by Megan Crane
She stared at him over the tops of her hands, and then dropped them slowly. “I’m sorry. That feels inappropriate, but the truth is, I can’t really tell.”
“Don’t lose your shit now, baby,” Blue said in a low voice as he circled the next block, making sure the sedan in his rearview mirror wasn’t tailing him. “I know it’s tempting to fall apart, but this is the time to keep it together.”
“Together, absolutely. I’m totally together. Though it did just occur to me that a giant bomb, or whatever that was, right there in my apartment, isn’t something they can clean up before the police get there. So I guess that’s progress?”
“They firebombed us,” Blue said tightly. He should have said you. But he didn’t correct himself. “They threw it through your bedroom window, and let’s be clear. That was deliberate. They expected you to be in that bed. They knew you had someone watching out for you in the living room, so they targeted you directly instead of worrying about where I was.”
For a long moment she didn’t say anything. A quick glance told him she was still sitting there, staring out at the road ahead of them.
“I get it,” he said roughly. “I remember the first time I was in a situation that wasn’t a drill or an exercise, when it was suddenly clear to me that someone was trying to kill me. Me, specifically.”
And then he had to sit there wondering why the hell he’d brought up something like that.
“Did it make you feel sick to your stomach?”
“Yes.”
“A little dizzy?”
“Yes.” He stopped at a red light and kept his eyes on the dark street behind them. “That’s normal.”
“I’m betting you didn’t curl into a ball and cry until the weird, targeted feeling went away.”
He couldn’t help himself. That made him grin. “Not exactly. I did my job.”
She sighed, shuddery and long, and he spent more than a few moments lecturing himself about why it wasn’t smart to reach over and put his hand on her. Because it sent the wrong message. Because despite the game he appeared to be playing here, he wasn’t that guy.
Then he did it anyway. Just a hand on her leg, to let her know she wasn’t alone.
The next breath she took sounded different. More . . . wistful.
“I’m sure that at some point it’s going to hit me that I probably just lost everything,” she said after a moment.
She slid her hand over his and held it there, and Blue started telling himself a whole lot of lies about it. Like that he’d have reached out to anyone in the same situation. Like that he couldn’t feel the heat of her skin through her jeans. Like that he couldn’t remember that slick, perfect slide deep inside her.
“Things are replaceable,” he said. “You’re not.”
She settled back in her seat and he took his hand back, because it was that or do something even more stupid.
“Right now the only thing I can think about is how happy I am that no one can accuse me of lying,” she said. “About this, anyway. Is that crazy?”
“I don’t think there’s any set behavior for how to act when someone blows up your life.”
Everly rubbed her hands over her face. “I hope no one else gets hurt. I don’t know how I forgot that the whole building could burn down. I don’t think I could live with that.”
“You can live with anything,” Blue told her, his voice curt. Harsher than it should have been. “That’s the price of surviving sometimes. You don’t honor anybody’s memory by wasting the life you get to live when they lost theirs. Remember that.”
Sixteen
But if Blue was expecting Everly to react badly or crumple or finally collapse into jagged, emotional pieces, she didn’t.
Instead, she let out a laugh.
“That’s what I love about you,” she said.
She laughed again, but with a sharp edge to it that he knew was the kind of shock that could tip over into tears or hysteria if she let it. He figured that was why she didn’t mind throwing around the word love like that.
And more, why he didn’t drive the car off the road at the sound of it.
“You’re always there with exactly the right thing to say to make everything better,” she was saying, with that same edge but without any apparent collapsing. “Good job, Blue. I feel much better.”
He found himself smirking against his will. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d lost it back in her apartment. If she’d been useless and sobbing and he’d had to cart her out of there on his back. But Everly didn’t break. She’d handled this whole situation on her own for weeks. She’d driven all the way to Alaska and then over a treacherous mountain pass that made locals shake and grown men cry. Regularly.
There was no doubt about it. Everly was a badass.
Even now, he kept waiting for some kind of reaction to take hold of her, but if it did, she didn’t show it. She pulled her feet up onto the seat so she could wrap her arms around her knees, but that was it.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t start hyperventilating. She didn’t have a well-earned panic attack, right there on the floor of the SUV.
Blue couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
For her, that was. He already knew it was a terrible thing for him. He didn’t need any reasons to like this woman more than he already did.
“I need to think about why this happened,” Blue muttered out loud, after he’d put some significant distance between them and Everly’s neighborhood with no apparent tail. “I’m going to drive around a while longer to make sure no one is following us. Then we’re going to have to find a place to hunker down for a while. Until I can figure out who the hell is throwing Molotov cocktails through your bedroom window.”
Everly checked out her side mirror, as if the fact they could be followed hadn’t occurred to her. And as if she maybe expected to see something right there. “Do you think someone’s following us?”
