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Everly racked her brain for something to say that might explain what had just happened, but there was no need. Mrs. Margate smiled politely, murmured something about her laundry, and walked out.
Leaving Everly to fortify herself with another cup of coffee before she slowly marched back up the stairs to that third-floor sitting room to find her... whatever Blue was to her.
She found Blue with his tablet in his hands again, sitting near the windows that overlooked her parents’ house. And this was the trouble with feeling all thisstuffabout a man she thought she ought to know but didn’t. It swirled around inside her. It felt like wonder, as if she might burst wide open if she didn’ttell him—
Everly bit her tongue again. Hard enough to hurt this time.
She had the sudden, unwelcome memory of her own voice in that car last night, using a word she should never have used.
It had no place here. Not inside her. Not with him.
God, she already knew what he’d say. He’d get pissed.Or, worse, turn pitying. He’d mansplain her own heart to her, and it wouldn’t matter what she said. He was going to leave anyway, the moment she was safe. She knew that, and even if she hadn’t, that scene downstairs just now would have clued her in.
She wasn’t in love with Blue. Of course she wasn’t.
Because that would be... hopeless.
“Are you going to stand there and stare at me all day?” he asked without looking up. “I can’t say I like it.”
A smart woman would fade off into the bathroom and shower for a while. At least until he started looking less outwardly belligerent.
It turned out that Everly wasn’t that smart. “What was all that?”
She thought he would pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about. She’d even braced herself for it. She wondered if she’d actually push him if he dug his heels in, and thought that yes, she would, because she knew how to protect herself with her own two hands now. She could protect him, too. Even if it was from himself.
Especially then.
But Blue leveled a hard look at her. “I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out that I didn’t come back here for years because there’s stuff I don’t want to talk about. It turns out I still don’t want to talk about it.”
“What other cloak-and-dagger stuff did she mean?”
“I’m pretty sure I just said I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Give me a break. That woman loves you. You can read anyone and anything, but you can’t read your own mother? You must know—”
But there was something so cold on Blue’s face then that Everly choked on her own words. He took his time standing up, every inch of him a threat.
And she immediately understood the difference. That he was aiming all that brawn and powerather, for once. That he wasn’t doing a single thing to protect her from all the lethal ruthlessness that was stamped deep into his every last bone.
“Do you really think that because we had sex, that means you get to dig around in my life?” he asked, in a voice as frigid as the expression on his face. “Or tell me what to do? It was sex, Everly. Just sex.”
It felt like he’d punched her in the stomach.
But it took only another moment to realize that it was meant to feel that way. It was meant to leave her winded. He likely expected her to slink off somewhere to lick her wounds and have a good cry.
In which case, he should have picked on a woman who hadn’t survived two assassination attempts in the past twelve hours. A woman who hadn’t run all the way to Alaska to find him. A woman he hadn’t taught the fine art of palm strikes and eye gouging.
And he definitely should have picked a woman who wasn’t in love with him.
“Wow,” she said, drawling it out for effect. “I guess that really hit you where you live. Did I ask you to marry me, Blue? Did I tell you that we were now joined forever because we had sex? Or did I ask you a not unreasonable question about your family situation after watching you fight with your mother?”
“I did not have a fight with my mother.”
“No, you didn’t,” Everly agreed. “You were rude, tomake sure she knew how you felt. And then you couldn’t yell at her when she called you on it, because at heart you’re a man of honor. So you did the next best thing and left, then tried to make me feel like crap. Does it feel better now? Do you?”
“You’re the one who suggested we come here,” he reminded her, something fierce in his gaze and his hands tight at his sides. “I never said it would be pleasant. I don’t know what you expect from me.”
“Right. Because I forced you to come here. You didn’t clear it with your G.I. Joe friends or anything.”