SEAL's Honor

by Megan Crane

  And that was when the man beside him smiled.

  “You can call me Isaac, brother,” he told Blue, like everything was settled. Then he lifted his own glass. “Welcome to Alaska Force.”

  Two

  PRESENT DAY

  “You must remember me,” said the woman who’d just screeched to a noisy halt in the dirt that passed for a driveway out behind the rickety old lodge. Blue was standing guard in the endless Alaskan summer sunshine, pretending he wasn’t doing just that. As if someone would just be standing around aimlessly at the end of a road only fools ever tried to drive, but the woman didn’t look like the sort who would make that distinction.

  Much too soft, even with that haunted look on her face.

  She threw herself out of the car as if she had someone on her tail. Blue knew she didn’t, because they’d been monitoring her approach since she’d turned onto the only road—such as it was—that eventually led from Grizzly Harbor and over the usually impassable mountain to the back side of this remote Alaskan island. Where the deliberately hard-to-reach headquarters of Alaska Force was spread over what had once been a summer fishing retreat for the very hardy and very, very rugged.

  Neither was a term Blue would use to describe this woman. She was delicate. Above his pay grade, if he had to guess from the quality of her clothes. And as weak and insubstantial as the jacket she wore against the ever-changeable and usually cold Alaskan summer weather.

  But she surprised him by taking a few steps in his direction until something, maybe a belated sense of self-preservation, made her stop and sway on her feet.

  “We grew up on the same street,” she insisted. “I’m Everly Campbell.”

  And Blue didn’t want to remember her. He opened his mouth to claim he didn’t.

  But he did.

  The last time he’d laid eyes on little Everly Campbell, she’d been a pudgy, solid thing with pigtails and a too-solemn expression, waving at him from the back of her ridiculously girlie bike on the street where his mom and stepdad still lived.

  He doubted he’d waved back.

  What he really remembered was the bike, not the girl, he told himself. The bike had been bedecked with too much pink and actual streamers that flapped around when she rode it in those irritating, incessant circles in the street between their houses. Some mornings he’d heard the snapping sound they made from his bedroom up under the eaves in his stepdad’s harsh, bitter house, long before his lazy teenage butt had wanted to be awake. If he’d thought about the girl across the street at all, it had been because little Everly lived exactly the kind of charmed American Dream life—two doting parents, a popular jock brother, a set of golden retrievers, even a freaking white picket fence—that Blue thought everybody deserved and, more, had joined the navy to protect.

  He’d enlisted the day after his high school graduation, left behind the commuter town outside Chicago where they’d grown up, and gone out of his way not to think about either it or her since.

  Until today.

  Blue liked his past where it was. Buried and forgotten. Not up in his face on a southeastern Alaskan island so difficult to reach it operated as a kind of natural fortress.

  “Come on, you must remember me,” said the woman who was definitely Everly Campbell, all grown up and not the least bit pudgy any longer. She sounded far more confident about his memory than she should have, to Blue’s mind, given it had been so many years. A lifetime. He crossed his arms over his chest and eyed her where she stood in the overgrown yard next to her haphazardly parked car, which he could tell at a glance was a rental. With Chicago plates. Which suggested she’d actually driven the three thousand or so miles to get here, give or take a ferry or two. “You and my older brother, Jason, are friends.”

  “I don’t have friends.”

  That was strictly the truth. Blue had brothers-in-arms or acquaintances, nothing in between. He liked it that way.

  “Fine.” Everly sounded more strung out and desperate than simply impatient, which rubbed at his hero complex like an itch he couldn’t scratch. But he was trying to get over his hero complex. Mostly. “You did in high school.”

  His memories of high school were dim and blurry, focused more on his stepdad’s temper than whatever weak teenage nonsense had cluttered up his days. And he didn’t really want any clarity on lost and happily forgotten yearbook crap, especially since he’d never bothered to pick his up, much less collect signatures from people he didn’t want to remember.

  Everly took another ill-advised step toward him. “Jason played football.”

  “Good for Jason. I didn’t.”

  “I know that. But the two of you hung out. He knows what you’ve been up to all these years.” Something about Blue’s expression must have penetrated, because she swallowed. Hard. “I think he kept in touch with one of your stepsisters?”

  More crap Blue didn’t want to think about.

  “High school was a long time ago, little girl.”

  But that only made her face light up, which was the exact opposite of what he’d intended.

  And to add insult to injury, she was pretty. Very pretty.

  Damn it.

  “See? You remember me. No one calls a grown woman little girl like that, all raspy and dark and menacing, unless they’re trying to make a point.”

  Good thing she was irritating. “‘Raspy and dark and menacing’? Really?”

  Everly waved a hand, and though something about the gesture struck him as frantic rather than dismissive, he ignored it and kept his gaze trained on her face.

  “I’m descriptive. It’s part of my job. Now it’s second nature, basically.”

  All of this sounded like trouble, but not the kind Blue liked to handle and was trained to solve. This sounded instead like the kind of trouble he’d been avoiding for the past twenty years. The kind of trouble that came with his mother’s bad choices and his stepdad’s late-night rants and all those choking, suffocating ties of stepsisters he’d never wanted and neighbors he’d never chosen and people who wanted something from him when he didn’t respect them. When he couldn’t and wouldn’t respect them.

