Chapter 12
Twelve
Everly
Beckett Benson went down like a building being demolished—one moment upright, the next horizontal, unconscious before his head hit the pillow.
In the dim light of the flashlight (being smothered by my hand so as to avoid catching attention), he looks relaxed.
At peace. He’s sleeping on his side, his face turned slightly toward me, the lines of his face smoothed away.
His chest rises and falls in slow, even breaths.
Cole is on his other side, snoring. Every fourth breath rattles. Every seventh produces a whistling note.
I have half a mind to smother him in his sleep.
The tent flap ahead of me hangs open, giving me a clear view of the empty darkness. And I sit, hockey stick across my knees, keeping watch.
No movement. No footsteps. No flashlight beams. 4:43 a.m. The sky outside the skylights is still black, but the black has a quality that wasn’t there an hour ago.
Morning is coming.
I should be sleeping. My body has filed multiple requests with increasingly aggressive symptoms—gritty eyes, heavy limbs, thoughts losing their edges like watercolors in rain. But every time I close my eyes:
His arm around me in the dark.
His warm hands pulling me close. “I’ll see you soon.”
And in the far distant reach of my mind. The elevator.
You build a life around the secret. People know you as one thing. And the real you is this other thing hiding underneath, and if it comes out—
Everything falls apart.
I’ve been writing this man for more than just my ice hockey books, and as much as I’m loath to admit it, all my heroes have a touch of Beckett. Heroes with strong jaws and tortured pasts and the ability to disarm bad guys with household objects. Jake Reeves is just my newest version.
And as I sit here, I realize I’ve gotten him (and every other hero) wrong.
Not the externals—the jaw, the toughness, the heroism—but the interior landscape.
The Jake Reeves in my manuscript is vulnerable because the heroine is persistent and charming.
But Beckett Benson opens up because he’s exhausted.
Because the filters dissolve when you’ve been running for eight hours, and the truth surfaces not because you decided to share it but because you don’t have the energy to keep it hidden.
He told me about his father not because I earned the confession but because the confession earned its way out.
The wall came down not because I breached it but because the building fell on it, and the rubble was a relief.
So maybe that was an exhaustion of a different kind too. I get that more than I want to admit.
Beckett stirs. The slow, disoriented surfacing of a man reacquainting himself with his situation. Yes, my man, you fell asleep in an ice-fishing tent in a camping store. His eyes open. Blink. Focus on the ceiling. Shift to Cole (snoring). Shift to me (sitting up, hockey stick across my knees).
“What are you still doing up?” Voice like gravel.
“What do you think? Watching for bad guys.”
“Why didn’t you wake up Cole?”
I shrug, the very gesture taking up all my energy. “I couldn’t do it. He needed the rest too.”
Beckett sits up, runs a hand through his dark hair. “Any sign of our friends?”
“None. It’s been quiet.”
“Maybe they left.”
“In a blizzard? With Cole’s car in the lot and three hundred thousand unresolved?” I raise an eyebrow. “Hardly.”
He lets out a light chuckle. Tired. He looks disheveled. Human. The version of Beckett Benson that exists when nobody’s watching. Except me. Is it terrible that I like that?
“We need another plan,” he says. “What time is it?”
“I think it’s almost five a.m. The mall opens at noon on Sundays.”
“I remember,” he adds, a familiar smile touching his lips, the hint of a shared history between us.
“It’s time for us to get out of here.” I’ve been thinking about this—two hours of silent vigil provides excellent planning time when the alternative is confronting your feelings. “In daylight, they have full visibility. So we need to be out before dawn.”
“I don’t suppose you have a plan for that?”
I whip out my best “thriller” smile. “We use the south exit…which is going to require some bolt cutters.”
Beckett gives a weary nod as if to say Why am I not surprised? “Why bolt cutters?”
“When I checked the door, it was chained from the outside. Maybe they couldn’t get the automatic locks to work. The bigger problem is that they’ve positioned themselves near the entrance they came through. The south exit is on the far side of the atrium. We’d have to cross the open floor.”
“Unless we go over instead of through.”
I stare at him. “Over?”
“Through the drop ceiling. Die Hard it,” he says with a completely straight face.
“You want to ceiling-crawl again?”
“It worked once.”
