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There was no doubt about it. Everly was a badass.
Even now, he kept waiting for some kind of reaction to take hold of her, but if it did, she didn’t show it. She pulled her feet up onto the seat so she could wrap her arms around her knees, but that was it.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t start hyperventilating. She didn’t have a well-earned panic attack, right there on the floor of the SUV.
Blue couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
For her, that was. He already knew it was a terrible thing for him. He didn’t need any reasons to like this woman more than he already did.
“I need to think about why this happened,” Blue muttered out loud, after he’d put some significant distance between them and Everly’s neighborhood with no apparent tail. “I’m going to drive around a while longer to make sure no one is following us. Then we’re going to have to find a place to hunker down for a while. Until I can figure out who the hell is throwing Molotov cocktails through your bedroom window.”
Everly checked out her side mirror, as if the fact they could be followed hadn’t occurred to her. And as if she maybe expected to see somethingright there. “Do you think someone’s following us?”
“I think they wanted us to go up in flames, andhopefully, they’ll think we did for at least the next hour or so. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a couple of people watching the front door. I don’t think anyone saw us go out that alley, but you never know.”
He heard her take another one of those long, steadying breaths. “What makes a good hiding place?”
She wasn’t focused on her own potential death, he noted. Just on the next step. That same thing he was devoting all his damned energy to ignoring kicked at him. Again.
And harder this time.
“We’re not hiding. We’re beating a strategic retreat while we gather intel.”
“Okay. Where’s a good place to not hide?”
“Somewhere untraceable with an armed guard would be nice,” Blue said darkly. “But I’d settle for off the radar. That means cash only, in case they’re tracking your credit cards. Or mine, which is a lot less likely but not impossible.”
Though if they did try to run him through any kind of database, it would set off alarms back at Alaska Force HQ. Which could be its own fun—but not with Everly in tow. The kind of fun he wanted to have with her didn’t involve a firefight.
“I would typically head for the last place anyone who knows me would expect me to go,” he told her. “But I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know what they know about you. I still don’t know why they took out your roommate. The truth is, I expected them to escalate a lot slower than this, so tonight is squarely on me.”
Everly was quiet for a moment. Blue switched lanes, then took a quick right, still scanning the road behindhim as he went. He hadn’t seen any sign of a tail yet, but he couldn’t rely on that. Not in a situation like this, where he’d already been wrong.
And, worse, had let these scumbags catch him and Everly naked.
Literally naked.
“I don’t think you set my bedroom on fire,” Everly said mildly.
Too mildly.
“Well, I might as well have.”
“You were right there on the couch with me. Unless you’re confessing that you set my bed on fire and then ran back to the couch before I woke up so I would think—”
“You’re my responsibility,” Blue managed to get out, stiff and harsh. “This night is my failure, no one else’s.”
They stopped at another light, and the passing headlights of other cars played over Everly’s face, but she didn’t look at him.
Which meant Blue had nowhere to push the unpleasant weight that was pressing down on him like it wanted to pound him into dust. He was familiar with the sensation. He’d felt it before, on other missions that went epically wrong.
But he’d never felt it like this. Not sitting next to the woman he—
Stop.The voice inside him could have been a commanding officer’s, it was so complete an order.Now.
“I know where we can go,” Everly said when the car started moving again.
Blue shot her a dark look she didn’t appear to notice. “Yeah? Because you have to think about the fact theseguys are too bold already. They showed up at your work. And your apartment, repeatedly. You need to assume they know everything about you.”