SEAL's Honor

by Megan Crane

  Blue exchanged a swift look with Templeton. His brother nodded, then headed toward the lodge to gather the team in the big room, once a lobby, they used as the official Alaska Force office when there was a client around. Blue waited until he heard the door swing shut behind Templeton and then he moved closer to her. Too close, if he was honest. Because now he could see the way her pulse throbbed in her neck, and that wasn’t going to help anyone. It only made him feel more greedy.

  The kind of greedy that was a hell of a lot more trouble than he planned to get into, no matter what she had or hadn’t done.

  Maybe if he kept telling himself that, he’d keep his hands to himself.

  He tilted his head to one side. “Do you think you’re a psycho?”

  “If I thought I was a psycho, I wouldn’t have driven twelve hours a day for almost five days straight to find you when the police told me to stay put,” she threw at him, in a tone that told him she was barely holding on to her own composure.

  On some level he was glad. It meant it wasn’t just him losing it today.

  “Why did you? What made you think that hunting me down was a good idea?”

  For a moment she looked more lost, and Blue had no idea why he had the urge to reach out to her then. He repressed it. Hard.

  “Because,” she said.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Because you’re . . . you.”

  Blue sighed. “Let me guess. Your brother lives some soft, sad life somewhere, and he likes to get off thinking back on his glory days in high school like every other douchebag with a soft, sad life. And he thinks I owe him something because back when we were teenagers, he wasn’t a complete dick to me. Is that why you’re here? Your brother thinks that all these years later I’m his pet commando because we were lab partners for five minutes one time?”

  Everly rocked back on her heels then, and suddenly she didn’t seem quite as lost. But the strangest thing was that he did, with the way her green gaze met his and held, as direct as a touch, when he had no intention of letting her touch him. That way lay nothing but madness, he could tell. She had that look.

  To say nothing of her connection to all that unfortunate history he wanted to forget.

  “Jason is a pediatric surgeon who does Ironman Triathlons in his spare time,” she said after a slight pause. She didn’t bring up the oatmeal cookies her mother didn’t bake. Or the fact that Blue kept reading her wrong, because he wanted her to be dismissible. He really, really wanted it. “I don’t think he’s sad, but what would I know? I’m his sister, and he lives across the country. He doesn’t tell me all his stuff.”

  “I’m sure he’s a terrific guy.” Blue glared at her, and she still didn’t crumple, and that meant either she really was a suicidal psycho—though, as much as he wanted to, he didn’t get that vibe from her—or she was an even bigger problem than he wanted to face. “Maybe if I’d thrown a few footballs around on summer evenings, I’d be a terrific guy, too, but that ship sailed a long time ago. And I mean that literally. I was in the navy.”

  This time when Everly frowned at him, it was more than a head trip. The breeze picked up her hair, and he could feel it brush against his arm below the sleeve of his T-shirt. And the way she looked at him made something inside him kick, hard.

  It wasn’t pity. He wouldn’t have taken that well.

  But he thought maybe this was worse. It looked a whole lot like compassion.

  “You’re a hero, Blue,” she said quietly, but with conviction. As if that were an undisputed fact instead of a complex he was working to eradicate. And more to the point, a lie. “That was why Jason told me to find you.”

  Then she reached over and made everything much, much worse by putting her hand on Blue’s arm.

  He didn’t want this. The shock of connection that slammed through him, like he’d never had a woman before. That sympathetic gleam in her eyes. The fact that she didn’t just need him but knew him—or some old version of him he hadn’t considered him in years.

  He didn’t want any of this.

  Blue didn’t know why the fact that she’d known him when he was scrawny and weak was so powerful. She should have been nothing to him except the memory of a pink bike outside a dismal house he’d never considered his home in the first place. He didn’t know why she got to him at all. Or why her hand on his arm seemed to burn its way through him, like she was leaving new scars on his battered skin. And then lighting him up, deeper still.

  He didn’t like it. Any part of it.

