SEAL's Honor

by Megan Crane

  Just like he didn’t want to think about the fact that a little girl on a pink bike he’d wanted to break with his own two hands way back when could have grown up and wrecked him so easily.

  He hadn’t seen her coming. Even when she’d arrived, spilling out of her car and staggering toward him in the dirt, he hadn’t realized his world was already spinning off its axis. How could he? He’d had no intention of helping her, much less coming back to Chicago with her.

  And he certainly hadn’t planned to lay a single finger on her.

  Sleeping with Everly had destroyed him, and Blue still didn’t understand how that had happened, only that it had. He’d been caught naked, literally. When that bomb had gone off, he’d woken up with her wrapped up in his arms, and for the first split second, he’d panicked.

  That was unacceptable.

  Everly wasn’t an adrenaline junkie. Blue knew she hadn’t slept with him to get a notch on her belt, or even as some sort of shady transactional thing because he was keeping her safe. He knew she wanted him. He knew she trusted him. Hell, he had the uncomfortable feeling that even now she really thought he was a hero.

  And his problem was that he cared entirely too much about the things this woman thought.

  Like every single thing she’d said to him in the sitting room on the third floor, sinking her untrained hands deep into his chest and cracking it open, as surely as if she’d used a spreader to wrench his ribs apart. Or the fact that she’d witnessed that crappy interchange with his mother, a conversation he’d been avoiding for all this time on purpose. Or worse, that Everly had imagined she had some insight into the endless mess that was his family.

  He couldn’t seem to get his head back into the game, where it belonged. Blue knew he needed to finish this thing off and get away from here. He wanted the quiet. He wanted the remote splendor of Grizzly Harbor. He wanted the demands on him to be about his skills and expertise, not all this emotional crap he’d never wanted to dig up in the first place.

  “Did you find anything?” he asked her now, gunning it as he dodged traffic on I-294, heading north to skirt the city and access the North Shore suburbs.

  “I’m looking,” Everly replied in a distracted tone. He’d given her his tablet and told her to access her social media accounts to see if there had been any other updates from Rebecca. Or whoever was using Rebecca’s account, because Blue didn’t think either one of them truly believed Everly’s roommate was still alive at this point. “There’s nothing anywhere. The last updates were the ones you told me about, but nothing since.”

  Blue tried to concentrate on the highway. He needed his heart rate to go down. He needed his head to clear. He needed to quit worrying about what Everly was doing—and thinking and feeling, and was he back in high school, for God’s sake?—and pay more attention to what he planned to do when they found Rebecca’s mother.

  Besides interrogate her about her failure to reply to his message, and ask her if she knew anything about the men who had come after them last night, that was.

  “That’s not good,” Everly muttered from beside him.

  And he hated the fact that she was still wearing the same T-shirt she’d slept in last night. Because all he could think about was the fact that she wasn’t wearing anything beneath it. And how he’d love to get his hands beneath it all over again.

  Blue couldn’t believe what an asshole he was. He really couldn’t.

  “What’s not good?” he managed to ask.

  Everly shrugged. “My boss noticed my absence today, that’s all. I need to appear at his desk with an appropriate apology within the next hour, or he says he’s letting me go.”

  “I can send someone to talk to him. Get his head on straight.”

  He heard Everly take a deep breath, hold it, and then release it. He felt that inside him, like a blow. He’d taught her that, he thought. He’d taught her how to breathe, and now she did it without his having to point out that she’d stopped in the first place.

  She’d stood up to him. She’d insisted that he take her with him, and he had.

  Everly was going to be just fine when he left. Blue wished he could be as sure about himself.

  But there was no point fixating on things like that. Not now. He could feel in his bones that they were closing in on the end of this, and he had no intention of letting it end badly. That meant that everything would be exactly the way it was supposed to be once it was done. He would head back to his cabin in Fool’s Cove. He would spend his days plotting out missions and acclimating to civilian life with his Alaska Force brothers. He’d eat at the Water’s Edge Café in Grizzly Harbor, the way he always did. He’d drink at the Fairweather. He’d take trail runs on frigid mornings that felt etched out of ice. He’d learn new words for snow.

  He would not think about Chicago. He would not obsess about his family. He would leave the past where it belonged, and he would live his life exactly the way he wanted to live it.

  And he would not think about Everly Campbell or the way she’d wrapped herself around him and cried out her pleasure into his ear, ever again.

  “The truth is, I don’t care if I get fired,” Everly said, snapping him out of what he suspected was a whole host of lies he’d been telling himself.

  “I wouldn’t walk away from a good job just because you’ve had a few problems,” he replied, his tone short. “I told you we’ll talk to your boss.”

  “What I’m telling you, Blue, is that I don’t want you to talk to my boss.” She smiled at him. “I can talk to my boss, thank you. I can tell him that I haven’t liked my job for some time. When I started, it was creative and fun. Now it’s too corporate and, honestly, not that much fun at all. This is as good a time as any to move on.”

