voice just because she was. As if this were intimate, this discussion that shouldn’t have been anything but an exchange of information. If that. “The truth is, I’m hard to kill.”
She shuddered, and something seemed to scrape through his gut, leaving him hollow. He wanted to call it weakness, but he didn’t feel even remotely fragile. He wanted to rip apart every creature who had ever dared threaten her, in the next fifteen minutes, if at all possible. He wanted to make them pay for frightening her. More than that, he wanted to tattoo her fingerprints on his hand where she’d checked him over to see if he was okay. He wanted to bundle her up and keep her safe no matter what it cost him, even if safe meant keeping her the hell away from him.
He looked at her and he wanted.
For the first time in his life, Blue wanted . . . everything.
“I hate the fact that you know that,” Everly whispered, fiercely, and her green eyes were shot through with an emotion he couldn’t identify when she looked up at him. “And I hate that you had to put that to the test tonight. Especially for me.”
And before he could brush that off, change the subject, and fight his way back to solid ground, she made everything worse.
She threw herself at him.
He could have handled it if she’d thrown a punch. His whole life was about functional responses to violence. How to contain it, survive it, combat it. He was good at all those things. He’d even have said he lived for it, if asked. He could have had her down and handled in a heartbeat if she’d tried to hit him.
But Everly wasn’t trying to beat on him.
On the contrary, she wrapped her arms around him. Then leaned in close, nestled her head against his chest in a move that made his entire body ache like some kind of sudden-onset arthritis, and hugged him.
Tight.
And didn’t seem to understand she’d disarmed a decorated Navy SEAL who was used to winning every battle before him.
Without landing a single blow.
Fourteen
Everly was only going with an instinct that she didn’t entirely understand.
And her own deep, abiding need, if she was honest. To get her hands on him. To feel that he was alive, flesh and blood. Warm and real.
Not another casualty of this battle that she’d woken up to find herself fighting.
Maybe she also just wanted to touch him. Needed to touch him, to make sure that no matter what he said in his tough guy way, Blue was really and truly okay.
“It was like reliving a nightmare but knowing I was awake,” she whispered against the hot, hard wall of his che
st, without stopping to question whether it was a good idea. “This time I knew exactly what was happening. I knew what those thumping sounds meant. I was so afraid that I’d open the door and it would be you this time, broken and bloody and—”
“Stop,” he said, but he didn’t sound pissed at her. Or as if that were an order he expected her to obey like the good little soldier she wasn’t. “That’s not going to happen.”
“Not tonight,” she agreed, feeling ferocious and relieved at once. And something else that pounded through her, edgy and dark, spurring her toward a shimmering that yawned there ahead of her, just out of reach.
Something wild and dangerous in a different way. Something irrevocable.
She held him tighter, and she felt it in every part of her when his arms finally—finally—closed around her.
And Everly knew she wasn’t imagining this. She wasn’t making this up in her head. This wasn’t a simple physical reaction to the man who’d broken in here or the fact Blue had fought him off. She knew, like it or not, that they were both caught up in the grip of the same thing.
That they had been all this time. Since the moment she’d found him again after all these years in the cool shade of the towering pines behind Fool’s Cove.
She wasn’t sure she could handle it. Not and stay in one piece. She kept her head turned to the side so she could catch her breath. So she could try to figure out what she should do next. Whether she should climb in bed and go to sleep the way he’d told her she should, or whether she needed to surrender, once and for all, to this thing.
And maybe throw herself at him while she was at it.
Because whatever else might happen, she knew that Blue would catch her.
He’s already caught you, a voice inside her pointed out slyly, as if she might have missed the deliciously heavy weight of his sculpted, honed arms around her, cradling her body against his, as if she’d been put on this earth for exactly this purpose. To fit against this man, just like this. What are you waiting for?
And it was as if everything crystallized inside her at that.
During the drive to Alaska, she’d told herself that all she wanted was to get her life back. But if the past few days were a test run, the truth was that she hated it. This whole long week of baiting a trap, she’d had the feeling that she was merely playing a role in her own skin, and she didn’t think that had as much to do with what had happened to Rebecca as she’d wanted to pretend.
For good or ill, her desperate drive to Alaska had woken her up.
And there was no going back now. She was sleepwalking through a job she’d stopped finding exciting a long time ago, living for the clock to tick over to the precise minute she could escape and race down to the lobby to find Blue again. She was ignoring texts and calls from her friends and older brother, because she had some notion that pretending they didn’t exist would keep them safe. And also because she didn’t want to waste a single second she had left with Blue.
She existed for that walk home in Blue’s company. For the hours they spent training together in her living room. For the dreamy, too-hot showers she took afterward, when she could lose herself in vivid fantasies about his hands all over her, but without the workout clothes this time . . .
Everly knew what she wanted.
What she’d always wanted, if she were being honest. She’d been fascinated by Blue when she was a little girl, too young for crushes in any meaningful way. She was seven when he graduated from high school, but she’d followed him around for years before that, because she’d thought he was wonderful.
She still thought he was wonderful. But now she knew precisely what she could do with all that wonder.
