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Just like he didn’t want to think about the fact that a little girl on a pink bike he’d wanted to break with hisown two hands way back when could have grown up and wrecked him so easily.
He hadn’t seen her coming. Even when she’d arrived, spilling out of her car and staggering toward him in the dirt, he hadn’t realized his world was already spinning off its axis. How could he? He’d had no intention of helping her, much less coming back to Chicago with her.
And he certainly hadn’t planned to lay a single finger on her.
Sleeping with Everly had destroyed him, and Blue still didn’t understand how that had happened, only that it had. He’d been caught naked, literally. When that bomb had gone off, he’d woken up with her wrapped up in his arms, and for the first split second, he’d panicked.
That was unacceptable.
Everly wasn’t an adrenaline junkie. Blue knew she hadn’t slept with him to get a notch on her belt, or even as some sort of shady transactional thing because he was keeping her safe. He knew she wanted him. He knew she trusted him. Hell, he had the uncomfortable feeling that even now she really thought he was a hero.
And his problem was that he cared entirely too much about the things this woman thought.
Like every single thing she’d said to him in the sitting room on the third floor, sinking her untrained hands deep into his chest and cracking it open, as surely as if she’d used a spreader to wrench his ribs apart. Or the fact that she’d witnessed that crappy interchange with his mother, a conversation he’d been avoiding for all this timeon purpose. Or worse, that Everly had imagined she had some insight into the endless mess that was his family.
He couldn’t seem to get his head back into the game,where it belonged. Blue knew he needed to finish this thing off and get away from here. He wanted the quiet. He wanted the remote splendor of Grizzly Harbor. He wanted the demands on him to be about his skills and expertise, not all this emotional crap he’d never wanted to dig up in the first place.
“Did you find anything?” he asked her now, gunning it as he dodged traffic on I-294, heading north to skirt the city and access the North Shore suburbs.
“I’m looking,” Everly replied in a distracted tone. He’d given her his tablet and told her to access her social media accounts to see if there had been any other updates from Rebecca. Or whoever was using Rebecca’s account, because Blue didn’t think either one of them truly believed Everly’s roommate was still alive at this point. “There’s nothing anywhere. The last updates were the ones you told me about, but nothing since.”
Blue tried to concentrate on the highway. He needed his heart rate to go down. He needed his head to clear. He needed to quit worrying about what Everly was doing—and thinking and feeling, and was he back in high school, for God’s sake?—and pay more attention to what he planned to do when they found Rebecca’s mother.
Besides interrogate her about her failure to reply to his message, and ask her if she knew anything about the men who had come after them last night, that was.
“That’s not good,” Everly muttered from beside him.
And he hated the fact that she was still wearing the same T-shirt she’d slept in last night. Because all he could think about was the fact that she wasn’t wearing anything beneath it. And how he’d love to get his hands beneath it all over again.
Blue couldn’t believe what an asshole he was. He really couldn’t.
“What’s not good?” he managed to ask.
Everly shrugged. “My boss noticed my absence today, that’s all. I need to appear at his desk with an appropriate apology within the next hour, or he says he’s letting me go.”
“I can send someone to talk to him. Get his head on straight.”
He heard Everly take a deep breath, hold it, and then release it. He felt that inside him, like a blow. He’d taught her that, he thought. He’d taught her how to breathe, and now she did it without his having to point out that she’d stopped in the first place.
She’d stood up to him. She’d insisted that he take her with him, and he had.
Everly was going to be just fine when he left. Blue wished he could be as sure about himself.
But there was no point fixating on things like that. Not now. He could feel in his bones that they were closing in on the end of this, and he had no intention of letting it end badly. That meant that everything would be exactly the way it was supposed to be once it was done. He would head back to his cabin in Fool’s Cove. He would spend his days plotting out missions and acclimating to civilian life with his Alaska Force brothers. He’d eat at the Water’s Edge Café in Grizzly Harbor, the way he always did. He’d drink at the Fairweather. He’d take trail runs on frigid mornings that felt etched out of ice. He’d learn new words forsnow.
He would not think about Chicago. He would not obsess about his family. He would leave the past where itbelonged, and he would live his life exactly the way he wanted to live it.
And he would not think about Everly Campbell or the way she’d wrapped herself around him and cried out her pleasure into his ear, ever again.
“The truth is, I don’t care if I get fired,” Everly said, snapping him out of what he suspected was a whole host of lies he’d been telling himself.
“I wouldn’t walk away from a good job just because you’ve had a few problems,” he replied, his tone short. “I told you we’ll talk to your boss.”
“What I’m telling you, Blue, is that I don’t want you to talk to my boss.” She smiled at him. “I can talk to my boss, thank you. I can tell him that I haven’t liked my job for some time. When I started, it was creative and fun. Now it’s too corporate and, honestly, not that much fun at all. This is as good a time as any to move on.”
Blue switched lanes with more aggression than was called for. “Listen to me. What you’re living through right now is a crisis. The last thing you want to do is change your life in ways you can’t take back in the middle of crisis mode, because everything’s going to go back to normal, and then what?”
“I might not live to the end of next week. I might not live through the day, actually.”