  Pass.

  There was a reason he never went home. And never would. The last thing he needed was a specter from that time, right here in front of him, like his past had a rental car and an evident death wish.

  “I don’t care,” Blue said, his voice hard. “About your brother or your job.”

  He didn’t say or you. He figured that was implied.

  Everly sighed at that, but she didn’t deflate. She also didn’t slink back to her car and leave, the way she should have if she’d possessed even the barest hint of self-preservation. And for a moment there was nothing but the sound of the tide coming in, the summer breeze hinting at the coming fall weather, although the air was still warm enough in the afternoon sun. Not that cold bothered Blue much. He’d spent so much of his life uncomfortable, courtesy of the United States military, that the alternative made him edgy.

  The woman standing there in front of him was just a new form of discomfort.

  Everly Campbell should not have been anywhere near him. She shouldn’t have been able to find him in the first place, much less remind him of the life he’d led before he’d become a SEAL. She should not have been within a ten-mile radius of him, because the kind of blood Blue had on his hands never washed off, and he’d stopped trying, and she was still made of picket fences and cute little dolls and happy golden retrievers who rolled around in leaf piles. All that sweet suburban happiness hung around her like a kind of mist.

  He wanted no part of it. Or her.

  But it didn’t keep him from noticing that she was definitely not a little girl anymore. Blue bet she despaired over the curves she’d packed into skinny jeans, a T-shirt with something cute on it, and a sleek blazer in a too-bright shade of blue. Despair was not the word
Blue would use to describe those curves, however. Not when his mouth was watering.

  She’d lost the pigtails. Her hair was strawberry blond, hanging in long layers around a face that begged for a man’s hands. Her face was a problem. Straight up. Sweet and smart at once, with a wide mouth that invited all kinds of deeply impure thoughts.

  Blue had spent years filled with only impure thoughts, happily, but he refused to entertain such notions about Everly Campbell.

  For more than a perfectly understandable moment or two, that was, because he wasn’t dead.

  He reminded himself that she’d careened over the long unmarked road that was officially called Hardy’s Pass but was colloquially known as Hard-Ass Pass. It was the only road on the island during the roughly seven days a year it was not actively treacherous. It led directly to the sprawling lodge here in the cove, ramshackle wood cabins connected by wooden stairs and boardwalks, where Blue had been living since the night Isaac had turned out to be a whole lot more than a legend. With a handful of other brothers-in-arms who’d gotten out of the special forces just like he had and shared not just his desire for a mission but a great many of his own very specialized skills.

  At least three of them had weapons trained on her right now.

  Not because they thought she was a threat, of course. No one who intended to do harm out here—a good thousand miles west of the middle of nowhere—would roar up blaring classic Bruce Springsteen and then jump out the way she had, calling his name like they had been tight once upon a time. Alaska Force wasn’t just a home for wayward veterans who hadn’t quite adjusted to civilian life. Isaac hadn’t set it all up in the fishing lodge his family had once operated as a summer tourist trap out of the goodness of his heart.

  Alaska Force was a last resort for people who needed very serious solutions to very complicated problems.

  No one came here for fun. Mostly, no one dared come here at all. Especially without an invitation.

  Blue refused to accept that Everly had the kind of problem she’d need a man like him to solve.

  No matter how pretty she was.

  “Great to catch up on old times,” he said while she was still frowning at him, likely considering another run at him with more memories he didn’t want to entertain. “Really. If you survive another pass over that road, which I have to tell you is unlikely, make sure you tell your mom I loved her oatmeal cookies.”

  Everly’s frown deepened, and that was a head trip. He remembered the little girl on her nauseating pink bike, and yet the woman in front of him made him . . . greedy. Restless in ways he understood perfectly and refused to indulge. No matter how much he wanted to strip off her funky blazer and help himself to—

  Stand down, he ordered himself. Especially that part of himself that wasn’t listening to anything but the surprising need pounding through him.

  “My mother is a thoracic surgeon,” Everly replied after a moment. “She’s never baked an oatmeal cookie in her life.”

  Blue didn’t give an inch. “You need to go home, Everly. Wherever that is.”

  “Chicago. And I can’t.”

  “You can. If you don’t feel like suicide by mountain pass, take a seaplane somewhere a whole lot safer than Alaska, which is pretty much anywhere else. You don’t belong here.”

  “I can’t.”

  She took a step closer to him, and this time she didn’t seem to think better of it. Blue was giving her a look he knew from experience made grown men back off and fall all over themselves to apologize, but Everly took another step toward him instead, which put her in arm’s reach.

  A very bad call on her part.

  “That wasn’t a suggestion so much as an order, sweetheart,” he growled at her. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing here. I don’t have any interest in running down memory lane. High school sucked. I don’t talk to my stepsisters and I don’t care if your brother does, because I don’t talk to him, either. I guarantee you that whatever you want, I can’t help you.”

  “If you can’t, no one can,” she said, and there was that strung-out, desperate thing in her voice again. He could see it all over her. It made her distractingly pretty green eyes in that problematic face of hers shine too bright, as if she were fighting back tears, and that was it. He was boned.

