Delta Force Defender

by Megan Crane

  PRAISE FOR

  SEAL’s Honor

  “Megan Crane’s mix of tortured ex–special ops heroes, their dangerous missions, and the rugged Alaskan wilderness is a sexy, breathtaking ride!”

  —New York Times bestselling author Karen Rose

  Also by Megan Crane

  SEAL’S HONOR

  SNIPER’S PRIDE

  SERGEANT’S CHRISTMAS SIEGE

  A JOVE BOOK

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Megan Crane

  Excerpt from Special Ops Seduction copyright © 2020 by Megan Crane

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  A JOVE BOOK, BERKLEY, and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9781984805539

  First Edition: July 2020

  Cover image of the couple by Claudio Marinesco

  Cover art: Figures © Claudio Marinesco; Sitka, Alaska © Alex Sava / Getty Images; Dock © Neta Degany / Getty Images; Alaskan Mountains © FloridaStock / Shutterstock

  Cover design by Sarah Oberrender

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for Megan Crane

  Also by Megan Crane

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt for SPECIAL OPS SEDUCTION

  About the Author

  To all the readers who are as excited for Isaac and Caradine’s story as I was, this is for you.

  And for Nicole. For obvious reasons.

  Prologue

  BOSTON

  TEN YEARS EARLIER

  Julia had already ignored her father’s summons as many times as she could. It was time to go back home or face the consequences.

  Or, knowing her father, both.

  Twenty-two-year-olds about to graduate from college should assert their independence. Or, anyway, that was the excuse she planned to use when he lit into her about it, assuming he was in a mood to listen to excuses. Because he was going to be furious—there was no getting around that.

  No one was suicidal enough to ignore Mickey Sheeran for too long.

  Julia was one of the few people who dared pretend otherwise, and—filled with bravado while safely on campus and protected by university security—she’d decided to prove it.

  She was already feeling sick with regret about that as she turned onto her parents’ street in their unpretentious neighborhood outside of Boston proper, which was filled with the regular Joes her dad claimed he admired as true American heroes. Julia knew that what he really meant by that was that all their neighbors were as in awe of him as they were afraid of him. Just the way he liked it.

  Most people were just plain old afraid of him, Julia included.

  More so the closer she got to the house she’d grown up in and hadn’t been able to leave fast enough. And never seemed to be able to put behind her, whether she lived there or not.

  There wasn’t a single part of her that wanted to go back. Ever. And particularly not when she’d deliberately provoked him.

  Sure, all she’d actually done was ignore a couple of phone messages ordering her to leave her dormitory and come home. But she knew her father would view the delay between the messages he’d left and her appearance as nothing short of traitorous. She was expected to leap to obey him almost before he issued a command, as she well knew. He didn’t care that she had exams. He probably didn’t know she had exams.

  But Julia knew it was foolish to imagine her father was dumb. He wasn’t. It was far more likely that he knew full well it was her exam period and had waited until this, her final semester of college, to force her to take incompletes and fail to graduate. He was nothing if not a master at revenge served cold.

  Mickey hadn’t been on board with the college thing, something he made perfectly clear every time he sneered about Julia’s “ambitions.” He’d also refused to pay for it and had gone ballistic when Julia had found her own loans and a job in a restaurant to help with costs.

  She still thought it was worth the bruises.

  Her sister, Lindsay, was fifteen months younger and had never made it out from under their father’s thumb. She still lived at home, grimly obeying his every command in the respectful silence he demanded, because females were to be seen, never heard.

  She’d even started dating one of Mickey’s younger associates.

  You know where that’s going to lead, Julia had muttered under her breath when she’d been forced to put in an appearance on Easter Sunday. Straight to an entire life exactly like Mom’s. Is that really what you want?

  You’re the only one who thinks there’s another choice, Lindsay had snapped right back, her gaze dark and her mouth set in a mulish line. There’s not.

  Julia had looked across the crowded church, filled with the people who came to Mass one other time each year, and stared at the back of Lindsay’s boyfriend’s head. She wished her gaze could punch holes in him.

  I don’t accept that, she’d said quietly. I refuse to accept that.

  Next to her, her sister had sighed, something weary and practical on her face. Julia had recognized the look. Their mother wore it often. Soon it would start to fade and crack around it turned into beaten-down resignation.

  He’s not a nice guy, but at least it gets me out of the house and away from Dad every now and again, she’d said. That’s not nothing.