“I think they wanted us to go up in flames, and hopefully, they’ll think we did for at least the next hour or so. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a couple of people watching the front door. I don’t think anyone saw us go out that alley, but you never know.”
He heard her take another one of those long, steadying breaths. “What makes a good hiding place?”
She wasn’t focused on her own potential death, he noted. Just on the next step. That same thing he was devoting all his damned energy to ignoring kicked at him. Again.
And harder this time.
“We’re not hiding. We’re beating a strategic retreat while we gather intel.”
“Okay. Where’s a good place to not hide?”
“Somewhere untraceable with an armed guard would be nice,” Blue said darkly. “But I’d settle for off the radar. That means cash only, in case they’re tracking your credit cards. Or mine, which is a lot less likely but not impossible.”
Though if they did try to run him through any kind of database, it would set off alarms back at Alaska Force HQ. Which could be its own fun—but not with Everly in tow. The kind of fun he wanted to have with her didn’t involve a firefight.
“I would typically head for the last place anyone who knows me would expect me to go,” he told her. “But I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know what they know about you. I still don’t know why they took out your roommate. The truth is, I expected them to escalate a lot slower than this, so tonight is squarely on me.”
Everly was quiet for a moment. Blue switched lanes, then took a quick right, still scanning the road behind him as he went. He hadn’t seen any sign of a tail yet, but he couldn’t rely on that. Not in a situation like this, where he’d already been wrong.
And, worse, had let these scumbags catch him and Everly naked.
Literally naked.
“I don’t think you set my bedroom on fire,” Ev
erly said mildly.
Too mildly.
“Well, I might as well have.”
“You were right there on the couch with me. Unless you’re confessing that you set my bed on fire and then ran back to the couch before I woke up so I would think—”
“You’re my responsibility,” Blue managed to get out, stiff and harsh. “This night is my failure, no one else’s.”
They stopped at another light, and the passing headlights of other cars played over Everly’s face, but she didn’t look at him.
Which meant Blue had nowhere to push the unpleasant weight that was pressing down on him like it wanted to pound him into dust. He was familiar with the sensation. He’d felt it before, on other missions that went epically wrong.
But he’d never felt it like this. Not sitting next to the woman he—
Stop. The voice inside him could have been a commanding officer’s, it was so complete an order. Now.
“I know where we can go,” Everly said when the car started moving again.
Blue shot her a dark look she didn’t appear to notice. “Yeah? Because you have to think about the fact these guys are too bold already. They showed up at your work. And your apartment, repeatedly. You need to assume they know everything about you.”
“Then they know I only go back home to visit my parents very rarely. For Christmas every year, sure. And sometimes for my mother’s birthday, but that was two months ago.”
“They’ll look at your parents’ house first.”
“Right now?” she asked, and Blue wasn’t sure he liked the pushback. Meaning, he definitely didn’t like it. “Tonight? First they’d have to realize I’m not already dead, right?”
“That’s not going to take as long as you might think.”
Everly seemed unimpressed. “My parents are in Europe. I know where they keep the spare key. At the very least, we could grab a hot shower while we figure out where to go next.”
“Out of the question.” He was . . . agitated. He tried to keep it out of his voice, with little success. “It’s too obvious.”
She shifted slightly in her seat then, and Blue couldn’t say he really enjoyed the sensation of her sharp green gaze against the side of his face, with more of that pushback.
“You’re probably right,” she agreed, but she sounded too mild again. He tensed in foreboding. “Wouldn’t it be great if we had access to a house that was right near my parents’? A house that, as I recall, has an attic that someone could hunker down in and watch my parents’ to see if any bad guys rolled up. The way you seem to think they will.”
Blue didn’t say anything, because he was stunned. Speechless, in fact, in the face of such a crazy suggestion.
Everly folded her arms over her chest, kept her gaze trained on him, and did not back down. At all.
“Imagine if we had the opportunity to hide in plain sight like that,” she continued in that same way of hers, so calm and rational it made him want to start breaking things. Only the fact that he was a goddamned professional with twenty years of keeping his cool kept him from it. “Because these people might know everything there is to know about me. They’ve clearly spent all kinds of quality time in my apartment, leaving cute little notes and whatever else, and who knows what happened to Rebecca or what they knew about her? But there’s no way they know anything about you, Blue. After all, we’re not friends. We’re not even friends in the usual, run-of-the-mill online sense. I haven’t laid eyes on you since I was seven years old. And if they don’t know you, there’s no way they know anything about your mother’s house, either.”
There were a thousand things he could have said to that. Including his knee-jerk reaction to her assessment of their relationship—which was crazy, because he agreed. They weren’t friends. They wouldn’t be friends. They weren’t anything.
That he could still taste her sweetness in his mouth was neither here nor there.
Blue settled on the easiest response. “No.”
“Okay.” She sat back in her seat, just as calmly as she’d done everything else tonight. Except come all over you. That wasn’t exactly polite, but it chilled him out some. It reminded him that she was just as wild underneath as he was. “But I need you to tell me something.”
