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“Then they know I only go back home to visit my parents very rarely. For Christmas every year, sure. And sometimes for my mother’s birthday, but that was two months ago.”
“They’ll look at your parents’ house first.”
“Right now?” she asked, and Blue wasn’t sure he liked the pushback. Meaning, he definitely didn’t like it. “Tonight? First they’d have to realize I’m not already dead, right?”
“That’s not going to take as long as you might think.”
Everly seemed unimpressed. “My parents are in Europe. I know where they keep the spare key. At the very least, we could grab a hot shower while we figure out where to go next.”
“Out of the question.” He was... agitated. He tried to keep it out of his voice, with little success. “It’s too obvious.”
She shifted slightly in her seat then, and Blue couldn’t say he really enjoyed the sensation of her sharp green gaze against the side of his face, with more of that pushback.
“You’re probably right,” she agreed, but she sounded too mild again. He tensed in foreboding. “Wouldn’t it be great if we had access to a house that was right near my parents’? A house that, as I recall, has an attic that someone could hunker down in and watch my parents’ to see if any bad guys rolled up. The way you seem to think they will.”
Blue didn’t say anything, because he was stunned.Speechless, in fact, in the face of such a crazy suggestion.
Everly folded her arms over her chest, kept her gaze trained on him, and did not back down. At all.
“Imagine if we had the opportunity to hide in plain sight like that,” she continued in that same way of hers, so calm and rational it made him want to start breaking things. Only the fact that he was a goddamned professional with twenty years of keeping his cool kept him from it. “Because these people might know everything there is to know about me. They’ve clearly spent all kinds of quality time in my apartment, leaving cute little notes and whatever else, and who knows what happened to Rebecca or what they knew about her? But there’s no way they know anything aboutyou, Blue. After all, we’re not friends. We’re not even friends in the usual, run-of-the-mill online sense. I haven’t laid eyes on you since I was seven years old. And if they don’t know you, there’s no way they know anything about your mother’s house, either.”
There were a thousand things he could have said to that. Including his knee-jerk reaction to her assessment of their relationship—which was crazy, because he agreed. They weren’t friends. They wouldn’tbefriends. They weren’t anything.
That he could still taste her sweetness in his mouth was neither here nor there.
Blue settled on the easiest response. “No.”
“Okay.” She sat back in her seat, just as calmly as she’d done everything else tonight.Except come all over you.That wasn’t exactly polite, but it chilled him outsome. It reminded him that she was just as wild underneath as he was. “But I need you to tell me something.”
“Do I think that the shock is getting to you? Yes. I do.”
She ignored that. “Do you not want to go to your mother’s house because you think it’s actually a bad idea? Or because you’re afraid?”
He thought his jaw might break in half. “I am not afraid.”
“Or let me guess. You think you have to take responsibility for every bad thing that’s ever happened, anywhere. From my apartment tonight to—I don’t know—your entire childhood.”
“Everly. Stop. This is not something that’s going to happen.”
She shrugged in the seat next to him—that was all, so Blue had no reason to feel it like a court-martial. Then she started to rub her palms up and down her arms, as if she needed the heat.
And she didn’t argue with him, which was worse. He could have handled an argument. Hell, he was jonesing for one, the louder and meaner, the better.
But all she did was sit there next to him, pointedly saying nothing, and that meant he couldn’t seethe and fume and formulate responses to her. He had to think.
And he couldn’t help thinking, despite himself, that her idea was brilliant.
Much as it killed him to admit that.
He wasn’t afraid to go home, he assured himself. He just didn’twantto—which wasn’t the same thing at all.
He grabbed his phone and called up Isaac’s number,letting the SUV’s sound system put the call on the speakers.
“Talk to me.”
It was Isaac’s standard greeting. Especially when an Alaska Force brother was out on some kind of mission and was calling back to Fool’s Cove in the middle of the night.
“There’s been an escalation,” Blue said, matter-of-factly, and then filled Isaac in on the night’s events in the same tone. The break-in. The fight. The fact the punk had run off—and Blue had let him.