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Or she’d inched forward, to be more precise. Whatever worked.
And then, sometime later, as she sat in a room crowded with very big and obviously dangerous men who looked as lethal as Blue did all these years later, and sounded three times as scary, it had all caught up to her. All the weeks of terror. The panic and fear. All the running and hiding and locking herself in the bathroom to sleep fitfully in the apartment only she seemed to believe had been the sceneof so much horror. The vats of coffee she’d chugged to keep herself functional. The sugar she’d inhaled in case the coffee didn’t quite work. It had all rolled over her and knocked her out.
Or so she assumed.
She didn’t remember falling asleep. But the fact that she was sitting in an unfamiliar bed suggested that she had, and heavily enough that she had no recollection of being moved from the lobby of the lodge to... wherever she was now.
Everly rolled off the bed, checking her watch for the fifteenth time, as if that would make it say something that made more sense than 1:07 a.m. with all that weird light outside. Her jacket had twisted around as she’d slept, so she tried to tug it back into place as she stood. She looked around, taking in the dim, quiet interior of the cabin. It didn’t look like anyone lived here or ever had. There wasn’t much more than the bed she was lying on, a scarred dresser in one corner, and the battered wooden floor beneath her feet, all looking wholly unused and untouched, as if this were a hotel room no one had occupied recently.
She saw her foldable, metallic flats on the floor next to the bed, curling up where they lay like pill bugs with cheerful teal soles. Usually the sight of them made her happy, but not today.Tonight,she corrected herself. She didn’t slip her feet into them, padding over instead toward the windows that flanked the front door, the unearthly light glowing around the edges of the curtains.
She eased the front door open, surprised when it didn’t creak the way she’d expected it to, since it looked so rough and felt so heavy. Something about that seemed toshudder through her, as if the door were a clue to a mystery she hadn’t realized she needed to solve.
But then it didn’t matter, because she was easing her way out onto the wide porch that jutted out over the cove below. And that should have been arresting enough. The Alaskan mountains were bold and high, capped with snow though it was high summer, and they loomed everywhere she looked. The sea was a dark, murmuring presence all around, in case she was tempted to forget she was standing on an island in the Gulf of Alaska, thousands and thousands of miles from anywhere. The strange, far northern light in the middle of the night was a kind of blue predawn and stirred her up inside in ways she didn’t quite understand. It felt magical. Otherworldly.
Yet what she noticed far more than the landscape was the man sitting out on one of the benches on the porch in the light of a lantern she wasn’t sure he needed, as if he’d been there a long while. As if he were standing guard, whether to keep her in or others out, she didn’t know.
And he was far more magical than the sky.
Blue.
His name moved through her like the tide against the shore below. An insistent, irrevocable clamor.
And it was worse now. Much worse than it had been when she’d thrown herself out of her rental car and staggered toward him, hoping like hell he remembered her.
That had all seemed so desperate, a part of all the panic and horror that had taken her over. She’d noticed how he looked. Of course she’d noticed. He was big and hard and scowling, and had added about a hundred pounds of sleek, lean muscle to the wiry teenage form she remembered. All of it in places she was entirely toofemale—even if she’d been scared so long she hardly remembered that she’d ever felt something, anything else—notto notice.
But this was worse.
He was justsitting there, for one thing. Not pacing around behind the lodge, in and out of the watchful trees. He had his feet kicked up on the bench and was looking down at a tablet in his hands, his head propped up behind him as if he’d never been more comfortable in all his life than he was then, lounging on a wooden bench after one in the oddly deep blue morning.
And maybe it was because she’d just slept—and hard—but Everly didn’t have it in her to deny what washed over her at the sight of him. It wasn’t just that he was beautiful, though he was. God help her, he was.
Blue Hendricks was what people dreamed about when they conjured up the wordhero. Tough. Strong. His dark hair was cut short as if he were still in the military, but the starkness of it only called more attention to the undeniable masculine beauty of his face. His mouth... got to her. It made her insides quiver, funny and low. His tough jaw saved him from prettiness, and the lines that fanned out from his dark eyes suggested that he was capable of acting a lot happier and friendlier than he had around her so far. He hadn’t shaved recently, but what might have looked scraggly on someone else looked nothing short of perfect on him. He was out there exposed to the Alaskan elements in cargo trousers, boots, and a T-shirt that did things that should have been preposterous to his hard, wide chest and impossibly sculpted biceps.
Everly told herself that the fact that this man happenedto be stupidly hot had nothing to do with... anything. But her breath seemed to tangle there in her throat regardless. And she knew the reality that he wasthat attractivewas something she was going to have to get over. Or find a way to ignore, anyway.
Because what mattered far more than how ridiculously good-looking her once-upon-a-time neighbor had become was the unmistakable fact that the man was a loaded gun. A deadly weapon in male form. And she’d never been happier in all her heretofore pacifist life to see that much artillery packed solid and lethal into one obviously capable man.
Blue didn’t move a single astonishingly hard muscle when she came through the door. But Everly had no illusions that she was sneaking up on him. It was possible he’d known the very moment she’d woken up inside, well before her feet touched the floor. She doubted she’d have managed to sneak up on him if it had been pitch-dark out here, much less when he was as bathed in the strange indigo light as she was.
She didn’t think he was the kind of man people snuck up on.
“What happened?” she asked, her voice husky.
She told herself it was from the unexpected nap. Because that had to be sleep in her throat, not the odd reaction she was having to Blue himself, like something almost uncomfortably fizzy was working its way over her skin and sinking deep beneath it, down into her bones.
Because her life was already complicated enough.
He didn’t look up. “You fell asleep. Hard. In a room full of people.”
There was no reason that should have made her feel so... fragile. “Where am I?”
“If you don’t know where you are, Everly,” Blue said in that gruff voice of his that rolled over her and then shook through her like some kind of thunder, setting off competing storms inside her whether she liked it or not, “then you’re in more trouble than I thought.”
“I know I’m in Alaska,” she said, as if she expected him to start handing out prizes for the right answers. Like the people-pleasing Miss Goody Two-shoes she’d been her entire life, until a month ago when she’d been recast as a lunatic Girl Who Cried Wolf who was maybe also a psychopathic killer. Or something. Maybe her parents’ disappointment in their less accomplished child wasn’t misplaced. “In a very hard-to-reach place a million miles from anything resembling a city, called Grizzly Harbor. Well. This is Fool’s Cove, technically. A... suburb of Grizzly Harbor?”
“Congratulations. You looked at a map.”