by Megan Crane
Everly felt her shoulders go down a few inches, telling her how tense she’d been that she hadn’t even noticed they were hunched up around her ears. “She loves nothing more. My father had to force a cell phone into her hand, because she vowed she’d never use one. Now she never puts it down, because she’s taking a million pictures with it all the time.”
“I don’t think there’s a thing your mother can’t do,” his mother said, and laughed.
“Okay.” Blue’s voice was flat. “Enough. We’re not here for pointless small talk.”
Everly set the mug she was in the process of lifting back down on the table, afraid her hands would start shaking. Because Blue’s voice felt like one of the blows he’d taught her, sharp and lethal and designed to maim.
For a moment that felt like it lasted forever, she found herself staring wide-eyed at Blue’s mother.
Who did not curl up into a ball the way Everly would have. She straightened her shoulders. For a split second, she looked hurt, but then a resigned sort of expression took over her face. She laid her hands on the table before her, very neatly, one on either side of her newspaper.
“Benjamin Lewis Hendricks,” she said, a kind of deep fury—or hurt, maybe, Everly couldn’t tell—making her voice shake, though she didn’t look away from Blue. “I haven’t laid eyes on you in twenty years. You show up here before dawn, and do I ask where you’ve been? Do I question you on why you’re back, and with the neighbor’s daughter, no less? No, I do not. Because I love you, no matter how you break my heart. And I’ll remind you that this is not the first time I’ve seen this kind of cloak-and-dagger nonsense.”
“Don’t.”
But Regina Margate ignored her son’s terse, angry monosyllable. She stood up, pushing back her chair as she rose but managing to make the scratch of it against the kitchen floor seem almost regal.
And this time, Everly was aware that she was holding her breath.
“I don’t think it’s asking too much for you to keep a civil tongue in your head while you’re in this house,” Mrs. Margate said. “However long you plan to remain in this house. That’s my only requirement.”
“It’s not your requirements that were the problem,” Blue bit out.
“You stop right there.” His mother sounded more furious than hurt. “This is his house. You’re not a child any longer. You’re a guest, not a dependent. If you don’t want to stay under his roof, Blue, no one is forcing you to stay here another minute.”
But Blue didn’t say another word. He simply turned and walked out of the kitchen, and Everly had to sit there in silence, staring awkwardly at his mother as they both listened to him take the stairs two at a time.
Everly knew her face was red. She was surprised to see that his mother’s was colorful, too. Flushed, anyway, and her eyes got glassy the more the silence dragged on.
“In my head he was still seventeen,” Mrs. Margate said when Everly had begun to think she wouldn’t speak at all. That she might stand there, frozen in place, forever. “Isn’t that funny? I know how old he is, of course. I knew he wasn’t still a teenager. It’s almost funny, the tricks time plays on a person.”
She focused on Everly then, which made Everly wonder if she’d forgotten she wasn’t alone.
Everly racked her brain for something to say that might explain what had just happened, but there was no need. Mrs. Margate smiled politely, murmured something about her laundry, and walked out.
Leaving Everly to fortify herself with another cup of coffee before she slowly marched back up the stairs to that third-floor sitting room to find her . . . whatever Blue was to her.
She found Blue with his tablet in his hands again, sitting near the windows that overlooked her parents’ house. And this was the trouble with feeling all this stuff about a man she thought she ought to know but didn’t. It swirled around inside her. It felt like wonder, as if she might burst wide open if she didn’t tell him—
Everly bit her tongue again. Hard enough to hurt this time.
She had the sudden, unwelcome memory of her own voice in that car last night, using a word she should never have used.
It had no place here. Not inside her. Not with him.
God, she already knew what he’d say. He’d get pissed. Or, worse, turn pitying. He’d mansplain her own heart to her, and it wouldn’t matter what she said. He was going to leave anyway, the moment she was safe. She knew that, and even if she hadn’t, that scene downstairs just now would have clued her in.
She wasn’t in love with Blue. Of course she wasn’t.
Because that would be . . . hopeless.
“Are you going to stand there and stare at me all day?” he asked without looking up. “I can’t say I like it.”
A smart woman would fade off into the bathroom and shower for a while. At least until he started looking less outwardly belligerent.
It turned out that Everly wasn’t that smart. “What was all that?”
She thought he would pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about. She’d even braced herself for it. She wondered if she’d actually push him if he dug his heels in, and thought that yes, she would, because she knew how to protect herself with her own two hands now. She could protect him, too. Even if it was from himself.
Especially then.
But Blue leveled a hard look at her. “I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out that I didn’t come back here for years because there’s stuff I don’t want to talk about. It turns out I still don’t want to talk about it.”
“What other cloak-and-dagger stuff did she mean?”
“I’m pretty sure I just said I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Give me a break. That woman loves you. You can read anyone and anything, but you can’t read your own mother? You must know—”
But there was something so cold on Blue’s face then that Everly choked on her own words. He took his time standing up, every inch of him a threat.
