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“You must remember me,” said the woman who’d just screeched to a noisy halt in the dirt that passed for a driveway out behind the rickety old lodge. Blue was standing guard in the endless Alaskan summer sunshine, pretending he wasn’t doing just that. As if someone would just be standing around aimlessly at the end of a road only fools ever tried to drive, but the woman didn’t look like the sort who would make that distinction.
Much too soft, even with that haunted look on her face.
She threw herself out of the car as if she had someone on her tail. Blue knew she didn’t, because they’d been monitoring her approach since she’d turned onto the only road—such as it was—that eventually led from Grizzly Harbor and over the usually impassable mountain to the back side of this remote Alaskan island. Where thedeliberately hard-to-reach headquarters of Alaska Force was spread over what had once been a summer fishing retreat for the very hardy and very, very rugged.
Neither was a term Blue would use to describe this woman. She was delicate. Above his pay grade, if he had to guess from the quality of her clothes. And as weak and insubstantial as the jacket she wore against the ever-changeable and usually cold Alaskan summer weather.
But she surprised him by taking a few steps in his direction until something, maybe a belated sense of self-preservation, made her stop and sway on her feet.
“We grew up on the same street,” she insisted. “I’m Everly Campbell.”
And Blue didn’t want to remember her. He opened his mouth to claim he didn’t.
But he did.
The last time he’d laid eyes on little Everly Campbell, she’d been a pudgy, solid thing with pigtails and a too-solemn expression, waving at him from the back of her ridiculously girlie bike on the street where his mom and stepdad still lived.
He doubted he’d waved back.
What he really remembered was the bike, not the girl, he told himself. The bike had been bedecked with too much pink and actual streamers that flapped around when she rode it in those irritating, incessant circles in the street between their houses. Some mornings he’d heard the snapping sound they made from his bedroom up under the eaves in his stepdad’s harsh, bitter house, long before his lazy teenage butt had wanted to be awake. If he’d thought about the girl across the street at all, it had been because little Everly lived exactly the kind ofcharmed American Dream life—two doting parents, a popular jock brother, a set of golden retrievers, even a freaking white picket fence—that Blue thought everybody deserved and, more, had joined the navy to protect.
He’d enlisted the day after his high school graduation, left behind the commuter town outside Chicago where they’d grown up, and gone out of his way not to think about either it or her since.
Until today.
Blue liked his past where it was. Buried and forgotten. Not up in his face on a southeastern Alaskan island so difficult to reach it operated as a kind of natural fortress.
“Come on, you must remember me,” said the woman who was definitely Everly Campbell, all grown up and not the least bit pudgy any longer. She sounded far more confident about his memory than she should have, to Blue’s mind, given it had been so many years. A lifetime. He crossed his arms over his chest and eyed her where she stood in the overgrown yard next to her haphazardly parked car, which he could tell at a glance was a rental. With Chicago plates. Which suggested she’d actually driven the three thousand or so miles to get here, give or take a ferry or two. “You and my older brother, Jason, are friends.”
“I don’t have friends.”
That was strictly the truth. Blue had brothers-in-arms or acquaintances, nothing in between. He liked it that way.
“Fine.” Everly sounded more strung out and desperate than simply impatient, which rubbed at his hero complex like an itch he couldn’t scratch. But he was trying to get over his hero complex. Mostly. “You did in high school.”
His memories of high school were dim and blurry,focused more on his stepdad’s temper than whatever weak teenage nonsense had cluttered up his days. And he didn’t really want any clarity on lost and happily forgotten yearbook crap, especially since he’d never bothered to pick his up, much less collect signatures from people he didn’t want to remember.
Everly took another ill-advised step toward him. “Jason played football.”
“Good for Jason. I didn’t.”
“I know that. But the two of you hung out. He knows what you’ve been up to all these years.” Something about Blue’s expression must have penetrated, because she swallowed. Hard. “I think he kept in touch with one of your stepsisters?”
More crap Blue didn’t want to think about.
“High school was a long time ago, little girl.”
But that only made her face light up, which was the exact opposite of what he’d intended.
And to add insult to injury, she was pretty. Very pretty.
Damn it.
“See? You remember me. No one calls a grown womanlittle girllike that, all raspy and dark and menacing, unless they’re trying to make a point.”
Good thing she was irritating. “‘Raspy and dark and menacing’? Really?”
Everly waved a hand, and though something about the gesture struck him as frantic rather than dismissive, he ignored it and kept his gaze trained on her face.