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And for a moment, everything between them seemed to light on fire, just like the walls last night. She’d never seen this stoic, composed man look the way he did then. Not just undone but furious on top of it, and all of it aimed straight at her.
Everly told herself she could take it, though she wasn’t entirely sure that was true.
But just when she thought she might actually be charred from the inside out, he wrenched his gaze away from hers.
“I’m an idiot,” he ground out.
“You’re not an idiot,” she assured him. “A lot of people carry all kinds of things—”
“Everly.” His gaze hit hers again, but he was the Blue she knew again. Cool and hard. As if nothing had happened. “Do not psychoanalyze me.”
“But—”
“This conversation is over. I just realized the only thing that changed in the past twenty-four hours.”
And Everly was certain he didn’t mean the fact that they’d slept together. Or the fact that they were here in his childhood home, the very last place on earth he wanted to be.
“It’s Rebecca’s mother.” Blue shook his head. “I can’t believe I let all this extraneous crap distract me. I called her yesterday and left a message. What mother doesn’t respond to someone calling about her missing kid? I think she’s the key to all this.”
Everly felt like the world was spinning too fast and uneven beneath her, but she forced herself to ignore it.
“Great,” she said, tilting up her chin against the objections she could already feel coming at her, like he was firing them one after the other from that big, ugly gun of his. She even crossed her arms in front of her, like that might make her bulletproof. She pretended she was. “Let’s go find her.”
Eighteen
Blue was off his game, and he didn’t like it.
They were back in the SUV, Everly in the passenger seat at his side, because he’d lost that fight in a hurry.
When had he started losing fights? But he already knew the answer. It was coming back to the same place where he’d last lost fights, when he’d been a kid and almost entirely powerless.
He wasn’t enjoying the déjà vu.
“How are you going to keep me safe if you’re not here?” Everly had asked him. In that new, challenging way of hers that made him hard.
And also made him want to tie her up and lock her in a closet, just to keep her safe.
But that was the trouble. Teach a woman to fight, and a man was pretty much guaranteeing that, sooner or later, she’d fight him. Blue should have seen this coming.
“One week of practicing a few self-defense movesdoes not make you prepared to handle the kind of situation we could be walking into,” he had argued, feeling a lot like a saint when he’d kept his hands to himself. Because his sense of being sucked down into the past wouldn’t ease any if he went ahead and christened his childhood bedroom the way he’d always fantasized about doing as a teenager. While his mother was downstairs, for God’s sake. “I hope you don’t think you can handle yourself because you learned a few things. Because that just makes you a danger to yourself and others. Namely, me.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” she’d said, but since she hadn’t physically backed down, he didn’t think she was surrendering. And sure enough, she’d kept right on going. “Which is why I don’t want to be left here, hoping against hope that these people don’t show up again. Hoping that I don’t have to try to protect myself and your mother with a few palm strikes. I don’t think that would end well.”
And that was how Blue Hendricks, former Navy SEAL, current Alaska Force brother, and widely acknowledged badass, found himself driving straight toward potential danger with the woman he was supposed to be protecting riding shotgun.
He figured he’d have ample time to kick his own butt over that decision later. When this was over. When he would have nothing but the towering silence of the Alaskan mountains to distract him from a fearless moral inventory of what a mess he’d made of the Everly Campbell situation.
Later,he growled at himself, and focused on the highway.
His brothers were already on the ground in Chicago.They were handling the police and the fallout from the firebomb.As far as we can tell, they climbed a telephone pole and tossed it through the window from there,Templeton had texted. Blue could have waited for them to make their way out to his stepfather’s house, so he could have left Everly in good hands, but he had that gut feeling again.
That drumming, restless sort of feeling in his gut that crap was about to go down. Or already was. That feeling that kicked at him, scraped at him, and wouldn’t let go no matter how he tried to reason his way out of it. That feeling that had saved his life more times than he could count. Today it was telling him that he needed to get out to the North Shore, and fast, if he wanted to get on top of this thing.
And certainly if he wanted to end it. And end it well, leaving Everly alive.
Alive and healthy and capable of picking up her life where it had left off just over a month ago. As if none of this had happened.
And if everything in Blue clenched too hard at that notion, he ignored it. Because he might not want to ignore it, but he damn well needed to. The same way he needed to ignore all the rest of the crap she churned up in him. He didn’t need to think any harder or deeper about his father and all the ways he could never live up to his legacy. He didn’t need to question himself about the possibility he’d been the one to treat his mother or even freaking Ron unfairly. He certainly didn’t want to think aboutghosts.