Page 27

“But—”
“I’m not going to stand out in a hallway and argue with you.”
He sounded so reasonable when he said that. So measured and calm. It made her ears burn and something more spiky than her usual fear storm through her.
She welcomed it. She’d rather be angry than afraid any day.
Everly headed down the hall toward her door, another short walk that felt like an uphill half marathon. But no matter how long it seemed to take, they were eventually at her door. And that terrible hand that gripped her at the rib cage clenched harder. Tighter.
Whatever charge she’d gotten out of being angry disappeared as if it had never been.
“Hey.” She looked up at Blue when he gritted that out, blinking to bring him into focus. That dark gaze of his that had tracked this way and that on the street moved over her in the exact same way. Looking for weaknesses and probably finding them. “Breathe.”
“I am breathing, thank you.” She couldn’t tell if she was frozen or furious or just plain afraid. She scowled at him. “And how could you tell either way?”
But she realized as she said it that she really had been holding her breath.
She... didn’t like that. The fact that Blue could tell whether she was breathing when, as far as she knew, he hadn’t even really been looking at her until this moment. He’d been looking at each of her neighbors’ doors. At the window down at the far end that looked over the alley. At the entrance to the stairwell beside the elevator shaft. He’d been constantly scanning from one side of the hallway to the other, making whatever calculations it was that he made. As if it was all second nature to him, which she supposed it would have to be.
And he didn’t answer her question. He just kept that dark gaze trained on her until her face felt too hot.
Again.
It was more difficult than it should have been to fit her key in the lock, then throw the bolt open. And then it seemed to require a heroic amount of energy to push open her own door and step inside.
The air inside her apartment was dull. Still. Everly tossed her keys on the small table in what passed for a front hall, then moved farther inside. She flicked on thelights from the switch in the hall, realizing as she did that she was holding her breath again, but at least this time she knew it.
But there was no one there when the lights blazed on. Rebecca’s door was open, just as Everly had left it. There were no signs of life inside, from what she could see from this angle. No one sang out a greeting or leaped out from behind the sofa, wielding deadly weapons of any kind.
She didn’t know whether to be thankful or worried that nothing seemed disturbed.
“Stay right there,” Blue ordered her.
This time, she was more than happy to do what he told her. He dropped the bags at her feet. Then she stood in her own foyer and watched as Blue moved around the apartment, shifting from one room to the next, barely making a sound. And that quiet of his was... disturbing. Or it got under her skin, anyway.
It was as if her head couldn’t quite make sense of it. She couldseehim as he moved, running a seemingly idle hand over her comic book collection in the living room bookcase, then stepping into Rebecca’s room to check it out more closely. She heard the refrigerator hum in the kitchen. She flicked the switch on the box on the wall near her and heard the air-conditioning kick in and rush through the vents high on her walls. She heard the closet in Rebecca’s room open, then close, but she didn’t hearhim. His feet made no sound on her hardwood floors. Blue was like a shadow, here and then gone.
And when he disappeared into her bedroom, she felt that same obnoxious heat wash over her again, but it was from head to foot this time. And came with a healthyside helping of embarrassment. She opened her mouth to tell him to stop, to stay out of her bedroom, but closed it again.
Because asking him not to look through her things was a surefire way to indicate she found all this a little too intimate. A littletoo much.
She couldn’t remember if she’d made her bed before she left for her mad drive, though she doubted it. She didn’t know why the thought of him standing there, looking at her sheets thrown to the side and a dent where her head had been on her pillows, made something uncomfortably hot twist in her gut. It wasn’t as if she was worried about a man like Blue rooting through her underwear drawer—because she had absolutely no doubt he saw all the ladies’ panties he wanted to see, whenever he wanted to see them.
And more to the point, he wasn’t that kind of guy. She was sure about that, if nothing else.
Still, she found it was all too easy to imagine Blue there at the foot of her unmade bed. Dark and commanding and silent and mouthwatering all over.
Only, in her head, she was watching him stand there while she was lying in her bed herself.
She thrust that out of her mind. Or tried, because there was no way anything like that was ever going to happen.
Everly didn’t know whom Blue typically dated, assuming anyone dated at all in a town as small as Grizzly Harbor, but she was pretty sure that Batman types did not generally go after account managers at midsized ad agencies who were addicted to French macarons, sushi, and reruns ofFriendsthey’d already seen nine thousand times. No way.
In fact, she thought when Blue finally prowled out of her room and stood there in her doorway—every inch of him a predator, made of smooth muscle, obvious skill, and that lethal confidence stamped deep into him—she would be very much surprised if a man like Blue Hendricks dated at all.
“Something funny?” he asked, just as curt and growly as ever, which only made it worse.
Everly was obviously a bit punchy, because she told him. “I was trying to imagine you on a date.”