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Gently. So gently.
He’d had actual sex that got to him less than that light touch, not that he could recall a single detail of it now.
There was only her. There was only this, as inevitable as a summer thunderstorm on a Chicago evening.
She smiled at him, and inched even closer—
And then she stopped short. She went stiff.
He saw fear. Panic. Ice.
“What just happened?” Blue demanded.
But he was already scanning the lobby. He had his back to the wall, but she’d looked off to the side, where there were people walking in and out of the lobby doors. Three women and two men engaged in the kind of conversation that suggested a business dinner. A businessman in a three-piece suit.
With a face he recognized.
“Don’t look now,” Everly whispered. “But they’re back.”
He got it then. He’d last seen the guy loitering near the exit—supposedly engrossed with whatever was on his phone—in Everly’s sketchbook.
And Blue had a split second to decide on a course of action. He could rush the asswipe, but that would leave Everly unprotected in this lobby, and his own words flooded through him.
Six seconds.That was all it would take.
He couldn’t take the risk.
So he did the next best thing.
“Run with this,” he ordered her gruffly.
Then he hauled Everly toward him and took her mouth with all the hunger and greed he’d been repressing since the day she’d reappeared in his life.
Twelve
His taste exploded over her, through her, like a tidal wave.
It was that huge. That devastating.
And that good.
Everly went from one extreme to the other in the space of a heartbeat. She was already too comfortable with Blue waiting for her every evening. And on their walks home, where he scanned the streets for killers and she got to pretend... things that she knew better than to let herself imagine.
She knew how dangerous it was to get carried away. How temporary this arrangement was and how deeply it was going to hurt when he solved her current problem and disappeared off into the Alaskan wilderness.
But her heart had clattered around the way it always did when she stepped out of the elevator and saw him with his back against the wall, there on the other side of security.
And then he’d thrown out the wordboyfriend, which was such a silly word. A ridiculous word, really, when she thought about trying to apply it to a man like Blue.
It was like calling the ocean a puddle.
But then everything had frozen when she’d looked over her shoulder and seen one of the faces from her nightmares. Not ten feet away.
She understood then, with a horrible lurch, that she’d... forgotten.
Well. Notforgotten, exactly. It was more complicated than that. It was impossible to forget what had happened, particularly with Blue here. Living in her apartment. Teaching her self-defense every night until her fingers ached. And she never knew, standing in the shower afterward, if they ached from the strikes she’d landed on his tough, hard body or from her endless, insatiable urge to touch him in a whole different way.
She’d been lulled into a false sense of security. She’d understood that in a sudden, sickening flash—the presence of the man she thought of as Goon Number One brought it all back.