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She shuddered, and something seemed to scrape through his gut, leaving him hollow. He wanted to call it weakness, but he didn’t feel even remotely fragile. He wanted to rip apart every creature who had ever dared threaten her, in the next fifteen minutes, if at all possible. He wanted to make them pay for frightening her. More than that, he wanted to tattoo her fingerprints on his hand where she’d checked him over to see if he was okay. He wanted to bundle her up and keep her safe no matter what it cost him, even ifsafemeant keeping her the hell away from him.
He looked at her and hewanted.
For the first time in his life, Blue wanted... everything.
“I hate the fact that you know that,” Everly whispered, fiercely, and her green eyes were shot through with an emotion he couldn’t identify when she looked up at him. “And I hate that you had to put that to the test tonight. Especially for me.”
And before he could brush that off, change the subject, and fight his way back to solid ground, she made everything worse.
She threw herself at him.
He could have handled it if she’d thrown a punch. His whole life was about functional responses to violence. How to contain it, survive it, combat it. He was good at all those things. He’d even have said he lived for it, if asked. He could have had her down and handled in a heartbeat if she’d tried to hit him.
But Everly wasn’t trying to beat on him.
On the contrary, she wrapped her arms around him. Then leaned in close, nestled her head against his chest in a move that made his entire body ache like some kind of sudden-onset arthritis, and hugged him.
Tight.
And didn’t seem to understand she’d disarmed a decorated Navy SEAL who was used to winning every battle before him.
Without landing a single blow.
Fourteen
Everly was only going with an instinct that she didn’t entirely understand.
And her own deep, abiding need, if she was honest. To get her hands on him. To feel that he was alive, flesh and blood. Warm and real.
Not another casualty of this battle that she’d woken up to find herself fighting.
Maybe she also just wanted to touch him.Neededto touch him, to make sure that no matter what he said in his tough guy way, Blue was really and truly okay.
“It was like reliving a nightmare but knowing I was awake,” she whispered against the hot, hard wall of his chest, without stopping to question whether it was a good idea. “This time I knew exactly what was happening. I knew what those thumping sounds meant. I was so afraid that I’d open the door and it would be you this time, broken and bloody and—”
“Stop,” he said, but he didn’t sound pissed at her. Or as if that were an order he expected her to obey like the good little soldier she wasn’t. “That’s not going to happen.”
“Not tonight,” she agreed, feeling ferocious and relieved at once. And something else that pounded through her, edgy and dark, spurring her toward a shimmering that yawned there ahead of her, just out of reach.
Something wild and dangerous in a different way. Something irrevocable.
She held him tighter, and she felt it in every part of her when his arms finally—finally—closed around her.
And Everly knew she wasn’t imaginingthis. She wasn’t making this up in her head. This wasn’t a simple physical reaction to the man who’d broken in here or the fact Blue had fought him off. She knew, like it or not, that they were both caught up in the grip of the same thing.
That they had been all this time. Since the moment she’d found him again after all these years in the cool shade of the towering pines behind Fool’s Cove.
She wasn’t sure she could handle it. Not and stay in one piece. She kept her head turned to the side so she could catch her breath. So she could try to figure out what she should do next. Whether she should climb in bed and go to sleep the way he’d told her she should, or whether she needed to surrender, once and for all, to thisthing.
And maybe throw herself at him while she was at it.
Because whatever else might happen, she knew that Blue would catch her.
He’s already caught you,a voice inside her pointed out slyly, as if she might have missed the deliciouslyheavy weight of his sculpted, honed arms around her, cradling her body against his, as if she’d been put on this earth for exactly this purpose. To fit against this man, just like this.What are you waiting for?
And it was as if everything crystallized inside her at that.
During the drive to Alaska, she’d told herself that all she wanted was to get her life back. But if the past few days were a test run, the truth was that she hated it. This whole long week of baiting a trap, she’d had the feeling that she was merely playing a role in her own skin, and she didn’t think that had as much to do with what had happened to Rebecca as she’d wanted to pretend.