SEAL's Honor Page 8

  “I always look.” He felt himself smile. Barely. “You’re not supposed to see me doing it.”

  He didn’t tell her that it was automatic. A survival mechanism, born of all those years when the only things that stood between him and certain disaster were the skills ingrained so deeply he didn’t have to think about them. Now that kind of vigilance was like a second skin.

  “I’m amazed at the detail. The camera equipment and the trail map.”

  “I can identify a trail map. And a camera. And a tourist who’s inevitably going to fall in the water, need to get fished out, and ruin all his brand-spanking-new equipment anyway.”

  “I’m not questioning you,” she said softly, and this time, that real smile of hers was all for him. “I’m thanking you.”

  Blue realized, abruptly, that he was just standing there. Hanging around the street outside the café as if this were a normal conversation. Some small talk and a pretty smile. Things Blue adamantly did not partake of, ever. He wasn’t a casual man. He never had been.

  He didn’t know what it was about Everly that made him feel new to himself. He knew only that he didn’t like it. He was a SEAL, for God’s sake. He didn’t let anything throw him, and certainly not a smile.

  He jerked his chin so she would follow him and set off down the winding street, up on the boardwalk, and then back down, aware of every step she took behind him in those silly shoes. But to her credit, she didn’t complain. She didn’t ask him to slow down or adjust his stride. She followed right behind him, gamely enough, until he reached the place down by the pier where he’d parked her rental.

  “Oh.” Everly blinked at the car, then at him. “Don’t tell me you drove back over that terrible mountain.” She shuddered, and he didn’t think it was for show. “It was pretty terrifying up there.”

  “Yeah, about that.” He didn’t understand why he sounded so flat. So pissed. “Never, ever do something so stupid again.”

  He expected her to get her back up at that. No one liked being called stupid, especially when it was true.

  But Everly didn’t look offended. If anything, she looked rueful, and that was the trouble with her. He couldn’t predict a single thing she did. He’d been completely wrong about everything so far, and it was driving him crazy.

  “It was stupid,” she agreed, because of course she had to make it impossible to dislike her or even stay rightfully furious with her. “So stupid. But by the time I realized exactly how stupid it was—and how close to death I was—by which I mean, like, a single half centimeter between me and a sheer drop of I don’t even know how far . . .” She shook her head, blowing out a breath while she did it. “I didn’t have any choice but to keep going. Because I figured the only thing more stupid than driving over that mountain in the first place was trying to reverse my way back off of it.”

  “You know what they call that road?”

  “Yes. As you pointed out yesterday, I did in fact consult a map. Hardy’s Pass. Elevation, way too freaking high, and road conditions, not awesome.”

  “That’s the official name. Everyone around here calls it Hard-Ass Pass. Because only a hard-ass goes up that mountain and makes it back down the other side.” Before he could think better of it, or even really think it through, Blue reached out and dealt with that same errant chunk of hair that the wind kept toying with. He pretended he didn’t feel the way she went still when his fingers grazed that sweet spot behind her ear. The same way he pretended he didn’t feel a damn thing himself. “So I guess that makes you a hard-ass, little girl.”

  She smiled as if she hadn’t shaken before him on an eerily lit porch, or shown him her tears. As if her ears and neck weren’t flushed that telltale red. As if she didn’t feel that touch the way he did, like an ache.

  He reminded himself of that bike, pink and white streamers flapping everywhere. The sheltered kid she’d been back then. But it didn’t help. Instead, it made everything in him seem to hum in a kind of recognition he didn’t want to acknowledge.

  But Everly was smiling at him.

  “I can’t really tell—because there’s a whole growly superhero thing going on, which is very Batman, and of course there’s the continued use of ‘little girl’ in a way that I really don’t think is all that appropriate—but I think that was a compliment.”

  “Growly?” He didn’t touch her again, and thought that deserved a commendation or two. “Batman?”

  “I try to like Superman,” Everly said in a rush, as if it were a confession, and he watched with that same fascination as another bright red flush spread over her cheeks. “I try and I try, but he’s just so boring. He does good for no particular reason and is so bland he can completely disguise himself with a pair of glasses. . . .” She let out a small sigh. “I guess I’ve always liked Batman better.”

  “I wouldn’t have figured you for a comic book fan. You’re too . . .”

  “Female?” Everly supplied. A bit tartly.

  “Fancy.” He raised his brows at her. “Too much of a city girl.”

  “I like Chicago a lot,” Everly told him, and when she smiled this time, he found his gaze drawn to the tiny dent in one of her cheeks. He wanted to taste it. He didn’t know how he held himself back. “But my favorite city, obviously, is Gotham.”

  Blue knew full well they had things to do. Important things. He’d decided to take Everly and her situation on, and that meant he had problems to solve. Lurking asswipes to locate and discourage. A police force to handle and a potential crime scene to investigate in his own way.

  But instead, all he could seem to do was stand around on a cool summer morning talking about the local flavor and comic books he hadn’t read since high school.

  None of this made sense. None of this was who he was.

  He didn’t get to meet-cute and live her kind of life. He didn’t get to go back in time and find a white picket fence to wrap himself in. He wasn’t innocent. Maybe he never had been.

