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He took his time letting go of her arm, never looking away from her. She’d never felt so safe. And, at the same time, soseen. Because she knew he didn’t miss a thing. Not the state of her hair and makeup after a long day at work. Not the fingernails she’d chewed on today despite her attempts to beat back the habit. Not even the glob of salad dressing she’d tried to scrub off her dress after lunch, which even she would have had trouble seeing if she didn’t know where it was.
She knew he saw all of that and more, everything happening around them. The street and the traffic. The man next to them on his phone. The two women doubling over with deep belly laughs and clinging to each other as they did. A pack of college students, probably involved in nearby DePaul’s summer sessions.
If she asked, she was sure Blue could tell her about every single one of them.
“Never apologize for things you’re not sorry about,” he told her now. “That’s rule number one.”
“There are rules?”
“Everly.” There was a hint of a curve in that hard mouth then, and it made her pulse quicken. “There are always rules.”
“Rules for what, exactly?”
But she didn’t care about that, either, for once. The rule-following good girl who’d never quite been good enough had died with Rebecca a month ago, and Everly wasn’t sure she missed her. Too much had happened since.
She wanted the summer evening to last forever and this walk home to go on even longer than that. She wanted to walk beside him, carefree and much too giddy, until her feet gave out. And Everly didn’t want to remind herself how stupid it was to get her heart involved in a situation that was all about fear.
Or how fleeting her time with this man was going to be, whether she lived to see fall or not.
“Rules for being a badass, obviously,” Blue told her, as if that should have been obvious. “That’s a side benefit to my being here. You stay safe, and I teach you how to be even safer.”
That curve in the corner of his mouth widened, becoming a grin. And her heart did a flip in her chest that she was sure she could see in the mirror of his Ray-Bans. And the truth was, Everly couldn’t bring herself to care. She didn’t even blush.
She was pretty sure what she did then was surrender.
Completely. To whatever came next.
“In fact,” Blue said, sounding like he knew it, “we’re going to start with a few lessons tonight.”
Eleven
An hour later, Blue was feeling pretty great about his decision to teach Everly a little down and dirty self-defense. It made sense to give her a few tools she could use to combat her own fear—and, if she had to, stun a bad guy in the unlikely event one got to her before Blue could.
He continued to feel great about it as he pushed the furniture back in the living room and made a space for training. And then Everly walked out of her room wearing nothing but yoga pants and a sports bra, and he about swallowed his own tongue.
For a beat, there was nothing in his head but a kind of... sizzle.
Every last drop of blood he had in his body left whatever it was doing and pooled exactly where he didn’t want it. She kept walking toward him, clearly oblivious to the effect she was having on him. Her strawberryblond hair was scraped back in a ponytail at the nape of her neck. She was barefoot.
Blue registered those details, but really, all he could focus on was the pale, freckled expanse of her abdomen now exposed to his view. He wasn’t a complicated man. He just wanted a taste. Of the indentation of her navel. Or the place where her hips flared out from her waist.
Just one taste—
But he shut that down, because he was a professional. He’d been a SEAL. He wasn’t a fifteen-year-old kid about to embarrass himself in front of the first girl he’d ever laid eyes on, no matter how it might feel. He was going to have to suck this up and deal with it, because it didn’t matter that he couldn’t remember ever wanting a woman the way he wanted Everly. He couldn’t have her.
She stopped in front of him. And was eyeing him strangely, which suggested Blue’s expression was giving too much away. He cleared his throat and tried to school himself into impassivity. Something that had never before been a stretch for him.
“I’m going to teach you how to defend yourself,” he intoned, stiff and weird like it hurt him, and wasn’t surprised when she frowned.
“I thought—”
“That I was going to protect you,” he finished for her. “I am. This is part of it.”
“If you say so.” She nodded at his own athletic clothes, the exercise pants and T-shirt he’d packed so he could keep his fitness at performance levels. His plan involved waking up at four a.m. and doing a solid ninety minutes of tailored resistance exercises out in the living room every morning, but he didn’t tell her that. A man neededto preserve some mystery while he was slowly losing it. “This looks a lot more like a workout class I didn’t sign up for. What’s next? Claims that salad is a form of self-defense?”
“It’s never going to hurt you to eat something green.”
She looked wounded. “And so it begins. Karate from the inside out. I’d rather eat cake.”