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Because she wasn’t dressed the way she should have been. He saw her jeans on her bed behind her and a pair of Converse next to them, but Everly was still wearing nothing but the T-shirt she’d been sleeping in.
Blue knew exactly how little was under it because it had been hiked up around her waist when he’d rolled into that bed with her.
Which he was definitely not thinking about, because he was a grown man who could control himself.
Everly pushed past him, her head swiveling wildly on her neck as she looked around the living room, like she expected to see evidence of the fight imprinted on the floor. She switched on the light next to the couch, and that didn’t help matters. Maybe she could see better. But the trouble was, so could Blue.
The light gave him a much better view of the long sweep of her legs, for example, in case they weren’t already burned into his brain. Perfectly formed. Just as pale and freckled as her belly, God help him. And worse, the hint of her butt right there where the hem of her oversized T-shirt flirted with the tops of her thighs.
She was killing him.
The puffed-up gym rat hadn’t been much of achallenge, but there was a distinct possibility Everly Campbell was going to take him down with a nightshirt.
“Do me a favor,” Blue gritted out before he well and truly lost it. “Go back to bed. Try to get some sleep. Because in the morning, we’re out of here.”
She was still staring out at the living room. At Rebecca’s door, Blue realized in the next second. As if she were reliving what had happened there all over again. What she’d seen that had caused all of this in the first place.
“I guess using me as bait worked.”
“I guess it did.”
“But you didn’t catch him.”
“I hurt him.” Blue didn’t work very hard to keep the satisfaction from his voice. He heard the little breath Everly pulled in at that, but if she thought he was a violent savage, he couldn’t really bring himself to care. Because hewasone, and proud of it. “And the thing about a guy like that is that he’s never alone. He’ll be back, with friends. You can set your clock by it. We need to be somewhere else tomorrow night.”
“That’s comforting, thank you.”
Everly took her time turning back to face him, and Blue braced himself for what he was sure he’d see on her face. Because it was easy to talk about heroes in the abstract. The same way it was easy to support wars that took place overseas, out of sight, where no one had to face the consequences of daily engagement with the enemy. Everybody loved a decorated war hero in uniform when he returned from battle unharmed and stoic. Few people wanted to deal with the physical and psychological cost veterans paid when they were back home, out ofuniform, and alone. Blue had lost as many friends after their tours of duty had ended as he had in battle, because some wars never ended. Some wars stayed with a man. And a lot of his friends had fallen on that internal battlefield, supposedly safe at home, as surely as they would have to an IED.
Heroes were much better on paper.
Everly had come to him because she wanted the kind of hero who looked good in comics and in the movies. Blue knew she had no idea what that actually meant.
He’d told Everly he was a monster. She should have listened.
But when she finally faced him, her expression wasn’t what he was expecting. She didn’t look disgusted or horrified. She looked... worried, almost. Everly reached over and ran her fingers over the back of his hand, then took it in hers, and Blue had to fight to keep from jerking it away from her.
She looked up at him, and it dawned on him that this woman wasn’t worried about any gorilla thugs coming back tomorrow night. She was worried abouthim.
Something inside him seemed to shift. As if he lost his balance, though he knew he hadn’t. He didn’t.
“Are you hurt?” she asked softly.
“Of course not.”
But the truth was, Blue hadn’t stopped to take an inventory. He did it then. There was a tender spot on his jaw. A little bruising and some scrapes on his knuckles where he’d landed a few good blows. And a faint hitch in his thigh, where the douchebag had landed a kick. That was it.
He got hurt a lot worse regularly in Isaac’s gym of pain.
“This guy was low-level muscle at best. Too dependent on his gun, which didn’t help him much when I relieved him of it. And he was used to his size solving problems to his satisfaction, which also didn’t help when I took him down.”
Everly was still holding his hand between her palms, as if she were inspecting it for signs of worse damage.
And maybe if Blue kept telling himself this was a clinical moment with medical overtones—not that Everly had ever indicated she had any training in that area—it would start to feel that way.
“He could have killed you,” she said, in a hushed, solemn voice that made him feel even more off-kilter than before.
“Always a possibility.” He didn’t know why he was talking in that low voice just because she was. As if this were intimate, this discussion that shouldn’t have been anything but an exchange of information. If that. “The truth is, I’m hard to kill.”