Delta Force Defender

by Megan Crane

  Isaac took them on a long, lazy drive instead. It probably would have been scenic, had the sun been up. And romantic, even, had he been with a woman who didn’t pretend to hate him. If he hadn’t carried her out of an inn earlier, bound and gagged. And if whoever was chasing her wasn’t staying tight on them the whole time.

  He imagined suggesting that this was romantic to Caradine, and imagining her response to that kept him fully entertained while he drove around in circles that never dislodged the car behind them. He looped around, and when he got to Route 1 for the second time, he called in again.

  This time, he spoke to Oz, who could do almost anything from behind his computer, and usually did. At dizzying speed.

  “I have some company out here,” he told Oz, who slept about as little as he did. “Find me a defensible safe house somewhere with minimal access so I can control whatever comes.”

  “On it,” Oz replied.

  And within a few minutes the navigation system of the SUV updated and led them north, deeper inland, toward one of the houses in their wide network. Some Isaac owned outright or had permission to use. Others were . . . available in one way or another.

  Especially if they were put back the way they were found when Alaska Force was finished with them.

  Beside him, Caradine had gone silent, which couldn’t possibly be a good thing when one of her foremost weapons was her mouth. But silent or not, she was safe, so Isaac couldn’t worry about it.

  Their tail kept dropping out of sight but always returned—usually right about when Isaac was tempted to imagine that he’d either lost them or they’d disappeared because they were locals being idiots, not actual pursuers.

  Finally, Isaac reached a dirt road that was the turnoff to the safe house Oz had found for them. As Isaac pulled off, he checked his mobile and saw more detailed instructions on the screen.

  He followed them to the letter, bumping down a small hill through thick woods. At the bottom of the hill, the woods opened up onto water. Some or other “long pond,” according to the navigation system, which looked more to him like a large lake.

  The dirt road turned into a narrow bridge that led to a house, set out in the water on a tiny island. The house took up most of the space on the island, save for some trees, rocks, and a yard. But it was exactly what he’d requested. There was only one road in or out and otherwise, dark water all around. Isaac sped up as he went over the bridge, driving them quickly to the house. He pulled the SUV around to the side, then got out.

  The summer night was a wild, deep dark around him, broken up by the sound of water lapping against the shore. And as he stood there, the cry of a loon.

  He found the key where Oz said it would be. He unlocked the side door and eased his way inside to sweep the house. He found nothing but a shut-up summer cottage, furniture draped in sheets and filled with the musty smell of forlorn, forgotten places. As expected. When he’d satisfied himself that no surprises lurked inside, he texted Oz that he was in. Then he returned to the SUV to find Caradine standing there, having gotten her ankles but not her hands untied.

  “Inside,” he ordered her. “Do not turn on any lights.”

  She gave him a glare he didn’t need any light to see, but she did as he’d asked, taking her bag with her in the hands still bound before her. Isaac grabbed his own cache of weapons from the back of the SUV, then followed her in.

  Inside, he locked the side door behind him and tossed his bag on the kitchen table. He moved toward the back of the house that faced the woods, aware that she was right behind him. He moved one of the heavy blinds that had been secured for winter and looked out, waiting.

  “Do you think we lost them?” she asked quietly.

  “That would be great, but I doubt it. Not when they’ve been on top of us for hours.”

  She stood there beside him, and together, they looked back at the woods they’d come through.

  One beat. Another beat.

  He tried to remember another time he and Caradine had ever simply stood somewhere together without having to engage in yet another round of their endless battle, and couldn’t. He was tempted to find this a little more soothing than it should have been, given that this was a hunt and this time, he was on the wrong side of that equation.

  Not to mention the fact he didn’t have all the information. Or any information at all.

  Still, he let himself enjoy the fact that she was standing there, a warm presence beside him. He could smell her shampoo and what he thought was body lotion, though he’d never seen her apply it. And he could hear her breathe.

  He knew better than most that it was the little moments a person clung to, later, when they were gone.

  A breath after that, sure enough, came the headlights in the trees.

  Then stopped at the top of the hill, the light eerie in the midst of so much darkness.

  “Well,” Caradine said brightly. “That’s creepy.”

  “I think we can assume that they’re going to come all the way down the drive. Then the question is, Will they keep coming? Or will they stay there and wait us out?”

  Caradine shifted around to stare at him, and he took her wrists in his hands, using the knife he kept on his belt to cut her free. She didn’t jerk her wrists from his grasp, which he should have liked.

  “Why didn’t you take these off yourself?” he asked gruffly. “We both know you could have. I thought it would take you ten minutes, tops.”

  “Why would I do that when I can make you feel bad about it instead?” She didn’t even smirk to take the sting out. “The way you should.”

  “News flash. Keeping you safe is what matters to me, Caradine. Not your feelings.”

  But despite what he said, the way she studied him made him feel guilty.

  You mean guilti-er, something in him corrected him.

