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This would be a lot easier if he didn’t find her entertaining. “I don’t have to like your routine. I’m not hereto improve your life, Everly. I’m here to make sure you have a life to waste on bad food and mindless reality shows.”
“And what a life it is,” she said softly. “Isn’t it funny that it only takes a few near-death experiences to make you contemplate how lucky you are to have a life of long hours and late-night television binges in the first place? I had no idea how much I’d miss it.”
“Funnyisn’t the word I’d use.” Blue was still standing there, but he couldn’t let himself move. Not until he knew which way he planned to go. Toward her or away from her? “As you pointed out to me, you didn’t choose this. When this is over, you get to jump right back into the life you had. Or change it if you want a different one. You can do whatever you want.”
There was a kind of recognition in her gaze that made Blue feel something like itchy.Bothered.He had to force himself to stand still.
“I take it that doesn’t apply to you.”
“The truth about the world is that there are monsters pretty much everywhere,” Blue told her, far more fiercely than necessary. “There have to be people to hunt them, or they win. But it turns out the only way to fight a monster is to become one.”
She was shaking her head before he finished, those finely cut strawberry blond strands dancing toward her shoulders. “I don’t believe that.”
“The thing about the truth is that it’s just as true whether you believe it or not.”
“Every person on this earth has a hundred reasons at any given moment to consider themselves a monster. You don’t have to believe it, Blue.”
She was so earnest. So sincere. It made him feel like his skin was on fire. He didn’t know whether he wanted to wrap her up in protective material and try to keep her safe from all the nightmares in the world, himself included. Or if he should take the opportunity to show her what a monster really was.
But it wasn’t about him. None of this wasabout him.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told her, his voice even. “And that’s good. You shouldn’t. I spent a lot of years fighting in a lot of wars so that civilian girls like you never, ever need to know anything about it.”
And she was such a fragile thing. Too bony, too weak. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to protect her. That one of those goons she’d seen before would come back at her and snap her in half before he had time to react. He’d dreamed about it as he slept fitfully out here on the couch, jolting awake with images of her broken body plastered all over his mind.
At least it was an upgrade, of sorts, from the crap that was normally plastered there.
She was small and she was scared, but he had to remind himself of that when she pulled herself up to her feet. She closed the distance between them and then stood there before him, closer than he should have allowed her to get.
It took him a long, shattered kind of moment to understand that she was placing her palm over his heart.
“No one is a monster here, Blue,” she told him, soft and solemn, her green gaze steady on his. “Unless they want to be.”
And then she padded off toward the kitchen, seemingly unaware that she’d cut him in half.
Ten
Everly resumed normal life the next day, just as Blue wanted.
She woke up that morning and decided she would play the best version of the Everly Campbell she’d been before, back before all this had happened. She would view it as a voyage of discovery, hour by hour, as she tried to re-create the life and times of the person she’d been. Way back when she hadn’t been scared, she’d simply... lived.
Her alarm went off at six, the way it always had. She shuffled to the bathroom to shower and let the hot water wake her. She did her makeup the way she always did on workdays, using enough mascara to look appropriately awake and energized without tipping over into something better suited for the stage. She dressed in one of her favorite work outfits, a dress that was funky and professional at once, as befitted a creative person in acorporate environment, or so she’d always told herself. And she was ready to step out the door at seven on the dot, so she could stop by her coffee shop and then walk the twenty minutes or so to work.
Every step of that was part of the typical Everly Campbell morning routine—except the fact that there was a huge, entirely too beautiful man crashing on her sofa.
He’d already been awake and fully dressed when she’d come out of her room a few minutes after six, which was much too early for that shrewd, dark look he’d thrown at her as she’d mumbled something, clutched her robe tighter around her, and barred herself in the bathroom. By the time she was out of the shower, he’d had coffee brewing in the coffeepot Everly had forgotten a previous roommate had left in her kitchen, making her apartment smell like it was someone else’s. His, possibly.
A notion that she hadn’t found calming.
By the time she was dressed and ready to leave, armed with her makeup and favorite dress, she’d already had more interaction with a ridiculously attractive male than Normal Everly could expect in months.
It didn’t help that Blue stared at her when she emerged from her bedroom. And then kept right on staring as she walked over to where he sat at a stool on the living room side of the open kitchen counter.
And it was hard enough to dress herself this early in the morning. It wasn’t fair that he looked so effortlesslygood. He had on jeans and a T-shirt, both of which did things to his perfect body that should have been illegal. It certainly felt illegal inside Everly.
On top of his T-shirt, he wore a shoulder holster. Complete with a very large, very dangerous-looking gun. In case she’d forgotten why he was here in her apartment, making her jittery and silly without even trying.
But he was still staring, so she jerked her attention away from the very real, not-at-all-fake weapon, and concentrated on him.