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So Everly did what she could. The only thing she could think to do. She drew herself up, trying to appear serene and unbothered—or as close as she could get to it on the outside.
He didn’t have to know that she was torn up inside.
Then she turned, very slowly, and walked calmly into her bedroom.
Where she closed the door, staggered over to her bed, and spent a lot longer than she wanted to admit with her face in her pillows.
Not screaming or sobbing, though she wanted to do both.Wanted to, but she’d told him she wasn’t a child, so she refused to let herself act like one.
Instead she relived that kiss again and again, hoping against hope that, at some point, it would affect her as little as Blue claimed it had affected him.
Because she had to stop obsessing about him. She knew that. She had to let this go no matter what her treacherous heart was telling her—and get back to the far more important business of fearing for her life.
Thirteen
Blue woke up like a switch being flipped.
It was a particular kind of jolting, immediate awareness he recognized from too many missions to count. He went from sound asleep to alert and wide-awake in an instant, shifting into battle mode seamlessly, because some skills never died no matter where he found himself.
He didn’t move. He stayed where he was, stretched out on the couch in Everly’s living room. Without changing his breathing or shifting his position, he eased open his eyes and began scanning the apartment around him to see if he could pinpoint what had woken him up.
One breath, long and deep like he was still asleep, in case someone was watching him. Then another.
He heard it then. A soft clicking noise that didn’t sound like much by itself.
But Blue recognized the sound for what it was.
Someone was trying to pick the lock on the front door.
Before he fully finished the thought, he was moving.
He hit the floor soundlessly in his bare feet and moved swiftly to Everly’s bedroom door. He could admit he was surprised she hadn’t locked the door behind her when she’d marched away from him earlier, ripping him up in ways he refused to acknowledge—especially right now. But she hadn’t.
He was inside and at her bed in two steps, then went down on the mattress beside her, hauling her into his arms with his hand tight over her mouth before she had time to react.
There was no time to think about how warm she was, sleepy and sweet. There was no time to catalog every last way her lush body fit with his, or what she was— or wasn’t—wearing. There was no time to act like the horny teenager Blue hadn’t been in years, not until her, when there was someone at the front door.
Everly woke up fast and scared, if the wild pulse in her neck was any guide. And she did his heart good by instantly trying to fight him off, as if she hadn’t noticed that he was bigger and stronger and already pinning her to the bed.
Because that was what he’d taught her. It was never over unless you were dead. And if you weren’t dead? You fought.
She was brave and determined, and it hurt like hell when she kicked him in the shin. He couldn’t have been prouder.
“It’s me,” he said against her ear, ignoring the way his body responded to getting that close to her, nomatter the pain in his shin. “Nod if you understand, but stay quiet.”
He felt her shudder. When she nodded a moment later, he eased his hand from her mouth.
And then they were staring at each other in the dark. In her bed. Something that only the direst circumstance—like the one happening right this second—could get him to ignore.
He felt like a saint. An aggrieved, pissed-off saint of lost opportunities, victim to an irritating hero complex. As far as he could tell, it had resulted in nothing so far but a whole lot of battle scars and a misplaced sense of honor that, bonus, matched his current level of sexual frustration.
And it wasn’t the time or place to think about any of that nonsense.
“Someone’s at the door,” he told her in a low voice, barely a whisper. “They’re picking the lock as we speak. I want you to barricade yourself in here. If anyone tries to get through your door who’s not me? I want you out that window again. Get dressed, put on some shoes, and take a different route to the police station in case they have someone watching the street. Got it?”
Everly didn’t speak. She didn’t point out what he assumed she must know—that if someone else was coming through her door, it would be over Blue’s dead body. She just nodded once. With certainty.
Because he might have stood there in the other room and shot off his mouth about what a child she was, but he knew better. That had been a self-serving diatribe at best, to divert attention away from how much he wantedto get his hands on her. Everly was more courageous than she should ever have had to be.