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“And you won’t,” Isaac agreed happily. So happily, like he wanted nothing more than to chitchat about sightseeing and local history forever. “There’s a reason people come to Alaska and never leave. That’s basically the story of the Gentry family right there.”
“When’s the last time you ate?” Blue asked Everly. And instantly regretted it.
Isaac gazed at him in a kind of amazement that boded all kinds of ill. Blue could already hear the crap-ton of BS he was going to get about this. In the gym. On missions. For the rest of his time in Alaska Force. It wasinevitable. He’d just outed himself as some kind of cozy, protective den mother, for God’s sake.
If it had been anyone else, he’d have led the BS brigade himself.
“I... I don’t know,” Everly replied after a moment, blinking as if she were confused.
She couldn’t possibly be as confused as Blue, who had until this moment imagined himself about as nurturing as a hungry mountain lion stalking its prey, but that didn’t change the fact that Everly looked pale and a few shades too skinny.
“If you don’t want to keep passing out,” Blue growled, “you’d better eat. Unless you like waking up in strange places with no memory of how you got there.”
Everly’s delicate brows rose. “Thanks, Dad,” she said, with a whole lot more calm than he was currently displaying, and that mildly sarcastic slap besides. But if she thought she could shame him, she was in for a big surprise. “As a matter of fact, I’m starving.”
Blue set his jaw, ignored the expression of pure, unadulterated glee on Isaac’s face, and lifted his hand to get Caradine scowling in his direction from her usual place on a stool behind the counter, where she liked to hover like a storm cloud when she wasn’t cooking.
“Pay no mind to this one’s attitude,” Isaac drawled as Caradine stomped over. “Her bark is worse than her bite. Loud, sure. But harmless.”
Caradine crossed her arms and smirked when she reached the table, but didn’t lower herself to snipe back at Isaac. Which Blue thought was a deliberate slap all the same.
But if Everly was wise to the undercurrents zapping back and forth between those two, she didn’t show it.
“Can I see a menu?” she asked.
“There are no menus,” Caradine replied. Her dark brows rose. “I told you that yesterday.”
“Oh. I thought you were just... saying that.”
“There are two things I never do,” Caradine said, sounding almost friendly. For her. “Waste my breath or suffer fools.”
Blue didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t the grin that spread over Everly’s face. She folded her hands on the table and aimed it straight at Caradine.
“I’m not much for fools,” she told the other woman. “Or suffering of any kind. I haven’t eaten anything in days but stale trail mix from a gas station, entirely too many Skittles, and energy bars that taste like sawdust. I want something—anything—delicious.”
“You city girls like all that quinoa and egg whites and whatever else,” Caradine replied. “Skinny latte surprise, milk wrenched from poor, unsuspecting nuts, and a side helping of self-hatred, as I recall. I don’t serve that.”
“I like food,” Everly told her solemnly. “A lot of it. Preferably with a whole lot of butter.”
Caradine didn’t blink. Her smirk reappeared—except Blue thought that maybe it was an actual smile. As impossible as that seemed.
“Food I can do,” she said.
“Is it that hard to be nice?” Isaac asked her, and he still sounded lazy, though Blue thought even Everly could hear the sharper edge beneath it.
“I don’t respond well to demands,” Caradine replied sweetly. “You of all people should know that, Isaac.”
And then she sauntered away, leaving Blue no choice but to pretend he hadn’t heard a thing, because he valued his own neck, thank you.
Later, when Everly had eaten her fill of the meal Caradine had prepared for her and Isaac had taken off, possibly because his easygoing act was beginning to chafe, Blue threw some money on the table and ushered Everly into the newly bright morning.
The streets in Grizzly Harbor were different from streets in other places, and not only because they weren’t really streets so much as dirt paths here and boardwalks there, with a fishing village jumbled all around. Everything was built right on top of each other, because no one wanted a long walk from the general store to the bar once winter hit. Blue remembered his first take of this town. How small it had seemed to him. How alien.
And in six short months it had come to feel more like home than any other place he’d lived, including that house across the street from Everly way back when.
“It’s different here,” he said. “From Chicago.”
He felt stilted. Awkward, almost, which was enough to horrify him down into his bones. Blue did not doawkward. He did not dostilted. That was the kind of thing that could get a man killed. The only form of social anxiety Blue tolerated in himself was the occasional need for particularly strong whiskey to deal with the inevitable nonsense some people liked to spew. Particularly if the people in question were... him. It didn’t change the nonsense into anything palatable, of course. Whiskey just made it go down easier.