And she immediately understood the difference. That he was aiming all that brawn and power at her, for once. That he wasn’t doing a single thing to protect her from all the lethal ruthlessness that was stamped deep into his every last bone.
“Do you really think that because we had sex, that means you get to dig around in my life?” he asked, in a voice as frigid as the expression on his face. “Or tell me what to do? It was sex, Everly. Just sex.”
It felt like he’d punched her in the stomach.
But it took only another moment to realize that it was meant to feel that way. It was meant to leave her winded. He likely expected her to slink off somewhere to lick her wounds and have a good cry.
In which case, he should have picked on a woman who hadn’t survived two assassination attempts in the past twelve hours. A woman who hadn’t run all the way to Alaska to find him. A woman he hadn’t taught the fine art of palm strikes and eye gouging.
And he definitely should have picked a woman who wasn’t in love with him.
“Wow,” she said, drawling it out for effect. “I guess that really hit you where you live. Did I ask you to marry me, Blue? Did I tell you that we were now joined forever because we had sex? Or did I ask you a not unreasonable question about your family situation after watching you fight with your mother?”
“I did not have a fight with my mother.”
“No, you didn’t,” Everly agreed. “You were rude, to make sure she knew how you felt. And then you couldn’t yell at her when she called you on it, because at heart you’re a man of honor. So you did the next best thing and left, then tried to make me feel like crap. Does it feel better now? Do you?”
“You’re the one who suggested we come here,” he reminded her, something fierce in his gaze and his hands tight at his sides. “I never said it would be pleasant. I don’t know what you expect from me.”
“Right. Be
cause I forced you to come here. You didn’t clear it with your G.I. Joe friends or anything.”
“G.I. Joe was in the army, Everly. Isaac was in the marines. And there are things you can’t possibly understand going on here.”
“I didn’t see your poor mother trying to blow you up. I saw her trying to pretend everything was okay when it clearly wasn’t.”
“Let me tell you something about my poor mother.” He threw the words at her as if they cut his throat on the way out. “My father was a navy pilot. He died when I was ten in a stupid training accident. And my poor mother mourned him so deep and so hard that she was remarried within the year.”
“I don’t know your mother very well,” Everly said quietly. “But I do know that you can never really know someone else’s heart.”
Blue stalked toward her, but she held her ground. She ignored the trembling sensation deep in her belly, which seemed to reverberate down into her knees, and let him come at her.
Because whatever this was, whatever was happening, she knew without a shadow of a doubt that no matter how mad this man got at her, or near her, he would never hurt her. The same way she knew her legs would carry her forward when she decided to walk. The same way she knew her neck would hold her head up.
She knew this man like she knew her own bones.
You love him, a little voice whispered inside her.
Maybe she’d loved him already, but she knew that right here, right now, in the attic of his parents’ house in their old hometown, she was seeing more of the real Blue than she’d seen so far. More than he’d shown anyone else in a long, long while, if she had to guess.
She couldn’t pretend it wasn’t what she’d wanted.
“She got two daughters and a new husband,” Blue was seething at her. “A big house. And I got Ron. Good old Ron, who thought he could make a man out of me.”
Everly knew his stepfather, too, of course. She remembered Ron Margate as a man who cooked a decent hot dog and told incredibly corny jokes. And, in the years since, had been a neighborhood staple. Always had his Christmas ornaments up over Thanksgiving weekend and tucked away again on New Year’s Day, things Everly’s father had always appreciated and commented on.
That didn’t mean he couldn’t have been an awful stepfather to a grieving kid.
“Blue, I don’t think—”
“You don’t know, Everly. You were across the street riding a pink bike up and down, clueless and sheltered. You have no idea what it was like growing up in this house.”
“Did he . . .” She wished she’d never started down this road, but she had. Now she had to deal with it. “Was he abusive?”
“He wasn’t my father.” Blue threw it at her like a right hook. “And he didn’t like it when I reminded him of that fact. Over and over and over.”
“Did he get physical with you?”
Blue muttered something under his breath. “The man is a dick. The end. Why are you dragging all this up? All you need to know is that I learned to do without my mother a long time ago. I’m glad that she took the opportunity to lecture me on my manners, because it reminded me that nothing ever changes. She made her choices.”
“She loves you,” Everly whispered, as if that could change anything.
Something washed over Blue, intense and wild. His eyes blazed.
“Don’t talk to me about love. My father loved my mother. He died because he loved his country. And look what kind of loyalty that got him.”
“It looks like he has your loyalty,” Everly said softly. “Doesn’t that count for something?”
She had never seen this man look so . . . undone as he did then. And she would have gone to him, put her arms around him, tried to hold him the way he’d held her in his old twin bed last night—but she knew, somehow, that he would never allow it.
That he got something out of standing there solitary and wounded and forever alone. He wanted it that way.
She could see it all over him.
