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Only to find herself face-to-face with a squawking Annabeth.
“I told you,” the older woman screamed at her, “I havePilates!”
Then she tried to drive her sharp little cocktail fork into Everly’s left eye.
So Everly did exactly what she’d been taught.
And used her palm to strike Annabeth directly in the face, taking her down to the floor.
Twenty-one
“I thought you were dead.”
Everly’s voice was raw. It cracked on the last word and hit a nerve inside Blue.
He’d been sure she was dead. That he’d lost her to these people. That he would have to add her to that sharp-edged list of names he carried in his gut like a stone, forged from guilt and grief.
Blue had been sure that he’d have to find a way to survive her, too.
And he wasn’t sure he could.
On the floor at Everly’s feet, Rebecca’s psycho of a mother let out a loud keening noise. She writhed there on her side, her hands covering her bloody nose, the end table with her crazy tea and lunatic berry plate upended beside her.
Everly was standing over Annabeth, panting, her arm still locked out from the palm strike she’d landed. Expertly.
Blue was sure he’d never seen anything so beautiful. Everly was alive. She was flushed andaliveand she’d knocked that cackling loon on her butt.
He was so proud of Everly it actually ached.
“I’m not dead,” he told her, his voice rough and low because he’d had no idea what he would find in here. He’d floated in that pool until his lungs ached and his head went spinny, thinking his only edge was taking himself out of the bull’s-eye without actually dying. Then the bigger goon had made the vast mistake of prodding him with one of the poolside cleaning implements.
When he’d finished teaching the moron the error of his ways, with prejudice, he’d gone to find Everly.
Aware with every agitated kick of his heart that he was probably too late.
He thought he would carry the sight of her in this room to his grave. He expected it to live in his nightmares. She’d been down on her knees but still defiant, staring up at Annabeth as if she could chat all day with a woman who wanted her dead and had already gone to some trouble to make that happen.
And when she’d seen him, everything had changed.
It wasn’t the world that had gone quiet; it was him.
Like a key into a lock, smooth and right. A recognition so profound and so simple that it had rocked him. Made him a different man than he’d been a breath before.
And that was before he saw that douchebag’s handprint on her face.
He stepped on said douchebag’s arm now, happy to share his feelings on that topic as the guy tried to breathe through the brutal takedown Blue had enacted.
With malice.
“I saw them shoot you, Blue. I saw you drown.”
Everly looked haunted. But Blue smiled, because she wasaliveand he couldn’t seem to help himself.
“I’m a SEAL, baby. SEALs don’t drown.”
He wanted to go to her. He wanted his hands on her. He wanted things he could hardly articulate, even in his own head.
But it didn’t matter what he wanted.