  Their brother Jimmy, the meanest of their three older brothers, had turned around from the pew in front of them. He looked more and more like Dad by the day, and the nasty look he’d thrown the two of them had shut them both up. Instantly.

  Sometimes Julia lay in her narrow cot in the dorm, squeezed her eyes shut so tight she expected all her blood vessels to pop, and wished. For something to save her. For some way out. For the limitless, oversized life her college friends had waiting for them, with no boundaries in sight. No rules. Nothing but their imagination to lead them wherever they wanted to go.

  Maybe she’d always known that she wasn’t going to get any of that.

  And maybe her father had been
right to oppose her going off to college, because all it was going to do was break her heart. Worse than if she’d been a good girl like Lindsay and done what was expected of her.

  Hopelessness only hurt if you were dumb enough to hope for something different.

  Julia couldn’t remember, now, when she’d first realized that her father was . . . unusual. That he was the reason the other children kept their distance from the Sheeran family. But she could remember, distinctly, the first time she’d Googled her father’s name and found a wealth of information about him. Just right there, online. For anyone to see.

  She’d always known her father was a bad man.

  Still, it was something else to find all those articles detailing the criminal acts he’d been accused of over the course of his long career. She thought sometimes that a good daughter would have been appalled, disbelieving.

  But she’d looked at her father’s mug shot in an article from the front page of the Boston Globe, and she’d believed. She’d known. He was exactly as bad as they claimed he was, and probably worse, and that likely meant she was bad, too. Deep in her blood and bones, no matter what she did.

  Every year they failed to catch him in the act, the bolder and more vicious he became. And the more she accepted that his DNA lived in her, too.

  Because if Julia were as brave as she pretended she was when she was across town on a pretty campus where she could squint her eyes and imagine she was someone else’s daughter, she would have called the FBI herself.

  But she wasn’t brave. She didn’t point the car in some other direction, drive for days, and disappear. Instead, she was obediently driving home to face her father’s rage. And the back of his hand. And whatever other treats he had in store for her.

  Her throat might be dry with fear and her heart might be pounding, but she was still doing what he wanted. In the end, she always did.

  All things considered, maybe Lindsay’s grim acceptance was the better path. Julia liked to put on a good show, but they were both going to end up in the same place.

  Her stomach was killing her. Knots upon knots.

  She eased her car to the curb and cut the headlights, then forced herself to get out into the cool night air. It was a force of habit to park a ways down the block. There were always flat-eyed men coming and going from the house, and it would go badly for her if she inconvenienced any of them. And Mickey was never satisfied with small displays of strength when bigger ones could cow more people and show off his cruelty to greater effect.

  In his circles, the crueler he was—especially to his own family—the more people feared him. And fear was what made Mickey come alive.

  She leaned against the closed car door and pulled her phone out of her pocket. It was cold enough that she wished she’d worn more than a T-shirt, but there was a part of her that liked the chill that ran along her arms. It would keep her awake. Aware.

  You couldn’t really dodge one of Mickey’s blows, but there were ways of taking it, and falling, that lessened the damage.

  She’d learned that lesson early.

  She pulled up Lindsay’s number and texted her, announcing that she’d parked and was about to walk in to face the music.

  Don’t come in, her sister texted back almost instantly. It’s weird in here.

  A different sort of prickle worked its way down the back of Julia’s neck and started winding down her spine. Her hair felt as if it were standing on end in the breeze, except there wasn’t a breeze.

  I’m coming out, Lindsay texted.

  Julia found herself holding her breath, though she couldn’t have said why. The night felt thick and dark, suddenly, though she could see the streetlights with her own eyes. Something about that caught at her, and she moved away from the nearest pool of light to the shade of a big tree. She stood there, keeping still. She put her back to the trunk, hoping that if anyone were looking, they wouldn’t see her.

  And she tried really hard to convince herself that she was just being paranoid.

  But when her sister appeared out of nowhere and grabbed her arm, she bit her own tongue so hard to keep from screaming that she tasted copper.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered fiercely at Lindsay. “You scared the—”

  “You should go back to your dorm,” Lindsay said, and this time, there was something stark in her gaze. Too much knowledge, maybe. Something unflinching that made the knots inside Julia’s belly sharpen into spikes. “And stay there.”

  And all the things they never talked about directly seemed to swell in the cool spring night. The truths that no one spoke, for fear of what it might unleash. Not just because they were afraid of Mickey and his friends, whom he often called his brothers but treated with far more respect than he gave the members of his actual family, but because acknowledging a thing made it real.