Everly couldn’t understand why she was wavering. Why her heart was pounding much too fast and she was on the verge of pulling away, then running off to hide. Why was she worried about staying safe now? The past month had taught her that no one was safe, least of all her. Safety could be stolen from anyone in a few seconds.
It could be taken in an instant. In her sleep.
Do or die, she told herself.
And there were only so many nights left before somebody killed her. Or before Blue solved everything, made her life safe again, but then disappeared off into the Alaskan wilderness.
Any way she looked at it, whatever happened, she was running out of time.
Why not spend this one night the way she’d been imagining since that first night in Alaska?
She tilted her head back and smiled at him, reveling in that hard mouth of his. That beautifully stern expression. And that bright, hot gleam in his dark eyes, which she chose to believe was all for her.
Everly stopped dithering. It was like a key had slid into a lock, and everything suddenly made sense. She rose up on her toes, pressing herself against him as if she were stretching like a cat, and looped her arms around his neck.
And it was awesome.
In this position, she could feel him in a way she never had before, not even when they’d been grappling in some or other lethal hold. She wasn’t wearing a bra beneath the T-shirt she’d been sleeping in, and it only now occurred to her that she wasn’t wearing her pajama pants, either.
Thank God.
Because she could feel him everywhere. Everywhere. Pressed up against her, hard and hot, and entirely Blue.
“You don’t need to do this.” His voice was low. Gravelly.
But what she noticed most was that he didn’t push her away. He didn’t step back. The gleam in his gaze went . . . molten.
And she did, too.
“But I do,” Everly said quietly. “I really, really do.”
And this time, she was the one who kissed him.
She set her mouth to his and indulged herself at last. She tested the shape of his firm, beautiful lips. Then she teased them apart and slipped inside, and drowned herself in all that sweet, hot fire.
And she felt it everywhere when he growled a bit, as if he liked that as much as she did; angled his head to one side; and took control.
It was a breathless catapult, wild and slick.
He took her head between his hands. He kissed her and he kissed her, and she fought to get closer. To go deeper. To taste every part of him she could.
Blue kissed her as if he had to. As if he couldn’t get enough. As if she’d broken something in both of them, and now they both had to pay the price.
The sweet, hot, glorious price.
Everly had the distant thought that she’d happily bankrupt herself if it meant she could have this.
His hands moved, one threading into her hair to hold her head still, leaving her mouth and neck bare for him to sample at will. And he did, a touch of fire, a faint hit of steel. The other hand slid down her back, slow and certain, then beneath the hem of her T-shirt to mold itself to her hip.
Then lower still, as if he couldn’t help himself. As if he needed to test the shape of her bottom, full against his palm.
Everly shuddered. Blue muttered something, hot and male and explosive.
Then everything shifted. He lifted her up and swung her into his arms as if she were weightless. Or maybe she just felt that way around him. She was captivated by the span of his mighty shoulders. And that wide, sculpted chest with a dusting of dark hair. And that intense, deliriously focused look on his face, as if she were the only thing in the whole of the world.
Everly was afraid her heart might claw its way out of her chest.
Or maybe the truth was she didn’t mind what happened next, as long as it happened with him.
She thought he might head into the bedroom, but there was something desperate in him. In her, too. She felt nothing but grateful when he carefully laid her down on the couch and then came down after her, covering her with his long, hard body.
“The bed—” she gasped.
“Too far.”
He settled between her legs at last, and it was her turn to frame his face with her hands. She ran her palms over the rough surface of his unshaven jaw, thrilling to the faint abrasion against her skin. It seemed to wind its way deep inside her until it pooled like a new fire between her legs.
He let out another sound, something like a sigh.
As if this were magic for him, too.
“I need to taste you,” he said, his voice like its own caress, there in the dark.
And all Everly could do was make a noise, helpless and greedy at once. She didn’t know what it meant. But Blue seemed to.
He reached down and took the hem of her T-shirt in one fist, then lifted it, tugging it up and over her head.
And then she was naked, save the skimpy pair of panties she wore, stretched there beneath him.
Open. Vulnerable.
Completely exposed to the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen in her life.
But Everly thought she’d never felt more beautiful than she did with Blue’s dark, hot gaze all over her, as if she were an altar and he had a mind to get his worship on.
He bent down, his hands smoothing their way over her as if she were precious beyond measure, so he could lift her breast to his lips. He licked her until she squirmed, and then he sucked.
And when she cried out, he started all over again on the other one.
Everly simply tipped her head back, surrendered herself to his hands and his mouth, his teeth, and his low, stirring laughter, and let him drive her wild.
She was breathing loud and heavy when he moved down farther, and she squirmed beneath him. His big hands circled her hips and held her still as he tested the depth of her navel, then licked his way down farther still.
“Stop fidgeting,” he said against her belly, halfway between her navel and the part of her that ached for him the most.
“I can’t help it.”
“Try.”
Everly could feel him smile. And his words were like coals, hot and glowing, pressed deep into her. She couldn’t stay still. She couldn’t stop smiling, her head tipped back like she was at the very top of a roller coaster and about to take flight.