  “Please, Blue,” Everly said softly, as if she trusted him on a personal level. Not just for his skills and abilities. When she had no reason whatsoever to do something so foolish. “Will you help me?”

  He knew he was a goner when he didn’t fight it. When he only looked down at her as if he really was the hero her brother imagined he was. Blue knew better. If he was any kind of hero, he wouldn’t be here. He’d be done. He’d be kicked back somewhere, trailing movie stars and collecting cash, instead of paying more penance in Alaska Force.

  Heroes didn’t need another mission. Heroes had nothing to prove.

  But that didn’t mean he couldn’t play the part for a little girl who’d gone and grown up pretty, and looked at him as if he could move the whole mountain that loomed behind them if he chose.

  He’d never so badly wanted to be someone he wasn’t. Not even when he was seventeen and still believed he could live up to the legend of his long-lost father. Not even when he’d been that deluded.

  “I’ll help you,” he told her, just to see her green eyes light up.

  And regretted it the minute he said it, because Templeton was right. Everly Campbell got under his skin.

  The smart move would be to send this woman back into whatever mess she’d made to handle it on her own, because no matter what it was, it couldn’t possibly be as bad as the things he’d done.

  But while Blue might not have been a hero, he was a man who kept his promises.

  If she could be saved, he told himself, he’d save her. For that scrawny kid she remembered who’d never managed to save himself or anyone else. Blue, on the other hand, was a lost cause. Some men had been born damned, and he was one of them, no matter how many Everly Campbells he tried to save.

  And no matter how distractingly pretty she was.

  So Blue sucked it up, promised himself he’d never give in to that greedy hunger within him, and led her inside to meet the rest of the reprobates who made up Alaska Force, before he thought better of it.

  Before he came to his senses and sent her home.

  Three

  Everly woke up startled, her heart trying to claw its way out of her chest, the way she’d done every morning since the night Rebecca had died. She was almost used to the kick of it. The panic as she looked around to make sure she was safe. The dawning realization that maybe she never would be again.

  Time was running out. She felt that deep inside, like her own breath.

  But this morning was different.

  It took her a minute to realize what the problem was as she looked around the small log cabin, her ability to see helped considerably by the deep blue light leaking in around the sides of the curtains pulled haphazardly across the windows on the far wall.

  Her gut told her it wasn’t morning at all. Her watch told her it was 1:03. And this was Alaska, land of the midnight sun farther north, so Everly guessed that 1:03 was unlikely to be the following afternoon no matter how tired she’d been. She eased herself up on the bed and looked around the small room she found herself in, trying to piece together what had happened.

  And where the hell she was. Specifically.

  She knew she was in Alaska, of course. It was the details beyond Alaska itself, the biggest state in the Union and the last, best frontier, that escaped her.

  She’d been in that rental car forever
. Hour after hour, day after day, fueled by panic and adrenaline. She’d kept pushing herself to drive farther and faster because she’d been so certain—or had wanted to be certain with every part of her that dared imagine she might get out of this mess—that the legend of Blue Hendricks her brother had shared with her over the phone one night would save her.

  That he had to—he had to—because no one else could.

  The ferry from Skagway had dropped her off in the colorful, quaint village of Grizzly Harbor after it had whisked her across glacier-studded seas she’d hardly believed were real even as she’d gaped at them. Mountains draped in clouds and fog, still capped with snow though it was summer. Sparkling blue skies everywhere else, arched over the mysterious northern Pacific Ocean. And evergreen trees on every surface, sturdy and windblown and a deep, rugged green. The town itself seemed torn from the pages of a picture book, atmospheric and pretty despite, or maybe because of, the weather-beaten, jagged coast where it sprawled just above the waterline, as if it were fighting to stay afloat. The buildings were painted bright colors that should have been jarring, bold and evocative against the gray sea despite their peeling paint, and Everly knew that only a short month ago she wouldn’t have been able to walk three feet without snapping a few thousand pictures.

