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“Female?” Everly supplied. A bit tartly.
“Fancy.” He raised his brows at her. “Too much of a city girl.”
“I like Chicago a lot,” Everly told him, and when she smiled this time, he found his gaze drawn to the tiny dent in one of her cheeks. He wanted to taste it. He didn’tknow how he held himself back. “But my favorite city, obviously, is Gotham.”
Blue knew full well they had things to do. Important things. He’d decided to take Everly and her situation on, and that meant he had problems to solve. Lurking asswipes to locate and discourage. A police force to handle and a potential crime scene to investigate in his own way.
But instead, all he could seem to do was stand around on a cool summer morning talking about the local flavor and comic books he hadn’t read since high school.
None of this made sense. None of this was who he was.
He didn’t get to meet-cute and live her kind of life. He didn’t get to go back in time and find a white picket fence to wrap himself in. He wasn’t innocent. Maybe he never had been.
Blue made himself take a step back from her, and hated the fact that putting space between them practically broadcast his own weaknesses. He might as well tell the whole town that he couldn’t control himself.
Or, worse, that he was entirely too tempted to forget himself.
“Take everything you need out of your car,” he told her, his voice too gruff.
“I got my bag last night.” Everly gazed back at him, but her green eyes were unreadable. If she’d noticed that he’d touched her and then jumped away like a kid who didn’t know his own mind, she didn’t show it.
Which, perversely, pissed Blue off.
“Is that everything?”
She studied his face for a moment. “Does it matter? We’ll have days and days and days to figure out what’sin the car. And whether or not you want to throw it out into the wilds of the Yukon rather than look at it one moment more, which I’ve already considered. About fifty times a day.”
“We’re not driving.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said. We’re not taking a week to drive the length of Canada, for God’s sake. I don’t know how you survived it one way. All that sitting would drive me crazy.”
“I don’t want to brag, but I’m actually really good at sitting. Like Olympic level.”
“Are you trying to be cute?”
She made a grand gesture with one hand. “It’s a simple truth you can do with as you will.”
As if she realized she was babbling, a hint of red appeared on the tips of her ears. Again. There was so much blushing, it surprised him she didn’t go up in flames.
Then again, it also surprised him that he didn’t.
“Of course,” she was saying, “it’s a rental car. I have to actually return it. I’m pretty sure it’s in the contract I signed.”
“We’ll take care of your car. You don’t need to worry about it.”
“But—”
“This is why you came all the way here, Everly,” he said patiently. Or maybe not all that patiently, he thought, when her eyes narrowed. “These are the kinds of details you hire people like us to take care of.”
She stood straighter then, and the last hint of her smile disappeared from her lips. “Right. We need to talk about what hiring you means.”
“It means I’m going to solve your problem. The end.”
“You and all your friends look too scarily capable, let’s just say, to be cheap. And there’s the whole Fortress of Doom on the back side of an impossible-to-reach island where there’s no running water but there is, notably, abundant Wi-Fi.”
He hated that she made his mouth twitch despite himself. “We have running water. In some cabins.”