by Megan Crane
“Or what?” she managed to ask.
“Oh,” he murmured, the scrape of his jaw against her tender skin, his head much too close to that melting place between her legs. “I’m sure I’ll think of an appropriate punishment.”
Everly couldn’t wait.
Blue’s fingers curled into the sides of her panties, then peeled the scrap of lace out of his way. He shifted as he tugged them down her legs, then tossed them aside.
She thought she said his name, but she couldn’t hear herself over the racket of her own heartbeat and her raw, desperate breathing, so loud she worried she might wake up the neighbors.
But she knew Blue was laughing, because she could feel it when he pressed a kiss to one hip bone. The way his mouth curved. The way his big body shook with delight.
“Hold on, baby,” he told her.
Everly heard that. And she thought the way he said baby might throw her over the edge, right there and then. She felt herself tremble, so hard and deep it made her throat feel tight.
Blue laughed again, then moved lower on the couch, wedging his shoulders more securely between her outstretched legs.
Then he leaned forward and set his mouth between her legs.
And everything . . . lit up.
She was on fire. His mouth was hot, masterful, and sure, and Everly couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t take it—
And she couldn’t get enough.
Blue licked into her, and she lost herself. She felt too hot to bear. She rocked against him, lifting her hips toward his mouth like an offering. He wrapped his arms around her hips, and she didn’t know if he was moving her or she was moving herself, rocking herself against his clever mouth in a kind of blistering rush, lost in the wild sensation stampeding through her, flinging her arms up over her face as she began to fall—
And too quickly, too easily, she shattered into a thousand pieces, all of them ablaze.
She didn’t know how long she lost herself out there, too many pieces thrown too far apart. Too much fire, not enough breath.
Too much need and longing wringing her dry where she lay.
When she came back into herself, she was still naked on the couch. Blue was crouched there beside her, as if he’d been rummaging in that bag of his.
His gaze met hers and held, dark and unyielding, and, God, she loved how uncompromising he was. Even now.
“Sorry,” she managed to get out, smiling at him. She reached out and fit her hand to his remarkable face. “I think I died.”
And she watched that ruthlessness in him soften, just the slightest bit, right there before her.
“Not yet,” Blue drawled. And this time, when his mouth curved, she felt as if it were wired to different parts of her body. Her mouth, certainly. And better yet, that tender place between her legs that seemed to have a heartbeat all its own. “Want to see what we can do about that?”
She couldn’t seem to keep herself from smiling wider.
Blue tossed something on the coffee table, then stripped off the athletic pants he’d been wearing. Everly hardly had time to admire him the way she wanted to, tall and sculpted to ferocious perfection.
But then she didn’t care, because he was settling himself between her legs again, and that was better. That was everything.
She could feel him, huge and hot, against her hip.
“Blue . . . ,” she whispered.
“Tell me what you want, baby.”
Everly smoothed her hands over the parts of his wide back that she could reach. “I just did.” She smiled at him again and thought the smiling might break her face in two. But she couldn’t seem to mind. “You. I just want you.”
He made a noise that on another man she might have called desperate. But from Blue, it was like music to her ears.
And then he was kissing her again, deeper this time. Rougher and hotter, and somehow sweeter for it.
She wound herself around him, and for a long time, lifetimes maybe, they explored each other. Red-hot and breathless, there in the dark.
And when they were both shaking, he reached over to the coffee table and grabbed the foil packet he’d dropped there. He ripped it open with his teeth, sheathed himself with a single, practiced movement, and then, finally, held himself there at the entrance to her body.
And for a moment, they were suspended there.
Everly’s heart was a drum. She could feel Blue’s pound, too, with his chest tight against hers. He seemed almost . . . wary. And she couldn’t stand it.
She slid her hands to his face again. She traced his beautiful mouth with her fingertips. She held his dark gaze and she smiled, so wide and sure it made her eyes water.
“Blue,” she told him, solemn and soft at once. “You’re not a monster. You’re a man. And I’ve never wanted anyone more.”
He let out a sound, as if she’d torn it from him, and then he was pushing his way inside her.
She was melting, shivering, and still, it took a moment or two for her to accommodate him. But then he was lodged inside her, sunk down deep, and Everly knew she’d never felt anything like this, so good and so right, in her life.
And that was when he began to move.
And every time he slid inside her, it was better. Impossibly, unimaginably better.
Blue set a pace. First slow and steady, then deeper. Determined.
And Everly was there with him. She clutched at his shoulders, and she didn’t simply take his thrusts—she met them.
She felt like liquid.
She felt like his.
And with every roll of his hips, she felt made new.
Part of him. Changed. Electric and free.
He dropped his head to her neck, and pressed his mouth there. His thrusts became wilder. All she could do was hold on and meet him.
Again and again, she met him.
Until she thought the fire might burn them both alive.