And she told herself that the hollow sensation in her chest had nothing to do with him. It wasn’t her heart breaking. It wasn’t anything.
But even the lies she told herself weren’t working today.
“I don’t lie awake at night wondering where it went wrong with the woman who abandoned him the minute he was gone,” Blue told her. “I wonder how I can ever be even half the man he was, knowing full well I can’t.”
“Well, of course you can’t,” she said. “He’s a ghost.”
And for a moment, everything between them seemed to light on fire, just like the walls last night. She’d never seen this stoic, composed man look the way he did then. Not just undone but furious on top of it, and all of it aimed straight at her.
Everly told herself she could take it, though she wasn’t entirely sure that was true.
But just when she thought she might actually be charred from the inside out, he wrenched his gaze away from hers.
“I’m an idiot,” he ground out.
“You’re not an idiot,” she assured him. “A lot of people carry all kinds of things—”
“Everly.” His gaze hit hers again, but he was the Blue she knew again. Cool and hard. As if nothing had happened. “Do not psychoanalyze me.”
“But—”
“This conversation is over. I just realized the only thing that changed in the past twenty-four hours.”
And Everly was certain he didn’t mean the fact that they’d slept together. Or the fact that they were here in his childhood home, the very last place on earth he wanted to be.
“It’s Rebecca’s mother.” Blue shook his head. “I can’t believe I let all this extraneous crap distract me. I called her yesterday and left a message. What mother doesn’t respond to someone calling about her missing kid? I think she’s the key to all this.”
Everly felt like the world was spinning too fast and uneven beneath her, but she forced herself to ignore it.
“Great,” she said, tilting up her chin against the objections she could already feel coming at her, like he was firing them one after the other from that big, ugly gun of his. She even crossed her arms in front of her, like that might make her bulletproof. She pretended she was. “Let’s go find her.”
Eighteen
Blue was off his game, and he didn’t like it.
They were back in the SUV, Everly in the passenger seat at his side, because he’d lost that fight in a hurry.
When had he started losing fights? But he already knew the answer. It was coming back to the same place where he’d last lost fights, when he’d been a kid and almost entirely powerless.
He wasn’t enjoying the déjà vu.
“How are you going to keep me safe if you’re not here?” Everly had asked him. In that new, challenging way of hers that made him hard.
And also made him want to tie her up and lock her in a closet, just to keep her safe.
But that was the trouble. Teach a woman to fight, and a man was pretty much guaranteeing that, sooner or later, she’d fight him. Blue should have seen this coming.
“One week of practicing a few self-defense moves does not make you prepared to handle the kind of situation we could be walking into,” he had argued, feeling a lot like a saint when he’d kept his hands to himself. Because his sense of being sucked down into the past wouldn’t ease any if he went ahead and christened his childhood bedroom the way he’d always fantasized about doing as a teenager. While his mother was downstairs, for God’s sake. “I hope you don’t think you can handle yourself because you learned a few things. Because that just makes you a danger to yourself and others. Namely, me.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” she’d said, but since she hadn’t physically backed down, he didn’t think she was surrendering. And sure enough, she’d kept right on going. “Which is why I don’t want to be left here, hoping against hope that th
ese people don’t show up again. Hoping that I don’t have to try to protect myself and your mother with a few palm strikes. I don’t think that would end well.”
And that was how Blue Hendricks, former Navy SEAL, current Alaska Force brother, and widely acknowledged badass, found himself driving straight toward potential danger with the woman he was supposed to be protecting riding shotgun.
He figured he’d have ample time to kick his own butt over that decision later. When this was over. When he would have nothing but the towering silence of the Alaskan mountains to distract him from a fearless moral inventory of what a mess he’d made of the Everly Campbell situation.
Later, he growled at himself, and focused on the highway.
His brothers were already on the ground in Chicago. They were handling the police and the fallout from the firebomb. As far as we can tell, they climbed a telephone pole and tossed it through the window from there, Templeton had texted. Blue could have waited for them to make their way out to his stepfather’s house, so he could have left Everly in good hands, but he had that gut feeling again.
That drumming, restless sort of feeling in his gut that crap was about to go down. Or already was. That feeling that kicked at him, scraped at him, and wouldn’t let go no matter how he tried to reason his way out of it. That feeling that had saved his life more times than he could count. Today it was telling him that he needed to get out to the North Shore, and fast, if he wanted to get on top of this thing.
And certainly if he wanted to end it. And end it well, leaving Everly alive.
Alive and healthy and capable of picking up her life where it had left off just over a month ago. As if none of this had happened.
And if everything in Blue clenched too hard at that notion, he ignored it. Because he might not want to ignore it, but he damn well needed to. The same way he needed to ignore all the rest of the crap she churned up in him. He didn’t need to think any harder or deeper about his father and all the ways he could never live up to his legacy. He didn’t need to question himself about the possibility he’d been the one to treat his mother or even freaking Ron unfairly. He certainly didn’t want to think about ghosts.
