Page 61

It was his own flesh and blood he didn’t want to face—or maybe, if he was more honest than he’d ever wanted to be before, it was himself.
You think you have to take responsibility for every bad thing that’s ever happened, anywhere,Everly had said.From my apartment tonight to—I don’t know—your entire childhood.
But what she didn’t know was all the crap he’dnottaken responsibility for. It was yet one more reason he wasn’t the hero she seemed to keep wanting to believe he was.
Blue knew the truth. He always had.
He turned down the street where he’d grown up. The houses were enough the same to make him wonder what year it was, though some of them sported different coats of paint. There were additions here, some new landscaping there. Trees he remembered climbing were gone, while new fences took their place. The world moved on,he supposed. Even in a place that had stayed forever preserved in his memory.
But his stepfather’s house looked exactly the same. He pulled into the driveway, then pulled the SUV around the back, where it couldn’t be seen from the street. He switched the engine off, looking at the woman who still slept there beside him. As pretty as she was when she was awake, there was something about her sleeping that caught in him.
The way it had that afternoon in Alaska when he’d carried her to the empty cabin and waited for her to wake up.
It was much worse now.
He’d barely had his fill of her. He hadn’t even had time to bask in the afterglow before those bastards blew the place up.
And much as he wanted to do it all over again, what he really wanted was something he refused to acknowledge.
He refused.
So he did the next best thing. He climbed out of the car, easing his door shut so as not to wake her. The sun was just starting to peek up over the edge of the world. It was that odd, in-between time just before dawn, hushed and soft.
And Blue was standing in his old backyard, breathing in that peculiar combination of scents that would always be this exact place to him. Newly cut grass. Those sweet flowers that grew in the neighbor’s backyard and sent petals soaring over the fence at this time of year. The thicker smell that reminded him of car engines, like the ones his stepfather had tinkered with but never fixed.His mother’s geraniums in the window boxes that were her pride and joy. The rich, green fragrance from the vegetable garden near the back porch.
It was crazy the things a man forgot. And then remembered too well.
Blue shook himself, then went around to the passenger side and pulled Everly out without waking her up. He lifted her in his arms and held her there when she murmured something unintelligible against his neck. When she settled, he turned, shutting the car door behind him with his foot and starting for the house.
And when the back porch light went on, flooding the yard and hitting him square in the face, Blue simply stood still.
He watched with a certain sense of foreboding, or inevitability, as the back door swung open.
He recognized the people standing there before him, both much older now. Both more frail than he wanted to accept. Something clenched inside him, and he wondered how he’d forgotten that part. That they would age. That everybody aged.
He knew he had. He remembered every year and every painful indication that he was no longer the sleek warrior he’d been at eighteen. Twenty. Even thirty.
But they’d gotten even older than he had.
“Dear God,” the man muttered.
Blue’s attention was on the woman. On a face he knew better than his own. Even lined with time and blurred with sleep, it was far more like his than he’d ever allowed himself to recall.
He knew her eyes. He knew that nose, though the one on his face was bigger and had been broken a fewtimes. He knew her hands—how they felt against his forehead when she’d checked him for fever and how they looked when she fidgeted with her rings the way she was doing now, as if she couldn’t help herself. And he knew that if he got closer, she would smell the way she always did, of lavender and fresh air.
A week ago he would have insisted he couldn’t remember any of this. And, more, didn’t want to.
Blue held Everly closer and reminded himself that he’d survived wars and some things that were far worse. He could handle a couple of nights back in this house, with these people. It might be uncomfortable. It was certain to be, in fact.
But he didn’tthinkit would kill him.
He realized they were still all staring at one another, so he made himself smile.
At her. He wasn’t ready to deal with anything but her.
“Hi, Mom,” he said, as if he’d been away for a few days. Not his entire adult life. And as if nothing had ever separated them but that time. “Do you mind if we come in?”
Seventeen