  Blue switched lanes with more aggression than was called for. “Listen to me. What you’re living through right now is a crisis. The last thing you want to do is change your life in ways you can’t take back in the middle of crisis mode, because everything’s going to go back to normal, and then what?”

  “I might not live to the end of next week. I might not live through the day, actually.”

  But Everly didn’t sound particularly scared by the possibility. If anything, she sounded matter-of-fact about her prospects. Blue should have liked her levelheadedness. And yet he didn’t. He really, really didn’t.

  She was still talking, shifting around in her seat so she could look at him. “I spent all last week acting the part of the person I used to be. One foot in my old life, with my other foot in the grave. And you know what I discovered? I don’t really want this life anymore.”

  “It’s not a great time to go goth and dark, Everly. You might actually have to fight for that life you don’t want.”

  She laughed. “The whole time I was in that rental car, driving all the way to Alaska, I just kept thinking I didn’t want to die. And then, once I found you, it was clear to me that whatever else happened, all I wanted was to stay alive. But then last night happened.”

  He needed to stop her. He needed to cauterize this crap right now.

  But he couldn’t seem to form a single word.

  “That guy showed up at my office. He broke into the apartment. Then they threw a bomb through my window,” Everly said quietly. “And in the middle of that, there was you.” He assumed she must want something from him, to say it so baldly like that, but if she did, she didn’t wait for him to let her down. She kept right on going. “And I understood then. It’s not enough to not die. It’s not even enough to just be alive. I want to live, Blue.”

  There was a tight band of emotion wrapped around his chest, digging in so it hurt, but he refused to acknowledge it. Much less release it.

  He didn’t want to feel anything.

  He didn’t want to feel this.

  “Everly . . .”

  “Anyway,” she said, and a swift glance told hi
m her attention was on the tablet, not on him. He didn’t know if that was better or worse. “The good news is that I don’t have to worry about paying rent on an apartment that no longer exists. Who cares if I quit my job?”

  “Do not quit your job. Do not do anything you can’t take back.”

  “It’s too late for that,” she said, and there was a certain finality in her voice. Or some kind of certainty that made all those gut instincts he prided himself on listening to go crazy. “I don’t think you can stare down your own death too long without making some changes. Do you?”

  Blue didn’t want to touch that.

  Hard. Freaking. Pass.

  “It’s not too late,” he said again, and even he could hear that he sounded way too invested. A shade too close to desperate for his peace of mind. “The thing about staring at your own death is that, yeah, it can give you some clarity. But it also teaches you to hold on to what you have. Normal isn’t a bad word. It’s what safe looks like when it’s not being threatened.”

  “Drive, Blue,” Everly said, sounding . . . self-possessed. Sure of herself.

  And Blue didn’t know why he wanted to reach over and get his hands and his mouth on her again, almost as much as he wanted to pretend she wasn’t getting to him. Indicting him, somehow, with her quiet acceptance of all the changes in her life.

  It wasn’t like Blue was any stranger to change. He’d transitioned from the SEALs to Alaska Force seamlessly. He’d been sent all over the world on active duty and off. He could situate himself wherever he landed in about three seconds and then get right to work. He was a goddamned poster boy for change.

  You can change your surroundings without thinking twice about it, a voice inside needled him, sharp and insistent. But can you change yourself? Have you changed at all from that angry teenager who stormed off to enlist?

  He realized he was rubbing the palm of his hand hard against his chest, right over his heart, and dropped it like he’d given himself a third-degree burn.

  “I think you’re going to regret losing your job,” he bit out. “But it’s your life, not mine.”

  “You keep saving my life,” she said in that same obnoxiously calm, certain way that was like more needles deep beneath his skin. Not a sensation he enjoyed. “In some cultures, that would make you responsible for me forever.”

  “I’ll put you on my Christmas card list,” he muttered.

  And then floored it.

  Because whatever was coming would come. And he would handle it, because that was what he did.

  And then he needed to get the hell away from Everly, for good, before she ruined him forever.

  * * *

  • • •

  Winnetka had always been Everly’s favorite of Chicago’s North Shore suburbs.

  Not only was it poised right there on the lakeshore; it was stately and pretty and even featured houses that Everly recognized from the old eighties movies she’d watched as a kid. When she’d been younger and dreaming of a glorious life in and around Chicago, she’d always imagined that someday she’d find herself in an ivy-covered house in Winnetka, with Lake Michigan lapping at the edge of her rolling yard.

  Her dreams might have changed, particularly lately, but she still loved the town.

  Even if Blue was taking the shine off it with his talk of Annabeth Lambert, Rebecca’s mother, and what he called his gut feeling about her.

  “Maybe she’s overwhelmed with emotion and can’t return calls,” she said, her gaze out the window. It was a pretty summer day, gold and blue filtering through the trees that lined the road and shaded the graceful houses. “Or maybe she’s sedated somewhere and hasn’t heard the message yet.”

  “Possible,” he said in that very military way of his that she suspected meant he didn’t think it was at all probable. “Did Rebecca talk a lot about her mother?”

  “Never.” Everly considered it as they drove through the charming downtown area and kept heading east, toward the lake. “She didn’t really talk about her personal life at all.”