  Blue made himself take a step back from her, and hated the fact that putting space between them practically broadcast his own weaknesses. He might as well tell the whole town that he couldn’t control himself.

  Or, worse, that he was entirely too tempted to forget himself.

  “Take everything you need out of your car,” he told her, his voice too gruff.

  “I got my bag last night.” Everly gazed back at him, but her green eyes were unreadable. If she’d noticed that he’d touched her and then jumped away like a kid who didn’t know his own mind, she didn’t show it.

  Which, perversely, pissed Blue off.

  “Is that everything?”

  She studied his face for a moment. “Does it matter? We’ll have days and days and days to figure out what’s in the car. And whether or not you want to throw it out into the wilds of the Yukon rather than look at it one moment more, which I’ve already considered. About fifty times a day.”

  “We’re not driving.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said. We’re not taking a week to drive the length of Canada, for God’s sake. I don’t know how you survived it one way. All that sitting would drive me crazy.”

  “I don’t want to brag, but I’m actually really good at sitting. Like Olympic level.”

  “Are you trying to be cute?”

  She made a grand gesture with one hand. “It’s a simple truth you can do with as you will.”

  As if she realized she was babbling, a hint of red appeared on the tips of her ears. Again. There was so much blushing, it surprised him she didn’t go up in flames.

  Then again, it also surprised him that he didn’t.

  “Of course,” she was saying, “it’s a rental car. I have to actually return it. I’m pretty sure it’s in the contract I signed.”

  “We’ll take care of your car. You don’t need to worry about it.�
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  “But—”

  “This is why you came all the way here, Everly,” he said patiently. Or maybe not all that patiently, he thought, when her eyes narrowed. “These are the kinds of details you hire people like us to take care of.”

  She stood straighter then, and the last hint of her smile disappeared from her lips. “Right. We need to talk about what hiring you means.”

  “It means I’m going to solve your problem. The end.”

  “You and all your friends look too scarily capable, let’s just say, to be cheap. And there’s the whole Fortress of Doom on the back side of an impossible-to-reach island where there’s no running water but there is, notably, abundant Wi-Fi.”

  He hated that she made his mouth twitch despite himself. “We have running water. In some cabins.”

  They also had what Griffin liked to call all that spy shit, but there was no need to get into that.

  “My point is that I have some savings that my grandmother—”

  “I’m not taking your money.” He was offended she even suggested it.

  “Of course I’m paying you,” she retorted, standing even straighter, like she imagined she could go toe-to-toe with him. “As you pointed out, you barely know me. We grew up on the same street, that’s all. It never occurred to me that you would do anything for me for free, nor should you. My grandmother—”

  “I’m not going to argue about this,” he told her. In a tone of voice that had been known to quiet treacherous uprisings and unruly dissidents alike. He wasn’t as shocked as he should have been that it had no discernible effect on Everly. “It’s not happening. I don’t want to hear about your grandmother again.”

  “Blue. Really. I want—”

  “If you have anything left in this car, you need to get it.” His voice was calm now, and so was he, because this was the mission. She was the mission. He didn’t want to examine what was happening to him around her and all that blushing and that smile that was wrecking him, but none of that mattered. Because this was what he did. He needed to focus on that. “We’ll go back to the inn and get whatever you left there. And then we’re hitting the road.”

  “Hitting the road?” she echoed. “What road?”

  “It’s commonly known as the Alaskan Marine Highway. You took the ferry over it already. But we’re going to fly.”

  She digested that. “You have your own plane?”

  “This is Alaska, sweetheart. Everybody has a plane.”

  “Everybody.” It was a challenge. “That old guy in the restaurant has a plane, too?”

  “Ernie is a bush pilot, among other things,” Blue told her. Maybe with too much satisfaction. “Some places, there are no roads at all, not even what passes for a street here in Grizzly Harbor. People use boats to get to town and ride ATVs in the bush. If someone needs to go any farther than that, they use a plane.” He nodded at the harbor spread out before them, the boats bobbing on their moorings, and the unforgiving white-capped mountain peaks all around. And everywhere else, in all directions, the seething summer ocean. “In case you haven’t noticed, this is the Last Frontier.”

  Everly looked like she had more to say, but when he nodded toward her car again, more insistently this time, she went over to it, opened the hatchback, and started rifling through it. When all was said and done, she threw her things into a bag on the backseat, and then looked like she wanted to object when he took it from her.

  And that was when he got it. The thing that was so different about Everly Campbell.

  She didn’t seem the least bit afraid of him.

  It spun his head around a little, Blue was man enough to admit. At least to himself.

  He was used to being . . . problematic. Women who enjoyed a taste of danger were always drawn to him, but they had their own issues, and he could usually see that particular avidness coming at him from a mile away. That wasn’t how Everly looked at him.

  Everly had called him a hero. She looked at him as if he were still that boy he’d been a million years ago. It was funny, the things he remembered when he’d actively been trying to erase that entire part of his life for years now. That house. The people in it. The one person—his father, who had died when Blue was ten—who had not been in it. He’d worked so hard to block all of that out.

