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He grabbed it in midair, of course.
She didn’t let that stop her.
“Stop,” she said with a quiet force she could feel flooding out from somewhere deep inside her, as if she were a part of the vastness all around her. As if it were in her, too. “I’m not a little girl. You don’t think I’m a little girl—you just wish you did.”
He shook his head as if he wanted to argue. She didn’t let him.
“I told you I was in love with you, Blue. I meant it. Did you really think that if you snuck out in the middle of the night, I would forget?”
Twenty-three
Blue dropped her hand like it was on fire, but that did nothing to alleviate the burn. He could feel her touch everywhere, making him hard and hollow and even less happy than he’d been to begin with.
She was here, and clearly had no particular plan to come find him.
She washere, for God’s sake.
According to Templeton, she’d been sauntering around Grizzly Harbor, unaware that he was tailing her for a good twenty minutes. She’d poked around the shops that stayed open, if only at random hours now that the summer crowds were gone. She’d taken some pictures with her phone. She’d looked, Templeton had been sure to tell him, as if she were just in town to look at the pretty views and then leave, like any other tourist.
“Great,” Blue had said, glaring down at his tablet as if he were really that entranced by the latest missionparameters they’d been debating in the lodge. “Then she’ll leave like a tourist, too. On the next ferry.”
No one had pointed out that today was Monday and the next ferry didn’t come until Friday. Everyone knew the freaking ferry schedule. Blue certainly did.
“Jesus Christ,” Jonas had muttered darkly. “I can’t stand this. You’ve been running around here like a crazy person for the past month.”
“I’m sorry if you can’t handle an uptick in intensity, brother,” Blue had replied. Through his teeth. “Noted.”
Jonas had flipped him the bird. Blue had responded in kind.
But it was Isaac who’d caught up to him when the meeting was over, falling into the same pace beside him as Blue had headed down to the water.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Blue gritted out.
“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“I can guess.”
“If you can guess, then I don’t know why you’re still here, glaring at the tide.”
Blue liked to take the beach route back to his cabin when it was low tide, although not so much today, when he mostly wanted to break things. He and Isaac had stood down by the water’s edge for a moment, Fool’s Cove deceptively smooth before them. Blue put his hands on his hips and stared out at the water because it was better than sucker punching one of the best men he knew, but it didn’t soothe him the way it used to.
The way it had even six weeks back.
The water wasn’t doing its job the way it had before.
“You went back home,” Isaac said into the silence.“That gets in your head. It messes you up.” He laughed. “Believe me, I know.”
“I spent twenty years knowing exactly who I was,” Blue heard himself say. And then, having started, he couldn’t seem to stop. “I knew what I did and why. I knew exactly what I stood for. There were no mysteries—there were only missions.”
Isaac stood next to him, his gaze trained on the water, too. And the fact that he didn’t say anything—he didn’t jump in to tell Blue what to feel, or argue with him about his own damned life—made it easy to keep going.
To put words to the thing that had been eating him alive since he’d left Chicago.
“She thinks I’m a hero,” Blue said, scratchy and low.
“I get why that bothers you,” Isaac replied, his voice grave.
Because he did. He knew what it meant when Blue said that. They all knew thatherowas a word that sounded great to other people and made those other people feel good, too. But every man in Alaska Force knew what it took to earn that title. What they’d done. What they’d lost. What each and every one of them would carry with them, always, thanks to that so-called heroism.