“It worked because you’re insane. What if we fall through? There’s no way they’d miss that.”
“It can hold. Trust me. There’s a maintenance cavity up there, built to withstand a little weight.
If we can get to the hardware store without being seen, we should be able to grab one of those extending ladders to get up.
We crawl above the east corridor—sixty feet or so—drop near the south exit, cut the chains, and we’re out of here. ”
I run it through in my head, playing out all the possibilities. The plan has holes. There’s no denying that. But it also has something none of our other plans have had: genuine surprise. Nobody expects their quarry to escape through the ceiling. It’s the kind of act-three move we need.
“I like it,” I say. “I hate it. But I like it.”
“And just think—we’re supporting local businesses.”
That earns a chuckle from me. “Your wallet must be in critical condition after everything we bought last time.”
“Oh yeah. I’m operating on IOUs and moral conviction.”
The laugh gets as far as my chest and stops—held, savored. This man. This ridiculous ceiling-crawling, money-leaving hero of a man.
I definitely picked the right hero for my books. (And we’ll unpack why in some therapy session later.)
“Okay. We wake Cole. We move.”
But he doesn’t move toward Cole. He stays sitting, facing me. Cole’s snoring has shifted to a deep rumble that serves as inadvertent white noise, and the tent feels private. A space outside the crisis.
“Can I see you after this?” he says quietly.
Oh. Um…and I sound like an idiot when I say “See me?” Aw, c’mon, Evie, you can do better than that. “As in a date?” Okay, that wasn’t much better, but—
“Yes.” There’s no doubt in his answer. It’s steady. His eyes catch mine, holding on, not letting go. “You also said maybe later.” Something happens at the corners of his mouth. A sly smile that steals my breath away. “It’s later.”
I gape at him, wordless, stunned. My heart racing. This is…insane. Twelve hours ago, the very idea of even seeing Beckett Benson was enough to send me into hiding. But now…he’s different. Or maybe he’s been different all along, and here’s where Sutton Blake steps in and says See?
Right. He isn’t the boy who humiliated me so many years ago, and if I’m honest, the man behind the jersey aligns with the man behind the letters. And I can’t help but think that maybe this is exactly how romance works in real life—messy and improbable and surprising.
“I’d like that.”
He leans toward me. Slow. Deliberate. His gaze falls to my lips, back to my eyes. The movement of a man who knows exactly what he’s doing. He lifts a hand, his fingertips grazing my cheek, threading through my hair, tilting my head back to look at him.
He stops. Inches from me. Close enough that I can see individual flecks in his irises—darker blue inside lighter blue, the pattern like ice forming on a lake, a man more complex up close than he ever appeared from the stands.
He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t need to. The question is in the pause—in the inch of air, in the stillness, in the way he holds there and waits. Waits for me to pull back or—
I answer—almost imperceptibly, my chin lifting a fraction, the smallest possible gesture that closes the smallest possible distance.
He kisses me.
This kiss is nothing like the first. Where our first kiss was something bred from desperation, a need for something to hold on to, ground us, this one is the complete opposite. It’s a leap of faith, wild and exhilarating. Letting go. Feet off the ground.
His other hand comes up to my face. Palm against my jaw, thumb brushing my cheek with the kind of gentleness that makes my heart skip a beat. The touch says I see you.
And I kiss him back. I let the world fade away—the fear, the danger, the freezing cold—because in five years of writing romance into my thrillers and crafting kisses, I have never once felt what I’m feeling right now.
No, this is better than fiction. The real Beckett Benson is decadent, rich in depth and kindness.
I’m drowning in this kiss, and I have no plans to come up for air.
My hands trail up his arms, his broad shoulders, coming to rest on his heartbeat, steady and strong—fast, but not frantic. Sure. The resting heartbeat of a man who is calm because he has decided, and the decision is me.
He pulls back. Just enough for the blue eyes to find mine. They hold me.
“Yeah…I’d really like that,” I say. My voice is wrecked and quiet and full. I’ve given speeches at book conferences and interviews on live television, and my voice has never sounded like this.
“It’s a date.” His thumb traces my jawline—once, light, as though memorizing the lines of my face. His forehead presses against mine, eyes closed.
Cole shifts, breaking the spell.
I pull back, clear my throat. “We should wake him,” I say. “If we plan to be out of here by six—”