  It had never occurred to Julia before this very moment how deeply and desperately she’d clung to the tattered shreds of her denial.

  She and her sister stared at each other in the inky black shadows of the ominous night, and she couldn’t tell anymore if it was the dark that threatened her, or if it was the truth.

  Whatever was coming, there was no escaping it. Had she always known that? Whether it was this night or another night or twenty years down a road that ended up with her seeing her mother’s tired, fearful face in the mirror, this life she’d been so determined to imagine as a path she could choose had only ever been a downward spiral. To one single destination.

  Sooner or later, they were all going to hell. Or hell was coming for them. It didn’t matter which. She was going to burn either way.

  Julia wanted to throw up.

  But at the same time, a heady sort of giddiness swept over her, and it took her a second to realize what it was. Freedom, of a sort. Or relief, which amounted to the same thing.

  She reached out and laced her fingers through her sister’s, the way she used to do when they were little. Back when it was easier to pretend.

  “Come with me,” she said fiercely.

  And Lindsay looked as if she wanted to cry.

  “It’s too late,” she replied. Her voice was soft. Painful. “He asked me to marry him.”

  “You don’t have to say yes.”

  “I love that you think it matters what I say.”

  “All the more reason to come with me,” Julia said stoutly. “We can figure it out. We can . . . do something.”

  Lindsay’s smile pained Julia, like someone had prized her ribs apart.

  “Julia,” she began.

  But when hell came, it came out of nowhere.

  A bright, hot, terrible flash of horror.

  They were both on the ground, dazed and stunned, and Julia lifted a hand to her temple, where she felt something sticky. But she couldn’t find her way to caring about it much. Something was wrong with her ears, her head. Something was wrong.

  Car alarms were going off up and down the street, there was a siren in the distance, and she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten to the ground. She pulled herself to her hands and knees, grabbing for Lindsay as she went.

  And they knelt there, hugging each other even though it hurt, and stared at the roaring fire where their childhood home had been.

  Their mother. Their brothers. Even their father—

  Julia couldn’t take it in.

  Lindsay made a shocked, low sort of sound, like a sob.

  And somehow, that crystallized things, with a wrenching, vicious jolt inside of Julia. Half panic, half resolve.

  She turned to her sister and took her shoulders in her hands, ignoring the stinging in her palms.

  “This is the other choice, Lindsay,” Julia said, her voice harsh and thick and not her own at all. But she would get used to it. She would grow into it. If she survived. And she had every intention of surviving. “But we have to choose it.
Now.”

  One

  The call came in at 2:47 A.M.

  Isaac Gentry wasn’t asleep because Isaac rarely slept, especially when Alaska Force was running active missions.

  And Alaska Force always had active missions.

  As the owner and leader of the most elite group of ex–special forces operatives in the world—the kind of individuals who didn’t think it was particularly heroic to save the world, because it was simply their job, in and out of active military service—Isaac had long since accepted that monitoring ongoing situations came with the territory. His cabin in Fool’s Cove, a remote and hard-to-reach spot on the back side of a distant, isolated island in the Alaskan Panhandle, was outfitted with enough tech to track his people wherever they found themselves on the globe.

  “Report,” he said into his comm unit by way of an answer, the way he always did when a member of his team called in.

  “There’s a fire,” Griffin Cisneros, known ice man and almost supernaturally self-possessed marine sniper, belted out. Sounding in no way self-possessed or icy or really like himself at all.

  Isaac’s gut twisted. Because Griffin wasn’t on a mission. Griffin was supposed to be at home in his cute little house on the other side of the island in picturesque Grizzly Harbor, tucked up with his woman and enjoying the relatively mild June weather.

  “Report,” he said again, though he already knew it was going to be bad. And worse, local. “Is it happening again?”

  The tiny fishing village of Grizzly Harbor was supposed to be too far away from anything to attract attention. It was on a small island in a little-traveled part of Southeast Alaska’s Inside Passage, where nothing ever happened. Something Isaac knew personally and well, having grown up here.

  But the past couple of years there’d been a little too much excitement in the middle of nowhere. It had even drawn down the attention of the Alaska State Troopers, who’d needed convincing that Alaska Force were the good guys. There’d been deaths, a mad preacher with a boatload of explosives, actual deployed explosives onshore and off, two kidnappings and a cult, plus acts of criminal mischief ranging from annoying to life-threatening.