SEAL's Honor Page 9
She didn’t want to admit it to herself.
And if she didn’t keep herself under control, she was afraid she would give in to the temptation to press herself against one of his absurdly sculpted arms. It was shown to entirely too much perfection in the T-shirt he wore, which strained to handle his biceps at all, and his forearm was a thing of such intense masculine perfection that Everly wasn’t sure how she was supposed to breathe with it right there. It was safer to sit carefully and quietly still. It was better to stare straight ahead, out the front of the vehicle, at the city all around them, gleaming steel and stone in the last of the summer evening.
Everly had always considered Chicago her home, even before she’d lived within the city proper. She’d spent her childhood and all her college years dreaming of moving here, and she’d made her dreams a reality the minute she’d graduated. But tonight it felt too big. Anonymous and threatening as it loomed above them. Blue inched his way into her neighborhood, and instead of feeling welcomed back or at home at last, she thought there was too much concrete. Everywhere she looked. Too many people jostling for space in the streets, on the sidewalks, and who knew how many of them were out to get her? It was hot and crowded and vaguely sinister. It made her feel as if there were a stone pressing down on her chest, forcing the air from her lungs. Crushing her bones where she sat.
She tried to shake it off.
After all, it had been a long day. They’d been up and chatting on a strangely lit Alaskan porch at one in the morning. Just about twelve hours later they’d taken a seaplane on a quick, beautiful jump from Grizzly Harbor to Juneau, where Alaska Force’s private jet had been gassed up and waiting for them.
“Stop gawking,” Blue had ordered her in that clipped, hard tone of voice he liked so much, as if he were her commanding officer.
His military background was why she’d sought him out. But it was a stark change from the way he’d talked to her as if they were some kind of almost-friends, there on the streets of pretty-as-a-postcard Grizzly Harbor. At first she’d told herself she’d imagined the change in him. That odd way he’d talked to her in the café and on the street, as if he were worried about her. Her personally, not just her as his next job. She’d lectured herself extensively that she was delirious and still exhausted and in Alaska, so of course she was hallucinating things like even the slightest little bit of softening in the hardest man she’d ever known.
But then, after she’d gathered her things from the adorably cozy Blue Bear Inn and had tried to relax in the alarmingly tiny seaplane that was flown by yet another one of Blue’s frighteningly competent ex-military friends, she’d changed her mind. It was something about the deliberately curt way Blue spoke to her. Not rude. Not mean.
But as if he’d gone too far before and was dialing himself back.
She’d decided that she hadn’t imagined anything after all.
Maybe that was why she’d grinned at him so openly, standing there on a chilly tarmac in Juneau with only the ever-present mountains as witness.
“I thought the whole point of having a private jet was so the unwashed masses would gawk,” she’d said.
That gleam in his dark gaze that she was starting to crave too much had gotten brighter then. His hard lips had hinted at a curve, there on that impossibly strong jaw he still hadn’t bothered to shave. It was her curse that she liked it that way. She liked him.
“You can’t fly commercial if you want to conduct missions on any kind of timetable.”
She’d nodded sagely. “And also, no one gawks at you if you arrive late from a layover in Cincinnati. Because that makes you one of the unwashed masses yourself.”
“There’s a lot of unwashed, suddenly. Is this your way of trying to tell me you didn’t shower today?”
Everly had only smiled wider. “I showered. But someday I’m going to have to go back to Grizzly Harbor and try those hot springs.”
Blue had looked at her for a moment that had gone on too long. Lifetimes, maybe, though it was possible only she had felt it that way. And the longer he’d looked at her, the less his eyes had gleamed in that way she liked.
“Are you planning to get in more trouble?” he asked, in a too-mild tone that Everly hadn’t really cared for.
But she’d answered him anyway. “Obviously, if I survive this, I plan to get in no trouble of any kind ever again.”
His mouth had twisted then, but it wasn’t a smile. “Then why would you come back to Grizzly Harbor?”
She’d spent the first few hours of their plane ride turning that one over and over in her head when she wasn’t reliving those odd, hushed moments near the pier—and spent the last few hours beating herself up for being such an idiot.
Maybe it was only natural to try to make this whole thing into something it wasn’t. Maybe she wasn’t so much an idiot as a very scared woman hoping like hell that Blue could really do the things she thought he could. The things she desperately needed him to do when they got back to Chicago.
But she had to remember that this was nothing but a job to him. Another mission, that was all. A favor he was doing her because they’d grown up on the same street, and nothing more.
It was disheartening—or maybe the word she was looking for was crazy—how hard that seemed to be for her to remember.
“Do cities make you feel claustrophobic?” she asked Blue as they lurched along in traffic, slowly making their way toward her apartment building.
He made a low noise. Maybe it was a laugh.
“I don’t get claustrophobic. I was a SEAL, Everly. Not a great career choice if you get claustrophobic.”
