Page 23

They also had what Griffin liked to callall that spy shit, but there was no need to get into that.
“My point is that I have some savings that my grandmother—”
“I’m not taking your money.” He was offended she even suggested it.
“Of course I’m paying you,” she retorted, standing even straighter, like she imagined she could go toe-to-toe with him. “As you pointed out, you barely know me. We grew up on the same street, that’s all. It never occurred to me that you would do anything for me for free, nor should you. My grandmother—”
“I’m not going to argue about this,” he told her. In a tone of voice that had been known to quiet treacherous uprisings and unruly dissidents alike. He wasn’t as shocked as he should have been that it had no discernible effect on Everly. “It’s not happening. I don’t want to hear about your grandmother again.”
“Blue. Really. I want—”
“If you have anything left in this car, you need to get it.” His voice was calm now, and so was he, because this was the mission. She was the mission. He didn’t want to examine what was happening to him around her and all that blushing and that smile that was wrecking him, butnone of that mattered. Becausethiswas what he did. He needed to focus on that. “We’ll go back to the inn and get whatever you left there. And then we’re hitting the road.”
“Hitting the road?” she echoed. “What road?”
“It’s commonly known as the Alaskan Marine Highway. You took the ferry over it already. But we’re going to fly.”
She digested that. “You have your own plane?”
“This is Alaska, sweetheart. Everybody has a plane.”
“Everybody.” It was a challenge. “That old guy in the restaurant has a plane, too?”
“Ernie is a bush pilot, among other things,” Blue told her. Maybe with too much satisfaction. “Some places, there are no roads at all, not even what passes for a street here in Grizzly Harbor. People use boats to get to town and ride ATVs in the bush. If someone needs to go any farther than that, they use a plane.” He nodded at the harbor spread out before them, the boats bobbing on their moorings, and the unforgiving white-capped mountain peaks all around. And everywhere else, in all directions, the seething summer ocean. “In case you haven’t noticed, this is the Last Frontier.”
Everly looked like she had more to say, but when he nodded toward her car again, more insistently this time, she went over to it, opened the hatchback, and started rifling through it. When all was said and done, she threw her things into a bag on the backseat, and then looked like she wanted to object when he took it from her.
And that was when he got it. The thing that was so different about Everly Campbell.
She didn’t seem the least bit afraid of him.
It spun his head around a little, Blue was man enough to admit. At least to himself.
He was used to being... problematic. Women who enjoyed a taste of danger were always drawn to him, but they had their own issues, and he could usually see that particular avidness coming at him from a mile away. That wasn’t how Everly looked at him.
Everly had called him a hero. She looked at him as if he were still that boy he’d been a million years ago. It was funny, the things he remembered when he’d actively been trying to erase that entire part of his life for years now. That house. The people in it. The one person—his father, who had died when Blue was ten—who had not been in it. He’d worked so hard to block all of that out.
But he remembered this. Everly. Her wide green eyes, fixed on him with perfect, total trust.
She’d looked at him back then when she couldn’t have known better. It was worse now, because she should have realized who and what he was.
But she showed no fear. No wariness, even. Just that same solemn certainty he was surprised to realize he remembered, as if she had no doubt at all that he could do exactly what he said he would. As if he could do anything.
She made him want to try.
And that, he knew, was begging for disaster.
Because this was just a regular Tuesday for him, but only the most dire circumstance—witnessing a murder, possibly being targeted to be next—could have brought Everly here to find him. While she’d slept last night, before they’d had their talk on the porch of her cabin, he’d dug into her.
And the thing about Everly was, she was normal. Happily normal, according to all the available evidence he’d accessed on the Internet and through Alaska Force’s more back-channel means. Her mother and brother were doctors, just as she’d said. Her father had recently retired after teaching biology at the university level for most of his life. Everly had gone to college at a place that touted itself as the Harvard of the Midwest and then had built herself a nice, safe life in Chicago. Roommates had come and gone, but there had been no glaring incidents with any of them aside from the usual squabbles over housekeeping. Landlords wrote good reviews about her, and employers followed suit. She’d had a couple of equally normal-seeming boyfriends, but nothing serious. Her social media accounts were filled with pictures of friends, the occasional trip or outing somewhere exotic, and the usual selfies—though he noted that wasn’t something she did too often, either.
She was just... normal. Completely and totally normal, as far as he could tell.
And for a man like him, that was as much a temptation as it was forbidden.
Becausenormalmeant innocent. Untouched. Unsullied.
Normal meant whole. No blood on her hands, nothing tainted and twisted, or charred in the place where real people kept their hearts.