Page 58 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
“You—” My fingertips press to my lips. “You kissed me.”
Beckett steps back, a sheepish look running its course through his whole body. He drags a hand over the back of his neck. “You were having an adrenaline crash.”
“So you kissed me?”
“You stopped shaking.”
I look down at my hands. Still. Somehow still. Completely, perfectly, traitorously still. Steady as if they’d been typing all night, writing scenes about wanting this exact thing and pretending it was fiction.
Okay, not with Beckett. (Really!) But still.
“What if that hadn’t been an adrenaline crash—what if I was having a legitimate physical crisis?”
Beckett shrugs. “Then I guess it wouldn’t have worked.”
I stare at him. He stares at me. Hockey sticks against the wall. Shelving unit guarding the door. Somewhere in this building, a man—likely armed—is hunting us. Nothing about this situation is conducive to romance or rational thought, or any behavior I would allow a character to engage in without writing a strongly worded margin note about pacing and plausibility. My gaze dips to his lips—his villainous (delicious!) lips.
They tilt into a rakish smirk.
My gaze snaps back to his. “Stop that.”
“Stop what?”
“Looking at me like you’re going to do it again.”
He smirks. “I’m not going to do it again.”
“Good.”
He quirks a brow. “Unless you want me to.”
“I don’t.”
Shrug. “Okay.”
I turn away, fix my attention on my notebook. Except my heart is still racing…doing something that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the fact that his hands were warm and his mouth tasted like maple and…and I am in catastrophic, irreversible, crash-and-burn trouble. And I don’t even realize I’m talking until the words are out. “…maybe later,” I say. So quiet the words barely exist. “When we’re not being hunted.”
Wait—what? But then something happens to his face.
Beckett Benson smiles at me. Really smiles. Not that lopsided grin from a moment ago. This one’s the real thing. Full. Undefended.
Something inside me catches, roars to flame.
Especially when he says quietly, decisively, “Deal.”
BECKETT
Everly Hart is magnificent.
I want that on the record.
It’s 10:47 p.m. We’ve been trapped in this building for five hours. And Everly Hart is standing over her notebook with a flashlight between her teeth, drawing arrows on a floor plan as though she’s planning a beach invasion—wild red hair, crooked glasses, hockey stick leaning against her hip like a sword in a scabbard. It does something to my nervous system that has no business happening during a tactical planning session.
She’s so focused, apparently unfazed by our kiss. And she’s got no idea what it did to me. She nearly catches me staring, watching that spool of red curls tickle her neck. I straighten, try to look like I’m being helpful.
“If you were writing this,” I say. “A thriller. Characters trapped with bad guys. What would your hero do?”
She looks up. Flashlight still in her teeth. “Fy hewwo would figwh—” She removes it. “My hero would fight.”