“I need you to come again,” he muttered against her neck, and Everly shuddered. “Now.”
And she obeyed him. Once again, she obeyed him.
She drowned herself against him, she whispered his name, and she let herself go. Over and over she tumbled, losing herself in a new shattering, and this time, he was with her.
This time, he called her name, and followed.
And when Everly woke up again, it was to a crashing noise and the sound of glass shattering.
Which was terrifying enough.
But then the walls caught fire.
Fifteen
“Fire!” Everly cried out, still tangled up against him on the couch.
And Blue was in motion again before he fully registered what was happening.
There was the crash. Shattering that he understood came from Everly’s window before he fully put together that something had come through it. And a deep sort of whooshing sound that he knew, on a deep level that had everything to do with his years in hell, spelled death. And fast.
Blue rolled to the floor, taking Everly with him and twisting so that he took the brunt of the impact. He rolled her carefully to one side, then sat up to assess the situation and the damage as best he could.
Firebomb.
They’d thrown it into Everly’s bedroom window, where they clearly expected her to be sleeping—and now burning to a crisp—but he couldn’t allow himself to think about what might have happened if she’d been tucked up in her bed where she belonged. They’d had good aim, too. The flames were already dancing along the length of the bed she should have been sleeping in, and licking at the walls.
Blue didn’t have time to explain himself. He scooped up her T-shirt and tossed it at her as he lunged for her bedroom doorway.
“Cover your face,” he ordered her. “And call nine-one-one. Tell them the address and hang up.”
He didn’t wait to see if she
would obey him. He wrapped his hand in his own T-shirt as a precaution, then reached out to grab the doorknob and slam the door shut. He turned back to face her as the apartment’s smoke detector began to shrill.
“We have to get out of here,” he told her, loud enough to be heard over the insistent shrill from above. “Now.”
Everly looked pale and a bit sick, but determined. She was clutching the apartment’s landline phone in one hand while she pulled on the T-shirt he’d thrown her with the other, but she only nodded at his latest order. Blue realized he expected her to argue. But she didn’t. Instead, he heard her belt out her address into the receiver, then toss it on the table, just as he’d asked.
He headed back to the couch, shrugging into his own T-shirt. He shucked on his athletic pants, stamped his feet into his boots, and grabbed his bag with his other hand. By the time he turned around again, Everly was across the living room floor near the kitchen, throwing open the utility closet that he knew by now contained an apartment-sized washer and dryer, stacked on top of each other.
“Now, Everly,” he bit out, eyeing the bedroom door in case it exploded.
She didn’t react, but she didn’t stop what she was doing, either. She yanked a pair of jeans out of the dryer, then stepped into them. She hooked them up over her hips, then raked her hands through the rest of the laundry in the dryer, finding a handful of what looked like panties. Nothing else. By the time Blue made it to the foyer, Everly was ready, meeting him there and sticking her feet into another pair of Converse she’d left by the door.
These were bright red, he noticed. And he couldn’t have said why that little detail, combined with how focused and calm she appeared in this latest crisis, made something in him clutch. Hard.
The girl next door had grown up into the perfect woman, but this wasn’t the time to throw himself into that minefield.
Will there ever be a right time? something in him asked. Will you ever face what’s been happening here?
But Blue didn’t really want to look into why his instant response to that question was negative.
“Stay behind me,” he told her curtly, because he wasn’t sure he even knew what might come out of his mouth around her. It was something he planned to be deeply pissed about—once they were safe.
“I will,” she said, in that same quiet, resigned way. As if she’d woken up to a firebomb a thousand times.
He hated the fact that it had happened to her even once. Blue was the one who’d been trained for this crap. Everly was supposed to . . .
Stay seven years old forever? that same obnoxious voice asked.
Blue gritted his teeth and shrugged his holster back on and into place. He hauled the table he’d left in front of the door back to its usual place in the foyer. Then he pulled his gun out, clicked off the safety, and eased the front door open.
He took a quick glance out into the hallway, fully expecting to find a gun in his face. Maybe more than one.
But the hallway was empty. He stepped out, then motioned for Everly to follow him, and he knew he should have reprimanded her when she tucked her fingers in the waistband of his sweats. He shouldn’t have encouraged that kind of thing, but the truth was, he liked knowing where she was.
Then they were on the move, a solid three minutes, maybe four, from impact. Blue moved swiftly down the hall toward the stairwell, and pulled the building’s fire alarm as he passed.
He sorted through the information he had as he jogged down the stairs, Everly right there behind him as he went. It seemed like an extreme escalation. Stalker to hit man to firebomb in the course of a single evening after all these weeks of nothing. Who did that? Who went from game playing on social media to explosive devices tossed through windows?
Blue turned that question over and over in his head as he heard the rest of the building start to come awake around them. There were shouts and slamming doors on the floors as they ran past them. The usual reactions to fire alarms in city buildings.