  “Are we a team now?” she asked, her voice as dark as the thick Maine night outside. “I’m finding it hard to keep track. One minute you’re bodily removing me from a bed-and-breakfast, against my will. Now you think we should work together like I’m one of your military buddies?”

  “You tell me. Are those your friends out there?”

  “Isaac. Please. You know I don’t have friends.”

  He reached over and smoothed his hand over the hair she so rarely left down. It was as silky and soft as it ever was, and he expected her to swat his hand away. But it made his chest feel tight when she didn’t.

  “I guess it never occurred to me to ask a critical question,” he said, his voice rougher than it should have been. “Are you running from something—or toward it?”

  “That sounds like a philosophical dilemma.” She smiled, though it wasn’t a real smile. It was much too tight. “I don’t do those, either.”

  “It’s only a dilemma if you don’t know the answer.”

  He studied her face in the gloom of the dark front room. That stubborn, pretty, clever face of hers, which had been keeping him guessing for years now. He was sure he could see something like regret. A kind of longing. And around and beneath it all, that stubbornness that might get them both killed. Possibly tonight.

  “I’m not running to or from anything, Gentry. I was on a lovely New England vacation. I’m not sure why that led to kidnapping and careening around the countryside in the middle of the night, but here we are. I blame you.”

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” Isaac replied, tracking the headlights as they bumped their way down the hill. “No one was tracking you for the entirety of the past week. I know, because I was there. Alone. How did they find you now?”

  “Is this really a good time for a chat? The bad guys will be at the door any minute.” She peered out the window, where the car had made it to the waterline. “Literally.”

  “Is that why you went to Camden in the first place? Were you planning to meet someone there?” He braced
himself. “Please don’t tell me that you really did blow up your own place.”

  “Of course I didn’t blow up my own place. I was in it.” She blew out a breath, but she kept her gaze on the car as the headlights winked out, there on the other side of the narrow bridge. “I’m not meeting anybody. Not the way you mean. Not exactly.”

  “Then what, exactly?”

  He tilted his head in the direction of the dirt drive as the car began to move again, slow and dark, creeping closer every second. He eased the blinds back down into place, leaving him with no eyes on their visitor. But at the moment his attention was on the woman before him.

  “I get it, Caradine. You have a deep, dark past. That’s not exactly a secret. But if I’m about to get in a firefight, surely you can give me enough details to know whether or not I can expect you to shoot me in the back.”

  She looked as if he’d hit her. “I would never shoot you in the back.”

  The words came out so fiercely it took them both by surprise. He could see it on her face. He could feel it flare between them, surprise rolling into all the rest of it, in this battle of theirs that only got hotter and more dangerous with time.

  Especially right now.

  For a moment, a scant breath, they stared at each other. Almost—

  But this was not the time. Isaac shoved everything ruthlessly aside, wishing he could compartmentalize her the way he did everything else in his life. God knew he’d tried, and that was before she’d been in trouble.

  She had always been the one thing in his life he couldn’t put in a box.

  “How did they pick up your trail in Camden?” he demanded, low and urgent.

  Outside, there was the sound of wheels crunching up the drive.

  “They didn’t pick it up,” Caradine whispered back in that same fierce way. “I called them.”

  Of all the things she could have said, he hadn’t been expecting that.

  Isaac felt winded, as if she’d kicked him in the solar plexus. “You did what?”

  “I called them.” Her chin tilted up, and he was sure he could see her eyes glittering with the emotion she liked to deny. “I wanted to see who would show up. I needed to see which nightmare I should be having. The same one I’ve been having? Or a brand-new one?”

  The sound of the wheels stopped. That was worse.

  Isaac stared at Caradine, not sure if he wanted to strangle her or pull her into a hug she would claim she hated. Both, probably.

  “Caradine,” he began, quiet and furious, and more of the latter, “don’t you think—”

  But that was when the front doorknob, three feet away from them, began to turn.

  Six

  “Please tell me you checked that door,” Caradine whispered, her heart pounding even as her stomach plummeted to the floor. And then stayed there, in a hard, ugly knot. “Please tell me it’s locked.”

  It was the closest she’d come to prayer in a long, long while.

  “Yes, I checked it,” Isaac muttered in an undertone. “And yes, it’s locked.”

  He sounded different, and that caught at her, yanking her out of the dizzy, nauseating spiral she was in. Memories of other terror-filled moments like this one, always scared and always in the dark and always sure that this was the end of it all—

  But Isaac was here this time.

  Deep inside, where she could be honest with herself, she acknowledged that what she felt was relief.

  And when she glanced over at him, he no longer looked like any of the versions of him she’d been so sure she’d seen and known and cataloged. He was hewn from stone, as ever, but there was something different about him tonight. A crackling sort of presence.

  He looks like a warrior, something in her whispered, from deep in that place where she kept her truths hidden.

  He pulled her behind him as he headed back toward the kitchen, away from the front door and that doorknob that was rattling, just slightly. Just enough. Caradine squinted hard in the gloom, trying to keep her eyes on the dead bolt. As if she could actually see it.

