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But now everything was changed. Again.
Because Blue was kissing her.
For a moment, Everly couldn’t make sense of it. His hand had gripped her upper arm, on the outside bit of her shoulder where her frilly, puffy quarter sleeve left her skin bare. She’d had a split second to register the intense heat and power in that hard palm of his, and the fact that he wastouching her, and then he was pulling her toward him.
And she certainly wasn’t fighting him.
Then Blue’s mouth came down on hers and ruined her forever.
Everly expected him to be fierce, like the warrior he was, and he delivered. But there was something lazy in the way he took her mouth. A kind of deliberate, confident sampling that spiraled through her like a heat all his own. But at the same time, softer and more persuasive than she could possibly have imagined.
Branding her. Changing her.
This time, when she flushed hot and red, it had nothing to do with embarrassment. It had everything to do with Blue.
“Kiss me back,” Blue muttered, pressing each word against her lips like some kind of sensual tattoo.
Everly obeyed him. Happily. She let herself melt against him, winding her arms around his tough, hammered-steel torso. She tipped her head back, and couldn’t help letting out a moan when he angled his head to get a better fit, using one of his big, hard hands to cup her jaw and move it where he wanted it.
It was blistering. She felt as if he singed her, head to toe and back again. He licked his way into her mouth, his tongue dancing with hers, over and over and over.
And when he pulled away, Everly wasn’t certain she knew her own name.
Until Blue said it.
Three times.
“I’m sorry,” she managed to say at last. She was tingling, everywhere. Her legs felt weak beneath her, and she was at a complete loss to describe the chaos winding around and around inside her.
A sweet, delirious sort of chaos that she knew had altered everything.
They could never go back.Shecould never go back.
“What did you say?” she asked.
It took her much too long to blink away the fog before her eyes, and when she did, her heart sank.
Because Blue wasn’t looking at her with any of that heat or fire she still felt storming through her body. On the contrary, Everly had never seen him look so cold or forbidding. And that was saying something.
“We have to go,” he said again, stern and harsh.
And he didn’t wait for her to respond as he slid a hand around to rest impatiently between her shoulder blades. She looked around for Goon Number One and didn’t see him, which made something jostle unpleasantly deep in her belly. But Blue was hustling her out of the lobby of her office building and into the street, so there was no time to explore her reaction.
Her lips felt swollen.Shefelt swollen. Everly didn’t know how to put that into words, so she simply followed where Blue led her, distantly amazed at the fact he’d had the presence of mind to pull out his cell phone and summon a car.
She doubted she could answer her own phone right now, much less use it todo something.
The car was there when they got to the curb, and Everly was grateful for the simple set of tasks before her. Open the door. Climb into the backseat. Throw herself to the far side of the car, so Blue could follow after her. Simple, easy things that didn’t require thought. She didn’t have to worry about it; she just had to do it. She didn’t have to analyze the whys and hows.
She didn’t have to wonder what the hell she was going to do now.
“Blue—” she began, aware as she spoke that her voice was much too husky. Too revealing.
“Not now.”
Terse. Dismissive.
And it was a measure of how thrown she was, half-giddy and half-hollow, that she didn’t push him.