Everly had never been particularly claustrophobic herself. But that was what it felt like, returning to Chicago tonight. Driving back into her life, which had felt cheerful and good, for the most part, before that night a month ago. Now everything she’d built here seemed like a nightmare. When they passed her favorite coffee shop, the one she’d stopped at every morning on her way to work for years, it was like an unseen hand wrapped around her ribs and squeezed her tight.
The closer they got to her apartment, the harder and tighter that hand felt.
Then again, she thought when they pulled up in front of her building, maybe it wasn’t claustrophobia at all. Maybe it was simpler than that.
Maybe it was plain old terror, sickening and syrupy, rushing back in after the brief vacation she’d had from it in Alaska. Since the moment she’d slammed on the brakes in her rental wagon because she’d recognized the man standing there outside the lodge in Fool’s Cove.
She snuck a look—or three—at him as he pulled up in front of her building and parked there, tossing something on the dashboard that looked a lot like a parking pass that police might use. Not that she knew too much about Chicago parking passes without a car of her own.
Blue didn’t seem to notice the way she kept looking at him, as if she expected him to disappear at any moment. He swung out of his seat, slamming his door behind him. By the time Everly unfastened her seat belt and opened her own door, he was there, their bags slung over his broad shoulders as if they weighed nothing at all.
She figured with shoulders like that, he could carry their bags, the SUV, and her without breaking a sweat.
“Into the building fast, head down, no looking around,” he told her.
It didn’t occur to her to disobey him. Not when he sounded so serious. Not when his gaze never met hers because he was looking to the right and left as if he were sweeping the street, looking for those men who had stalked her. Not when she was still caught in the grip of that terrible fear she’d somehow forgotten about while in Alaska.
Of course she hadn’t really forgotten it. But she’d . . . put it on hold. And she couldn’t say she cared for the way it rolled back in so easily, flattening her, as if it were making up for lost time.
She ducked her head down and sprinted fo
r her front door, a desperate, itchy kind of panic rippling down the length of her spine as she moved. As if she had a target drawn all over her back. As if she could feel one of those creepy goons taking aim—
Everly was panting when she pushed through the double sets of doors, into the small lobby that held nothing but tenant mailboxes and a stack of those old paper phone books no one ever used anymore.
“You can check your mail later,” Blue said gruffly from behind her.
Right behind her, which made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. Because who could imagine that a man that big could move so quietly? Everly couldn’t really imagine it and she was experiencing it.
But she didn’t say anything. She just nodded and pushed on to the elevator. Despite the grand claims the landlord had made in the rental listing about the boutique elevator here, as if that were a perk, it was usually easier to jog up the stairs instead. Tonight the old, creaking thing seemed to take even longer than usual, and Everly didn’t know what she was supposed to do while they waited for it. Talk? Not talk? Stare grimly ahead the way Blue was doing? Pretend she was perfectly at ease with a brooding commando at her back?
She was ready to sob openly in relief when the elevator finally clattered to a stop before them. Happily, she contained herself as she stepped inside, and then had to stand there while Blue followed her, crowding into what little space was left. And he was so huge and dangerous that she didn’t really know what to do with herself except try to keep from gasping for air.
Or doing something much worse, like throwing herself at him again.
Obviously she couldn’t let herself do that. Everly stared straight ahead instead. She pretended she couldn’t really see him. That she was all alone in the antique elevator. She stared at the arrow that inched from one floor to the next and willed the elevator to move already.
It took forever to rise a single floor. Everly tried to think about something else. Anything other than the fact that she kept finding herself too close to this man, torn between wanting to touch him and knowing that would be . . . very, very bad.
At the moment, she couldn’t remember why, exactly.
She breathed in, then out. The fact was, she hadn’t been gone very long. A week was nothing. And still she felt like a complete stranger. To herself. Or maybe it was that nothing in her life seemed to fit anymore. It hadn’t when she’d raced out of here a week ago, and it certainly didn’t now that she was back. With Blue.
“I don’t like this elevator at all,” Blue said in a low growl when the elevator finally groaned to a halt on her floor and she stepped out. His comment instantly destroyed whatever fantasy of distance between them she’d been fostering. Because she could feel that growl, as if his mouth were on her—
Stop it, she snapped at herself.
“We’re going to take the stairs from now on,” Blue was saying, still in that same burnt-ember way of his.
“I live on the sixth floor.”
Everly didn’t know why she said that. She usually took the stairs because she didn’t have to be a decorated war hero with danger stamped all over her and a mouthwatering pair of forearms to know that the elevator was old, slow, and the last place she’d ever want to be stuck if something bad was happening.
It was possible she wasn’t as okay with him ordering her around as she’d thought she was.
Blue craned his neck to gaze down at her, right there in the hallway with their bags across his shoulders. Once again he seemed to take up twice the amount of space that he should. As if shoulders like his were entirely too broad to fit in a narrow hallway six floors above the Chicago streets.
She waited for him to say something. But he didn’t. He just looked at her, steady and implacable, and she felt herself flush.
