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And no matter how distractingly pretty she was.
So Blue sucked it up, promised himself he’d never give in to that greedy hunger within him, and led her inside to meet the rest of the reprobates who made up Alaska Force, before he thought better of it.
Before he came to his senses and sent her home.
Three
Everly woke up startled, her heart trying to claw its way out of her chest, the way she’d done every morning since the night Rebecca had died. She was almost used to the kick of it. The panic as she looked around to make sure she was safe. The dawning realization that maybe she never would be again.
Time was running out. She felt that deep inside, like her own breath.
But this morning was different.
It took her a minute to realize what the problem was as she looked around the small log cabin, her ability to see helped considerably by the deep blue light leaking in around the sides of the curtains pulled haphazardly across the windows on the far wall.
Her gut told her it wasn’t morning at all. Her watch told her it was 1:03. And this was Alaska, land of the midnight sun farther north, so Everly guessed that 1:03was unlikely to be the following afternoon no matter how tired she’d been. She eased herself up on the bed and looked around the small room she found herself in, trying to piece together what had happened.
And where the hell she was. Specifically.
She knew she was in Alaska, of course. It was the details beyond Alaska itself, the biggest state in the Union and the last, best frontier, that escaped her.
She’d been in that rental car forever. Hour after hour, day after day, fueled by panic and adrenaline. She’d kept pushing herself to drive farther and faster because she’d been so certain—or had wanted to be certain with every part of her that dared imagine she might get out of this mess—that the legend of Blue Hendricks her brother had shared with her over the phone one night would save her.
That he had to—he had to—because no one else could.
The ferry from Skagway had dropped her off in the colorful, quaint village of Grizzly Harbor after it had whisked her across glacier-studded seas she’d hardly believed were real even as she’d gaped at them. Mountains draped in clouds and fog, still capped with snow though it was summer. Sparkling blue skies everywhere else, arched over the mysterious northern Pacific Ocean. And evergreen trees on every surface, sturdy and windblown and a deep, rugged green. The town itself seemed torn from the pages of a picture book, atmospheric and pretty despite, or maybe because of, the weather-beaten, jagged coast where it sprawled just above the waterline, as if it were fighting to stay afloat. The buildings were painted bright colors that should have been jarring, bold and evocative against the gray sea despite their peeling paint, andEverly knew that only a short month ago she wouldn’t have been able to walk three feet without snapping a few thousand pictures.
A month ago, when she’d still been the person she used to be. A month ago, when she’d still had a normal life and the projected life span to go along with it.
But she hadn’t come to Alaska to sightsee. Or to mourn the slow-motion loss of her entire life, likely quite literally if she couldn’t find Blue Hendricks and beg him to help her. She was on a mission—though it hadn’t taken long on the walkways that passed for the streets in tiny Grizzly Harbor to figure out that no one in the whole town wanted to tell her where Blue actually lived.
“Oh, around,” the man in the general store had said with a shrug. He’d nodded in the vague direction of the dive bar Everly had walked by on her first pass through the little fishing village that clung to the base of the mountain, barely above the high-tide line and scattered up into the trees along the steep incline. “You’ll run into him sooner or later.”
Butsooner or laterwas time Everly didn’t have.
It took her a while longer to figure out that the tiny, remote cove where Blue and his equally intimidating buddies were holed up might as well have been on a separate, possibly armored island; it was so inaccessible. Instead of right here on the same rather small island in the Alexander Archipelago, the range of submerged coastal mountains that made up the bulk of Southeast Alaska and created the many sharp, hilly coasts and deep fjords that Everly had seen from the ferry.
But even when she’d realized how much farther shestill had to go, after she’d foolishly thought she’d finally reached safety in Grizzly Harbor itself, she hadn’t stopped to have a long sob about the extreme unfairness of all this the way she’d wanted to.
Life is unfair,she’d told herself harshly instead, because harsh was all she had left these days, and it was better than the alternative.Better to know it than be surprised by it.
She had to keep moving forward, as fast as she could, or she would collapse. And Everly knew that if she allowed herself to collapse, if she fell down on the ground the way she wanted to with every last, protesting cell in her body, she would never get up again.
She’d felt the same thing that night in her Chicago apartment, almost a full month ago now. She’d stood there in her usual nighttime outfit of a tank top and pajama pants, barefoot and half-asleep in her own bedroom doorway. Everly had looked at the horror unfolding before her, right there across her living room, and she’d frozen. Her heart had beat once, a stunningly violent kick that had made her feel dizzy. Sick.
And she’d known that she had one split second to act or there would be no action. One split second to move or she would never move again.
Everly had been moving ever since.
It had taken one pointed conversation with the unfriendly owner of the Water’s Edge Café, the first and only café Everly had found in Grizzly Harbor, to learn the name of the place where Blue lived. Supposedly.
“You don’t want to go to Fool’s Cove,” the woman had told Everly, eyeing her as if taking her coffee orderhad been offensive enough, but asking questions was up there with a personal attack. She’d slid her hands in the back pockets of her jeans and shaken her head like Everly was an idiot. “It’s for fools. It’s right there in the name.”
But getting to Fool’s Cove had seemed relatively straightforward, the café owner’s attitude and its name notwithstanding. Everly had pulled up the map on her mobile phone with what iffy cell service she had, and sure, the road over the big mountain had looked squiggly—but after almost a week of driving across the greater Yukon and Alaskan wilderness all by herself, sleeping in her rental car when necessary, she wasn’t afraid of a little squiggle.
Until she understood that what she drove over that mountain wasn’t so much a road as it was the suggestion of a road, and not much of a suggestion at that.
She’d gotten through it in white-knuckled, ear-popping, potential-heart-attack-at-any-second silence. She hadn’t looked down at the steep drop-off that had sometimes seemed to be all of a crumbling inch away from her tires. She’d kept moving forward, because that was what she did now.