  “Then what did you talk about?”

  “We were roommates, Blue. Not buddies. Though we were friendly, sure. We talked about TV shows. Gossipy things, like which pop star was in a feud with which actress. That kind of stuff. Silly things, mostly.”

  “But not family.”

  “I probably talked about my family. In the way people do. Holidays and so on, or a lunch date with my mother. That kind of thing. But I don’t remember her ever saying anything about hers. Not anything that stuck with me.”

  “Interesting.”

  He muttered it in that low, intense way of his, which told her he was thinking it all through, turning the facts around and around to try to get a sense of all the angles. All while he drove them through Winnetka, right on the edge of too fast. Which only a damaged person would find sexy under the current circumstances, she thought. Which meant she’d sustained some pretty serious blows.

  But Everly felt perfectly safe, damaged or not. She had no doubt that Blue could handle the vehicle—and whatever they were driving into—in the same way he’d handled her.

  Then she felt shuddery, thinking about handling. At a time like this. She shifted in her seat, flushing a bit at the fact that she was so unable to keep her attention where it belonged.

  And very, very grateful that Blue had to stop and scowl at some pedestrians, so he missed it.

  She’d e-mailed her resignation letter to her boss, right from Blue’s tablet. Charles clearly hadn’t been expecting it, and Everly had had the strangest revelation that most of her work life—her whole adult life, in fact—had been arranged around threats. That she could be evicted. Or fired. Or simply that people wouldn’t like her. Whatever the situation, there was always a looming threat.

  Charles had threatened her, never thinking she would call his bluff. Or so his surprised return e-mail had told her. It had also told her that she was an integral part of his team and he’d love to explore options to keep her on board.

  All because she’d faced the threat and countered it.

  Talk about life lessons in the strangest of circumstances.

  She’d received a notification from her landlord to everyone in the building, filled with lots of intense legal language about insurance and police investigations and requests that the tenants wait for the fire department’s inquiry to conclude before they tried to get back inside to see what was left.

  Everly assumed she’d lost everything. Or if she hadn’t, what remained was likely to be a sodden, charred mess. Meanwhile, she hadn’t had time to mourn her possessions because she was on the run, and the people who wanted to kill her were still at large.

  And yet somehow, she didn’t feel as if she had nothing. She didn’t feel alone or lost.

  On the contrary. Everly felt free.

  As if this had all been a dramatic rescue of herself, from a life she hadn’t realized wasn’t making her happy. She’d been happier in between two attacks last night then she’d ever been. She didn’t want to say that out loud because she was sure it would make her sound crazy, but that didn’t make it any less true.

  Everly had fallen head over heels in love with the man beside her, but it didn’t matter that she couldn’t tell him that. She knew better than to tell him, because if his reaction to her losing her job was negative, she really didn’t want to think about how he’d respond to any declarations about feelings. He’d probably spontaneously combust where he sat.

  But that was okay. She could keep it to herself.

  For now.

  “What about you?” she asked.

  He threw a dark look her way, then took a turn too quickly. “What about me?”

  “What do you want to do with your life?”

  “I’m doing it.”

  “I mean . . . after.”

  He was already tense, but
he suddenly seemed to turn into stone. She stared at his hands, crooked over the steering wheel, and the fact that his knuckles looked whiter by the second.

  “After what? This is after.”

  “After the military, sure. But you can’t do Alaska Force forever, can you?”

  He cut the wheel, pulling the SUV over to the side of the road, and then stopping abruptly. So abruptly she threw out a hand to catch herself on the dashboard.

  “What do you think is happening?” he asked, a kind of midnight in his voice. His gaze, too. But he kept his hands on the wheel, still clenched too tight. “Let me tell you right now, little girl—this isn’t some fairy tale where you walk through a deep dark forest and come out the other side a princess.”

  “That’s great news, because I’m not a little girl and I don’t actually look good in tiaras.”

  Blue ignored that. “This is just life, Everly. We’re going to fix this, you’re going to live your life and apparently start it with some job hunting, and you don’t need to worry about what I’m going to do after Alaska Force. That’s not your business.”

  She’d known better than to poke at him, and she’d done it anyway. She had no one to blame if he’d hurt her feelings. Exactly the way she’d known he would. “It was just a question.”

  “Like hell it was. You think I can’t tell the difference between an innocent question and an agenda?”

  “I don’t know if you can, actually.” Everly hadn’t been mad at him a second ago, so it was surprising how quickly it ignited inside her. “So far, the evidence seems to suggest you see agendas wherever you look. Your mother can’t be happy to see you. I can’t ask a question. It’s all a big dramatic plot to harm you, headed toward some end only you know.”

  “The fact that you think you can sit here and talk to me about my mother is everything that’s wrong with this situation,” Blue said coldly. So coldly it should have frozen her where she sat, despite the summer heat outside. “And it ends now. You don’t know a goddamned thing about my childhood. You were across the street living out your perfect little life. You’ll go back to pink bikes and fairy tales the minute this crap is over. The end.”