  A month ago, when she’d still been the person she used to be. A month ago, when she’d still had a normal life and the projected life span to go along with it.

  But she hadn’t come to Alaska to sightsee. Or to mourn the slow-motion loss of her entire life, likely quite literally if she couldn’t find Blue Hendricks and beg him to help her. She was on a mission—though it hadn’t taken long on the walkways that passed for the streets in tiny Grizzly Harbor to figure out that no one in the whole town wanted to tell her where Blue actually lived.

  “Oh, around,” the man in the general store had said with a shrug. He’d nodded in the vague direction of the dive bar Everly had walked by on her first pass through the little fishing village that clung to the base of the mountain, barely above the high-tide line and scattered up into the trees along the steep incline. “You’ll run into him sooner or later.”

  But sooner or later was time Everly didn’t have.

  It took her a while longer to figure out that the tiny, remote cove where Blue and his equally intimidating buddies were holed up might as well have been on a separate, possibly armored island; it was so inaccessible. Instead of right here on the same rather small island in the Alexander Archipelago, the range of submerged coastal mountains that made up the bulk of Southeast Alaska and created the many sharp, hilly coasts and deep fjords that Everly had seen from the ferry.

  But even when she’d realized how much farther she still had to go, after she’d foolishly thought she’d finally reached safety in Grizzly Harbor itself, she hadn’t stopped to have a long sob about the extreme unfairness of all this the way she’d wanted to.

  Life is unfair, she’d told herself harshly instead, because harsh was all she had left these days, and it was better than the alternative. Better to know it than be surprised by it.

  She had to keep moving forward, as fast as she could, or she would collapse. And Everly knew that if she allowed herself to collapse, if she fell down on the ground the way she wanted to with every last, protesting cell in her body, she would never get up again.

  She’d felt the same thing that night in her Chicago apartment, almost a full month ago now. She’d stood there in her usual nighttime outfit of a tank top and pajama pants, barefoot and half-asleep in her own bedroom doorway. Everly had looked at the horror unfolding before her, right there across her living room, and she’d frozen. Her heart had beat once, a stunningly violent kick that had made her feel dizzy. Sick.

  And she’d known that she had one split second to act or there would be no action. One split second to move or she would never move again.

  Everly had been moving ever since.

  It had taken one pointed conversation with the unfriendly owner of the Water’s Edge Café, the first and only café Everly had found in Grizzly Harbor, to learn the name of the place where Blue lived. Supposedly.

  “You don’t want to go to Fool’s Cove,” the woman had told Everly, eyeing her as if taking her coffee order had been offensive enough, but asking questions was up there with a personal attack. She’d slid her hands in the back pockets of her jeans and shaken her head like Everly was an idiot. “It’s for fools. It’s right there in the name.”

  But getting to Fool’s Cove had seemed relatively straightforward, the café owner’s attitude and its name notwithstanding. Everly had pulled up the map on her mobile phone with what iffy cell service she had, and sure, the road over the big mountain had looked squiggly—but after almost a week of driving across the greater Yukon and Alaskan wilderness all by herself, sleeping in her rental car when necessary, she wasn’t afraid of a little squiggle.

  Until she understood that what she drove over that mountain wasn’t so much a road as it was the suggestion of a road, and not much of a suggestion at that.

  She’d gotten through it in white-knuckled, ear-popping, potential-heart-attack-at-any-second silence. She hadn’t looked down at the steep drop-off that had sometimes seemed to be all of a crumbling inch away from her tires. She’d kept moving forward, because that was what she did now.

  Or she’d inched forward, to be more precise. Whatever worked.

  And then, sometime later, as she sat in a room crowded with very big and obviously dangerous men who looked as lethal as Blue did all these years later, and sounded three times as scary, it had all caught up to her. All the weeks of terror. The panic and fear. All the running and hiding and locking herself in the bathroom to sleep fitfully in the apartment only she seemed to believe had been the scene of so much horror. The vats of coffee she’d chugged to keep herself functional. The sugar she’d inhaled in case the coffee didn’t quite work. It had all rolled over her and knocked her out.