  Blue wasn’t built to ignore a cry for help.

  Especially not from a pretty woman who’d known him when he couldn’t help anyone, not even himself.

  Behind her, he saw one of his Alaska Force brothers drop soundlessly from the tree where he’d hidden himself like the terrifyingly accurate marine sniper he was, because threat or no threat, anyone who rolled up on the lodge here in Fool’s Cove was an opportunity to practice for the inevitable day when it really was an adversary. Griffin Cisneros nodded coolly at Blue, then melted off around the far side of the lodge like the six-foot-two ghost he was, all glacial focus and ice straight through, so quietly that Everly never knew he’d been there. It was one of his specialties.

  But Templeton Cross—ex–Army Ranger, ex–Delta Force, and always happy to play the jackass—took a different approach. He strolled on down from the command station in the trees, where he’d been the one to clock Everly’s rental car roaring down the winding, dizzyingly steep mountain road in the first place, a huge smile on his face, like this was a party.

  “You didn’t tell us you had friends,” he said, aiming that giant grin of his right at Blue. “I had money riding on you being born mean and alone.”

  “I don’t have friends,” Blue said. Again. He scowled at Everly as she gazed up at Templeton, who was six feet and four inches of a beautifully mixed DNA cocktail that made the average female walk into things when she saw him. Blue reminded himself that he had no reason to care that Everly appeared to be maintaining that average. “Everly isn’t a friend. And she’s leaving.”

  “I apologize for his manners,” Templeton told her, with exaggerated courtesy, probably because he knew exactly how much that made Blue want to take a swing at him. “Sometimes I think he was raised in a sewer.”

  “A four-bedroom suburban Colonial, actually,” Everly replied. She shrugged when both men stared at her, her gaze shifting back and forth between them like she didn’t know which one of them she found more intimidating. “I grew up across the street.”

  “A figurative sewer.” Templeton stuck out his hand. “Templeton Cross, ma’am. It’s a pleasure to meet anyone who can get under my man Blue’s skin, a feat I personally would have told you could not be accomplished without a bullet, some luck, and very good aim.”

  Blue shoved Templeton’s outstretched hand away from Everly before she could take it, and opted not to question that move. Or the way the other man grinned wider, as if he didn’t need to question it because he already knew the answer.

  “I will never understand why Isaac doesn’t keep you on a leash,” Blue muttered.

  “Isaac would never put me on a leash,” Templeton explained to Everly, who hadn’t asked. As if he didn’t see Blue slowly losing his cool right there next to him, when Blue was quite certain he did. “That would be a deep violation of the bonds of brotherhood, obviously, but would also hurt my feelings.”

  As if anything could hurt him. The man was as bulletproof as he was deceptively talkative. All that chatter lulled the enemy into a false sense of security, because Templeton was one of the deadliest men Blue had ever met. And Blue pretty much knew only the most lethal individuals alive.

  He didn’t bother telling Templeton to STFU again. It would only delight him.

  “Get in your car,” Blue ordered Everly. “And go before the next rain, which will probably be tonight, when half of that pass will wash out again and you really will die up there.”

  “They think I murdered her,” Everly said instead, looking startled, as if she hadn’t expected to speak. But the words kept coming. “They can’t decide if
I’m a cold-blooded killer taunting them with my crimes or a very sick woman who doesn’t know she’s committed them in the first place.”

  Templeton went still and intent, while Blue studied the paleness in her cheeks and the lack of any mascara, which he should have paid attention to earlier. It was unusual for a pale redhead with copper lashes like Everly to go without, and slightly jarring when he really looked at the preciseness of her haircut and how it was clearly meant to showcase her face in a very specific manner. Her haircut and the clothes he’d already identified as high quality told him she was a woman who probably wore makeup, but wasn’t today.

  If she hadn’t been Everly freaking Campbell, shouting out his name in the middle of Alaska like a blast from the entirely unwanted past, he would have already noticed that.

  And then there was the fact the jeans she wore were faintly baggy in the knees, which suggested normal wear, but also at the waist, which hinted that she’d lost a few pounds—maybe too quickly to get a belt or a smaller pair. Her fingernails were short—too short for a woman who wore jeans so obviously expensive and a pair of flats in a complicated metallic color with teal soles that he knew at a glance cost as much as or more than the jeans and certainly had no business in a glacial wilderness. The way the blazer fit her told the same story, and made her ragged nails that much more of a tell.

  And he felt like a dick. Because he’d been so busy fighting with ghosts in his head that he’d deliberately missed the fact that Little Miss American Pie was actually here because she was in trouble, just like all the other lost and tortured souls who found their way to Isaac’s remote hill and the deadly little army he’d assembled here.

  “Who did you kill?” he asked casually, and she flinched.

  “Rebecca. My roommate. But I didn’t kill her. I saw her get killed.” She swallowed, hard. “I think I did. I mean, I know I did, but there’s no proof, because when I got back with the police, there was nothing there.” She looked too vulnerable, suddenly. “Or maybe the police are right and I’m a complete psycho. Either way, I need help.”