Page 57 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
“A weapon.”
I blink again. “I’m sorry—are you expecting me to deflect bullets with a wooden hockey stick? I mean, I’m pretty handy with my golden bracelets, but I’m out of practice?—”
Beckett casts me a flat look. “Calm down, Wonder Woman. It’s better than nothing. Or would you rather keep using your camera bag as a club?”
My hand hovers over the stick for a moment, then I take it.
“All right,” Beckett says, his voice gentle, as though talking to an easily spooked animal. “Let’s just catch our breath and figure out how to find Cole before those guys do.”
Twenty minutes go by, and my heart’s finally back to a reasonable pace—as reasonable as can be expected when you’re being hunted by bad men in a snowed-in mall.
My flashlight points at the ceiling, illuminating the small stockroom. My notebook sits splayed across a worn counter in the back as I try to work out an exit strategy on a page that keeps blurring. If they come from the east corridor, we go west. If they block the service tunnel?—
My hand jerks. The pen veers off the page, slicing a sharp line through the food court. “Shoot,” I mumble under my breath, steadying my hand, gripping it with the other. The shaking doesn’t stop though. If anything, it gets worse—a tremor that starts out small, a buzz in my fingertips that travels up my forearms, growing in waves until my whole body trembles. “Pull it together, Evie.”
I pick up the pen again. It slips from my fingers.
“Everly?” Beckett’s voice carries softly from across the storage room. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. But I’m not okay. My breathing is wrong. It’s too fast. Too shallow. And is the room shrinking? No, I know it’s not literally shrinking, but the walls—they are definitely closer. The air is thinner. My lungs pull desperately for breath and come up empty.
We have to get out of here. We can’t stay here.
I pick up the pen again, watch it peck at the paper in my earthquake grip. “They’ll probably get out of the arena soon—that third person, the guy in charge, he’ll find them soon. So?—”
“Everly.”
“—we sneak out the doors they came in through, except?—”
“Everly.”
“—that’s exactly where they’ll expect us to go.” I suck in a ragged breath. It scrapes both in and out. “Maybe we should go back for Cole’s duffel, get the evidence?—”
“Hey!”
Beckett is beside me, his warm hands gripping my shoulders, turning me toward him. His eyes are wide with concern and icy and blue and…I could just swim in them. The world feels like it’s spinning. Spinning around Beckett Benson.
“You’re okay,” he whispers.
“I’m fine.” The automatic response of a woman who has been fine her entire adult life through sheer force of will.
“You don’t have to be fine.”
His words don’t fully process. It’s like I’m hearing them but I can’t understand. And then the shake enters my voice. “Those men are going to kill us, Beckett.” The words rush out so fast I can’t stop them. “They said ‘deal with the rest,’ and I have put that line in the mouths of people who do terrible things, and it was always fiction, it was always at a safe distance, but now someone said it about me and I can’t?—”
I never get to finish that sentence because Beckett kisses me.
His arms wrap around me, pulling me into his embrace—his strong, sure, steady embrace. And he kisses me.
You didn’t see that coming either, did you? Maybe you did. Maybe I’m just slow, but it works. The spinning stops, the static ringing in my ears softens, fades away as his fingers thread through my hair, gentle, safe. And suddenly I can’t think of anything else except for being here in this cocoon of Beckett’s protection.
I’ve crossed over the blue line into a world where he is the defender and nothing gets past him.
And I’m desperately, perfectly okay with that. My fingers curl into his flannel, pulling him closer.
This kiss, it’s not like the ones in my books. It’s not sweet, it’s not timid—it’s gentle. There’s a difference. Tentative is uncertain. Gentle is certain and choosing softness anyway.
He pulls back, just enough, and I drink in a breath. Lungs full. My eyes drift open, and I find him looking at me, his lips parted slightly, searching and wondering.