  But he remembered this. Everly. Her wide green eyes, fixed on him with perfect, total trust.

  She’d looked at him back then when she couldn’t have known better. It was worse now, because she should have realized who and what he was.

  But she showed no fear. No wariness, even. Just that same solemn certainty he was surprised to realize he remembered, as if she had no doubt at all that he could do exactly what he said he would. As if he could do anything.

  She made him want to try.

  And that, he knew, was begging for disaster.

  Because this was just a regular Tuesday for him, but only the most dire circumstance—witnessing a murder, possibly being targeted to be next—could have brought Everly here to find him. While she’d slept last night, before they’d had their talk on the porch of her cabin, he’d dug into her.

  And the thing about Everly was, she was normal. Happily normal, according to all the available evidence he’d accessed on the Internet and through Alaska Force’s more back-channel means. Her mother and brother were doctors, just as she’d said. Her father had recently retired after teaching biology at the university level for most of his life. Everly had gone to college at a place that touted itself as the Harvard of the Midwest and then had built herself a nice, safe life in Chicago. Roommates had come and gone, but there had been no glaring incidents with any of them aside from the usual squabbles over housekeeping. Landlords wrote good reviews about her, and employers followed suit. She’d had a couple of equally normal-seeming boyfriends, but nothing serious. Her social media accounts were filled with pictures of friends, the occasional trip or outing somewhere exotic, and the usual selfies—though he noted that wasn’t something she did too often, either.

  She was just . . . normal. Completely and totally normal, as far as he could tell.

  And for a man like him, that was as much a temptation as it was forbidden.

  Because normal meant innocent. Untouched. Unsullied.

  Normal meant whole. No blood on her hands, nothing tainted and twisted, or charred in the place where real people kept their hearts.

  It wasn’t an accident that Blue lived out here, far away from normal people and their quiet, contented little lives. There was a reason he surrounded himself with men just like him, savage to the bone. Men who still lived by strict codes of honor and still tried to do the only thing they were good at, because that was the only way to survive with the kind of blood they had on their hands.

  The kind he had on his.

  Blue had always handled what needs he couldn’t repress or ignore with the adrenaline junkies, the women who wanted him precisely because of the danger he represented. Maybe that was empty, but no one got hurt.

  He’d decided a long time ago that he was done hurting anyone, if he could help it.

  It had never occurred to him that he would ever meet a woman who would tempt him to break his own rules.

  “You’ve gone very quiet,” Everly said. She looked slightly apprehensive as she gazed up at him. “That doesn’t mean you’re changing your mind.”

  She said it like it was a statement, but he heard the question there, hanging in the air.

  “I’m not going to change my mind,” Blue said shortly, though he knew he should. That if he was even half the man he’d always imagined he was, he’d step away from this particular temptation right here, right now. He’d turn her over to Templeton, Isaac, even Jonas. One of his brothers could handle this, and her, without breaking a sweat.

  And, he had to believe, without that unwelcome thing inside him that kept pushing him to act
like someone else.

  Someone undamaged. Someone unbroken and fit for human interaction, when he knew better.

  God, did he know better.

  There was a kind of knowledge in her gaze then, and it hit him much too hard, because she shouldn’t have been able to read him. She shouldn’t have been unafraid of him. She should have cowered a bit. Cried more.

  She should have done something to make herself less tempting.

  “You don’t look sure.”

  “Everly.” Blue gritted her name out like it hurt. Because it did, and he didn’t know what to do about that, either. “I’m sure.”

  And that, at least was true. He was sure all right.

  That he was boned.

  Seven

  Chicago had changed in the week she’d been away.

  Everly told herself it was the long flight. Or, more likely, the man who’d lounged across from her in the biggest of the plane’s three different seating areas, apparently deeply engrossed in whatever he was reading on that tablet of his. Or studying the drawings she’d made of the men in her apartment that night and the ones she’d seen following her on the street. Or conducting almost laughably laconic mobile phone conversations that consisted of him saying single words like affirmative repeatedly.

  She’d wanted to focus on the fact that she was on a private jet flown by one of the mysterious Alaska Force men, but didn’t. Instead of marveling at her surroundings, she’d found herself fixating on that strange, breathless moment down at the pier in Grizzly Harbor when Blue had tucked a bit of her hair behind her ear.

  Here, now, in the passenger seat of the SUV that had been waiting for them when they’d landed on an airfield outside Chicago, Everly fought off a shiver. Again. Just thinking about that brush of his fingers—

  Her inner voice was stern, as if that might make a difference. You need to get a hold of yourself.

  Not that she’d paid much attention to her inner voice so far.

  Beside her, Blue navigated his way through the usual Chicago traffic as if he drove through congested major cities every day. Everly knew perfectly well the only congestion back in Grizzly Harbor was likely to come from the moose population, and yet Blue didn’t seem to be the least bit bothered. He had one hand hooked over the steering wheel, while the rest of his big, rangy body somehow took up twice the room it should have. She had to physically restrain herself from pressing against the passenger door, because she didn’t want him to have even the slightest inkling of the effect he had on her.