“Do I think that the shock is getting to you? Yes. I do.”
She ignored that. “Do you not want to go to your mother’s house because you think it’s actually a bad idea? Or because you’re afraid?”
He thought his jaw might break in half. “I am not afraid.”
“Or let me guess. You think you have to take responsibility for every bad thing that’s ever happened, anywhere. From my apartment tonight to—I don’t know—your entire childhood.”
“Everly. Stop. This is not something that’s going to happen.”
She shrugged in the seat next to him—that was all, so Blue had no reason to feel it like a court-martial. Then she started to rub her palms up and down her arms, as if she needed the heat.
And she didn’t argue with him, which was worse. He could have handled an argument. Hell, he was jonesing for one, the louder and meaner, the better.
But all she did was sit there next to him, pointedly saying nothing, and that meant he couldn’t seethe and fume and formulate responses to her. He had to think.
And he couldn’t help thinking, despite himself, that her idea was brilliant.
Much as it killed him to admit that.
He wasn’t afraid to go home, he assured himself. He just didn’t want to—which wasn’t the same thing at all.
He grabbed his phone and called up Isaac’s number, letting the SUV’s sound system put the call on the speakers.
“Talk to me.”
It was Isaac’s standard greeting. Especially when an Alaska Force brother was out on some kind of mission and was calling back to Fool’s Cove in the middle of the night.
“There’s been an escalation,” Blue said, matter-of-factly, and then filled Isaac in on the night’s events in the same tone. The break-in. The fight. The fact the punk had run off—and Blue had let him.
And then they’d tossed a firebomb through her bedroom window.
Isaac didn’t pause. Or offer any reaction. “Status?”
“We’re both alive and well,” Everly said from her place beside him. Dryly. “But thank you for your concern.”
There was a pause. Then Isaac let out a short bark of laughter. “Glad to hear it. I mean that.”
“I think these guys are a little too motivated for my tastes,” Blue said, getting the conversation back on track. “We could lay low at Everly’s parents’ house out in the suburbs, but I have a bad feeling they’ll track her there.”
“Your bad feeling has saved my ass a time or two,” Isaac pointed out. “I’d be inclined to listen to it.”
“There’s an interesting second option,” Blue said stiffly, though it cost him. “I could set up shop across the street, and see if they have the stones to chase her that far out of the city. It’s an hour away. A different world, really, and there’s always the possibility that this is just a localized issue.”
Though Blue thought the firebomb suggested otherwise.
“Run-of-the-mill intimidation is one thing,” Isaac said after a moment. “I think blowing up an apartment takes it all to a different level.”
“Agreed.”
“Can you secure the new location?” Isaac asked.
He meant, could Blue keep Everly safe? And Blue couldn’t give the answer he wanted. Which was that he would figure out how to do it or die trying.
“To an extent,” he said instead. Gruffly. “It’s not perfect.”
“That sounds good to me,” Isaac said. “I trust your judgment.”
Then Blue heard a sound that he identified instantly. It was Isaac sitting up in his bed, which meant that even though it
was past midnight in Alaska, he was going to work. And would likely pull everyone else in, too. Because Alaska Force was all for one, one for all. Brothers-in-arms, always.
He would rather punch himself in the face than admit that it made him feel a certain warmth inside.
“In the meantime,” Isaac said, “we’ll reach out to the Chicago police and see if we can finesse some of this. We don’t need your name in it. Or Everly’s. And you can expect reinforcements tomorrow.”
Blue muttered his appreciation, and that was it. Isaac hung up, and Blue headed for the expressway that would deliver him to the last place on earth he wanted to go.
He expected some gloating in the seat next to him. Triumph, at the very least, and he wasn’t sure he’d handle it well, so he didn’t look. He drove for a while instead, making sure he was hyperaware of every other car in their vicinity. And mapping out his childhood home in his head, trying to recall every entry point, every weakness, every window and stair.
And the next time he glanced over toward the passenger seat, Everly’s head was tipped to one side and her eyes were closed. And the way she was breathing, deep and long, told him she’d fallen asleep.
Just like she had back in Alaska. All that adrenaline and the way she’d managed to hold herself together throughout the whole of this ordeal had worn off, fast. It was a surprise she hadn’t dropped like a stone earlier.
But that meant that he was left with nothing but his own dark thoughts as he drove out of the Chicago city limits and into the suburbs. It was a drive he hadn’t taken in some twenty years, and bonus, with Everly asleep beside him and no one chasing him, there was nothing to concentrate on but the past.
Exactly what he’d been trying to forget all this time.
He didn’t want to think about his early childhood, when his father had still been alive. He didn’t want to think about that loss and all the ways it had affected him, then and now. He didn’t want to think about his mother’s remarriage or what it had been like to be ten years old and left to feel as if he were the only person on earth who remembered his dad.