  As if she could make it hold with her will alone.

  What was funny was that she’d planned this. She’d made that call from the phone beside her bed in the inn. She’d planned to do this all by herself. Accordingly, she’d made contingency plan after contingency plan. If they did this, she’d do that, and so on.

  Caradine had been positive she’d worked out every angle. A hundred times over.

  But she hadn’t banked on the panic.

  Because all of a sudden, it was like ten years ago all over again. Her head ringing. That pressure in her ears.

  She had to keep checking to see if she was sprawled out on the ground. Bleeding, even.

  But no. Isaac positioned her in the small hall between the front room and the kitchen, then left her there. Caradine stared at the walls that seemed to close in on her, covered in peeling paint and framed prints of wooden sailboats and bright red canoes. She felt something on her face and was sure she was bleeding again, there on the sidewalk—

  Isaac was back, there in front of her and wider than the walls. Bigger and tougher than the world. He pressed a gun into her hand and then he grabbed her chin.

  His grip was electric. It shocked her.

  “Focus,” he ordered her.

  And Caradine had spent so many years making fun of Alaska Force in general and Isaac in particular. But right now she was grateful for every scrap of experience that lent that unmistakable note of authority to his voice. For that uncompromising look in his gray eyes.

  For every last choice he’d made in his life that had made him into who he was. This warrior before her.

  She nodded, jerkily, despite that grip of his. She ignored the panicked ringing in her ears, held tight to the handgun, and found herself standing straighter.

  “I’m focused,” she told him. Or maybe herself.

  He didn’t argue with her. And there was something about his instant, automatic acceptance that made her believe in herself, too.

  One more thing she would have to excavate—or ignore—if they survived this. When they survived this.

  “Anyone walks through the door, take one second,” Isaac told her. It was another order. “Inhale, see if it’s me, then exhale. If it’s not me, shoot. Got it?”

  And suddenly, here in a lonely cottage on a remote lake deep in the Maine wilderness, when it was much too late, Caradine wanted to say . . . everything. All those things she’d refused to say when she had the chance. All those things that crowded in her throat and made her tongue taste bitter in her own mouth.

  There was a man at the door, her past was coming at her too fast and too deadly, and Isaac looked like some kind of warrior god. And she wanted to tell him all the things she’d never dared. Now.

  While she still could.

  Instead, she swallowed it all down the way she always did. No matter what shade of gray his eyes were in the quiet darkness of the old house.

  “Got it,” she said.

  And then she stayed there, rocked inside and out, as he melted off into the shadows. She could still feel where he’d gripped her chin, and she focused on that when her pulse picked up. She concentrated on the heat and strength his fingers had left behind and that controlled look he’d worn while his eyes had glittered—because it was better than spiraling into a panic attack she couldn’t afford.

  She thought she heard the faintest whisper of sound from the kitchen, but when she tensed—ready to aim and fire—nothing happened.

  That was the back door, she told herself. It was Isaac going outside.

  Straight toward the threat, the way she supposed he always did. That was what he’d spent his entire adult life doing. While she’d run, hidden, and panicked—

  Focus, she ordered herself, the way he had. Breathe.

  Everything
was silent then. Dark.

  As if the night were going to sit on her like this forever. Living in Alaska should have made her shrug off the dark, but not tonight. She tried to breathe more quietly. She tried to listen.

  She tried to fight off the fear instead of surrendering to it.

  But that was a lot easier when she was doing something. Climbing out her window, stealing a boat from a remote inlet, and so on. Even staying awake for days and driving crazy distances fueled only by caffeine. It was all action.

  Sitting still like this—still and quiet and alone—reminded her a little too strongly of her childhood. Of hiding from her father’s temper or worse, his business associates and so-called friends. And of the first five years after she’d run away from Boston, always crouched down somewhere, waiting to be discovered. Waiting to be hurt.

  Waiting to see if this time, they would win.

  If this time, they would finally get what they wanted.

  Caradine hated waiting. She watched the front door, but the knob stopped moving back and forth.

  She strained her ears, but there was nothing but the oppressive weight of the silence. Outside, the Maine night seemed to press down hard on this little cottage far away from anything. There had been no lights anywhere as they’d come down the hill, except the stars. That told her that even if there were neighbors, or other houses set around this same lake, none of them were awake at this hour.

  Caradine was smack down in the middle of another dark night of the soul, and she could do nothing but flick off the safety, wait, and remind herself that she’d practiced—and practiced and practiced—for this.

  The worst thing she could do was start imagining things.

  Like what it would mean if Isaac wasn’t the man who came to the door.

  “Stop it,” she hissed. Out loud.

  An eternity passed. Then another.

  She stayed where Isaac had left her, frozen solid, as if his command were some kind of spell she had no choice but to obey.

  That notion was comforting. It was almost as good as his being here, with all that brooding intensity, strength, and power he wore so carelessly.