“You expect me to walk up and down five flights of stairs. Every time I want to come in and out of my apartment.”
“I do.”
“What if I have heavy groceries?”
“Then you’ll get a workout. Also, you’re not going to make yourself a target by doing something stupid like carrying heavy bags, right? It’s like begging for trouble.”
“What if I have a broken leg?”
“Then you won’t have to worry about how you get in and out of your building, because you won’t be leaving your apartment at all in a compromised state.”
“What if—”
“Everly.” Her name was a command, and it seemed to land on her, then slide in deep. “A few stairs never killed anyone. But getting caught on that death trap elevator just might.”
“But—”
“I’m not going to stand out in a hallway and argue with you.”
He sounded so reasonable when he said that. So measured and calm. It made her ears burn and something more spiky than her usual fear storm through her.
She welcomed it. She’d rather be angry than afraid any day.
Everly headed down the hall toward her door, another short walk that felt like an uphill half marathon. But no matter how long it seemed to take, they were eventually at her door. And that terrible hand that gripped her at the rib cage clenched harder. Tighter.
Whatever charge she’d gotten out of being angry disappeared as if it had never been.
“Hey.” She looked up at Blue when he gritted that out, blinking to bring him into focus. That dark gaze of his that had tracked this way and that on the street moved over her in the exact same way. Looking for weaknesses and probably finding them. “Breathe.”
“I am breathing, thank you.” She couldn’t tell if she was frozen or furious or just plain afraid. She scowled at him. “And how could you tell either way?”
But she realized as she said it that she really had been holding her breath.
She . . . didn’t like that. The fact that Blue could tell whether she was breathing when, as far as she knew, he hadn’t even really been looking at her until this moment. He’d been looking at each of her neighbors’ doors. At the window down at the far end that looked over the alley. At the entrance to the stairwell beside the elevator shaft. He’d been constantly scanning from one side of the hallway to the other, making whatever calculations it was that he made. As if it was all second nature to him, which she supposed it would have to be.
And he didn’t answer her question. He just kept that dark gaze trained on her until her face felt too hot.
Again.
It was more difficult than it should have been to fit her key in the lock, then throw the bolt open. And then it seemed to require a heroic amount of energy to push open her own door and step inside.
The air inside her apartment was dull. Still. Everly tossed her keys on the small table in what passed for a front hall, then moved farther inside. She flicked on the lights from the switch in the hall, realizing as she did that she was holding her breath again, but at least this time she knew it.
But there was no one there when the lights blazed on. Rebecca’s door was open, just as Everly had left it. There were no signs of life inside, from what she could see from this angle. No one sang out a greeting or leaped out from behind the sofa, wielding deadly weapons of any kind.
She didn’t know whether to be thankful or worried that nothing seemed disturbed.
“Stay right there,” Blue ordered her.
This time, she was more than happy to do what he told her. He dropped the bags at her feet. Then she stood in her own foyer and watched as Blue moved around the apartment, shifting from one room to the next, barely making a sound. And that quiet of his was . . . disturbing. Or it got under her skin, anyway.
It was as if her head couldn’t quite make sense of it. She could see him as he moved, running a seemingly idle hand over her comic book collection in the living room bookcase, then stepping into Rebecca’s room to check it out more closely. She heard the refrigerator hum in the kitchen. She flicked the switch on t
he box on the wall near her and heard the air-conditioning kick in and rush through the vents high on her walls. She heard the closet in Rebecca’s room open, then close, but she didn’t hear him. His feet made no sound on her hardwood floors. Blue was like a shadow, here and then gone.
And when he disappeared into her bedroom, she felt that same obnoxious heat wash over her again, but it was from head to foot this time. And came with a healthy side helping of embarrassment. She opened her mouth to tell him to stop, to stay out of her bedroom, but closed it again.
Because asking him not to look through her things was a surefire way to indicate she found all this a little too intimate. A little too much.
She couldn’t remember if she’d made her bed before she left for her mad drive, though she doubted it. She didn’t know why the thought of him standing there, looking at her sheets thrown to the side and a dent where her head had been on her pillows, made something uncomfortably hot twist in her gut. It wasn’t as if she was worried about a man like Blue rooting through her underwear drawer—because she had absolutely no doubt he saw all the ladies’ panties he wanted to see, whenever he wanted to see them.
And more to the point, he wasn’t that kind of guy. She was sure about that, if nothing else.
Still, she found it was all too easy to imagine Blue there at the foot of her unmade bed. Dark and commanding and silent and mouthwatering all over.
Only, in her head, she was watching him stand there while she was lying in her bed herself.
She thrust that out of her mind. Or tried, because there was no way anything like that was ever going to happen.
Everly didn’t know whom Blue typically dated, assuming anyone dated at all in a town as small as Grizzly Harbor, but she was pretty sure that Batman types did not generally go after account managers at midsized ad agencies who were addicted to French macarons, sushi, and reruns of Friends they’d already seen nine thousand times. No way.