  Or so she assumed.

  She didn’t remember falling asleep. But the fact that she was sitting in an unfamiliar bed suggested that she had, and heavily enough that she had no recollection of being moved from the lobby of the lodge to . . . wherever she was now.

  Everly rolled off the bed, checking her watch for the fifteenth time, as if that would make it say something that made more sense than 1:07 a.m. with all that weird light outside. Her jacket had twisted around as she’d slept, so she tried to tug it back into place as she stood. She looked around, taking in the dim, quiet interior of the cabin. It didn’t look like anyone lived here or ever had. There wasn’t much more than the bed she was lying on, a scarred dresser in one corner, and the battered wooden floor beneath her feet, all looking wholly unused and untouched, as if this were a hotel room no one had occupied recently.

  She saw her foldable, metallic flats on the floor next to the bed, curling up where they lay like pill bugs with cheerful teal soles. Usually the sight of them made her happy, but not today. Tonight, she corrected herself. She didn’t slip her feet into them, padding over instead toward the windows that flanked the front door, the unearthly light glowing around the edges of the curtains.

  She eased the front door open, surprised when it didn’t creak the way she’d expected it to, since it looked so rough and felt so heavy. Something about that seemed to shudder through her, as if the door were a clue to a mystery she hadn’t realized she needed to solve.

  But then it didn’t matter, because she was easing her way out onto the wide porch that jutted out over the cove below. And that should have been arresting enough. The Alaskan mountains were bold and high, capped with snow though it was high summer, and they loomed everywhere she looked. The sea was a dark, murmuring presence all around, in case she was tempted to forget she was standing on an island in the Gulf of Alaska, thousands and thousands of miles from anywhere. The strange, far northern light in the middle of the night was a kind of
blue predawn and stirred her up inside in ways she didn’t quite understand. It felt magical. Otherworldly.

  Yet what she noticed far more than the landscape was the man sitting out on one of the benches on the porch in the light of a lantern she wasn’t sure he needed, as if he’d been there a long while. As if he were standing guard, whether to keep her in or others out, she didn’t know.

  And he was far more magical than the sky.

  Blue.

  His name moved through her like the tide against the shore below. An insistent, irrevocable clamor.

  And it was worse now. Much worse than it had been when she’d thrown herself out of her rental car and staggered toward him, hoping like hell he remembered her.

  That had all seemed so desperate, a part of all the panic and horror that had taken her over. She’d noticed how he looked. Of course she’d noticed. He was big and hard and scowling, and had added about a hundred pounds of sleek, lean muscle to the wiry teenage form she remembered. All of it in places she was entirely too female—even if she’d been scared so long she hardly remembered that she’d ever felt something, anything else—not to notice.

  But this was worse.

  He was just sitting there, for one thing. Not pacing around behind the lodge, in and out of the watchful trees. He had his feet kicked up on the bench and was looking down at a tablet in his hands, his head propped up behind him as if he’d never been more comfortable in all his life than he was then, lounging on a wooden bench after one in the oddly deep blue morning.

  And maybe it was because she’d just slept—and hard—but Everly didn’t have it in her to deny what washed over her at the sight of him. It wasn’t just that he was beautiful, though he was. God help her, he was.

  Blue Hendricks was what people dreamed about when they conjured up the word hero. Tough. Strong. His dark hair was cut short as if he were still in the military, but the starkness of it only called more attention to the undeniable masculine beauty of his face. His mouth . . . got to her. It made her insides quiver, funny and low. His tough jaw saved him from prettiness, and the lines that fanned out from his dark eyes suggested that he was capable of acting a lot happier and friendlier than he had around her so far. He hadn’t shaved recently, but what might have looked scraggly on someone else looked nothing short of perfect on him. He was out there exposed to the Alaskan elements in cargo trousers, boots, and a T-shirt that did things that should have been preposterous to his hard, wide chest and impossibly sculpted biceps.