But he had the two of them out of the stairwell, then headed toward the side door of the building that let out into the alley beside it, before he heard the fire trucks in the distance.
“We’re going to head for the SUV,” he threw over his shoulder when they reached the door to the outside. He eased his way out, checking the alley for lurking scumbags, but it was clear.
“I thought you got rid of it days ago.”
Everly sounded a shade too monotone for his peace of mind, which suggested she was in shock, but there was nothing Blue could do about it now.
“I moved it from the front of the building days ago. Rule number two is always, always have a getaway car.” She slipped out behind him and closed the door carefully, instead of letting it slam shut, because she wasn’t just a pretty face. Not this one. “Or, you know, a handy seaplane. A boat. Whatever works.”
Instead of heading toward the front of the building and the busy street, he took her elbow and led her in the other direction. There was a fence in the middle of the alley, separating one property from the next, but Blue didn’t pause. He threw his bag up and over the chain-link barrier, then turned to Everly.
“Can you climb it?”
She was too stiff when she stopped moving. Pale and fragile-looking, to his mind. But there was a kind of grim acceptance in the way she stared at that fence. It ate at him.
“I can climb it.”
“Because if you can’t, I can—”
“I said I can climb it.”
And then she did. Not particularly gracefully. Not fast or with any skill. She looked like what she was—a scared woman climbing over a city fence in the middle of the night because she had to. Because she’d decided she would, and so she did.
Blue waited where he was, making sure no one was coming up behind them. But when she reached the top of the fence and threw her leg over, she let out a long, shaky breath, and he found himself looking at her instead of keeping watch.
“You okay?”
She didn’t quite smile. Her mouth looked too soft and too vulnerable for that, and Blue’s problem was that all he could think about, then, was tasting her all over again. Getting his mouth on her and who cared where they were or how much danger they were in?
He was even more pissed than he had been before, because whoever was chasing her had ruined that, too. He could have woken up with her. He could have taken his time. He could have—
“I’m okay,” she said, snapping him back to this alley. This moment. And the things he should have been doing that weren’t fantasizing about getting his hands on her again. “I’m alive, right?”
And for a moment she looked more than simply alive. The security light from the building behind hers made her strawberry blond hair look like some kind of halo. And it made Blue feel alive in ways he couldn’t explain to himself.
As if she’d flipped a switch in him. One he hadn’t known was there.
One he didn’t like knowing was there, especially when he felt lit up, a lot like that impossible red halo and her soft mouth as she looked down at him. Then swung her leg over and climbed down the other side.
Leaving him . . . outside himself and out of sorts and not at all okay with pretty much anything.
He was almost glad he had concrete things to think about. Getting her away and to safety. Figuring out what hornet’s nest he’d kicked and how to find it again, with an exterminator this time. Then removing himself from the Chicago area and all these damned ghosts before it was too late.
Whatever too late meant. He shoved that to the side, too.
Then shoved his gun in his shoulder holster so he could run and flip himself over the fence. He landed in a crouch, then grabbed his bag with one hand and her with his other.
He wasn’t thinking about the way her fingers laced with his or the fire that raced in him at even so little contact, because that was unacceptabl
e. Unacceptable in every way, and yet he took a moment to let the heat really settle in him.
Because her mouth was so soft and her eyes were so big and he was a sucker for her in ways he was afraid to list, even in his own head.
And then they ran.
This was the girl who’d complained about potentially having to climb five flights of stairs, but she didn’t complain tonight. Everly gripped his hand and ran beside him, her breath ragged and loud, but she didn’t slow down. She didn’t stop. She followed him out the other side of the alley to the street behind hers and across three more blocks before he finally led her to the SUV, which he moved to a new spot in the neighborhood every day. Just for the possibility of an occasion like this.
He bundled her into the passenger seat, then circled around, looking for potential danger in every shadow—but there was nothing there. Just the relative quiet of a city night. They were three blocks away from her building, and there was still no sign of whoever had thrown that crap through her window.
Something worse than temper cracked in him at that, but it still wasn’t time to take that on. Not when they were exposed like this.
There was all the time in the world to get pissed about the intentions of asswipes, Blue thought as he climbed behind the wheel and fired up the engine, but not while Everly was out on the streets. Unsafe and unprotected.
“We need to find a safe house,” he said tersely as he pulled the SUV out of its parking spot and gunned it down the street. “And then we need to reassess this situation.”
She didn’t say anything. One minute dragged by. Then another. He slid her a probing sort of glance as he turned the corner, but he couldn’t see any obvious issues. She was sitting gamely enough in the seat next to him. Not shaking. Not crying. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap. She was maybe too quiet after everything that had happened tonight, but that was the only indication that something might be amiss.
“Are you all right?”
Everly laughed. It was a wild, jagged sound. She clapped her hands over her mouth, as if the sound had shocked her.
