Delta Force Defender

by Megan Crane

  Ouch.

  “I still don’t understand why you’re breaking our promise,” Lindsay said, traces of fear in her voice.

  “Because I brought help. I didn’t come all this way to tell you something I could have told you when you picked up my message. My friend—” And she remembered as she said that word, again, that though she hadn’t been given a comm unit like the rest of the team, they’d put a recording device on her. Meaning they were all listening to her talk about Isaac. They were listening to her use the word friend, and of all the things that had happened, were happening, and were likely to happen still, it was ridiculous that she should get caught up on something like that. Still, it seemed to bang inside her chest like a gong. “My friend runs a business.”

  “He looks like a mercenary,” Lindsay said flatly.

  “His business is all about finding creative solutions for tricky problems.” Caradine parroted something she’d heard any number of Alaska Force members say over the past five years, usually when they were meeting new clients in her café. “And they all have special ops experience, if you want to know the kind of solutions I’m talking about. Can you think of anyone who has a bigger problem than we do?”

  Her sister’s eyes darted around, as if she were looking for a way out. “What I’m not tracking is why you would bring our favorite problem directly to me.”

  “If they found me, they’re going to find you. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “A matter of time, sure. Or, you know, my sister coming straight for me, making a trail for them to follow to my front door.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Caradine saw Isaac again. He moved lazily around the SUV’s front, then leaned against it, looking idle and vaguely bored when she knew he was anything but.

  And the fact he’d put himself where she could see him warmed her all over again. It gave her a little more strength than she’d had a moment ago. Almost like—

  But she shoved that aside, because there were miles upon treacherous miles yet to go.

  “I live on a remote Alaskan island,” Caradine said evenly. “Not on Maui. You have to work hard to get to Grizzly Harbor.”

  “Because it’s a real picnic coming up the road here,” Lindsay said sarcastically. “Tourists do it all the time.”

  Caradine ordered herself not to snap at her sister. “If they could find me there, Maui’s got to be a walk in the park.”

  “Especially now you’ve drawn them a map to that park.”

  “I don’t know what your life is like,” Caradine said fiercely then. “But I know mine. Pretending to settle down but always having one foot out the door. Always knowing that at any moment it could all blow up. And then it did. I wanted to see you, Lindsay, not to make you a target. But to see if together, you and me and my friends, we could figure out a way to make this stop.”

  And as she said it, she almost believed it was possible. She almost believed they could do it.

  The door to the house opened then and Lindsay turned, a look of wild panic on her face.

  Caradine shot to her feet, but even as she started to back up, Isaac was there.

  Thank God. Because the man who stepped out onto the porch looked like Isaac’s kind of trouble. He was big, tall. He looked like possibly he played a defensive position in football in between bench-pressing cars for fun. He was Hawaiian, with visible tattoos all over his upper body and up his neck.

  But it was what he was carrying that stopped Caradine dead.

  Not the gun he held loosely in his right hand. But the tiny little girl he held in the crook of his other arm, who looked like a perfect, pretty little brown replica of Lindsay.

  Caradine’s heart . . . stopped.

  Then slammed against her ribs like a train.

  Lindsay had a child. A daughter. Her sister had a daughter.

  Caradine was an aunt, and she would never have known that if she hadn’t come here. Something washed over her then, a complicated mix of emotion and hope and determination for the future. Because there had to be a future.

  And in the next beat came the fear.

  Because she and Lindsay were one thing. They could run. They shouldn’t have had to, but life was unfair, and running was still better than life in their father’s house.

  She couldn’t bear the thought of passing that on to the little girl with big brown eyes who stared back at her, her middle two fingers tucked in her mouth.

  The way Lindsay’s always had been as a little girl, until their father had broken them when she wouldn’t stop.

  Caradine couldn’t take that back. She couldn’t change the past. She could never make it okay.

  Nothing would make it okay.

  But maybe, just maybe, they could make it stop.

  And the surge of hope that bloomed inside her then made her feel nauseated and dizzy.

  “You know my position on this,” the man said, his gaze moving over Caradine, hard and quick. He lifted his chin in Isaac’s direction, his black eyes glittering. “I’m tired of hiding. I want this over.”

  “And I keep telling you, that’s a fantasy,” Lindsay snapped. She moved over to the man and gathered the little girl into her arms. “It’s never over. It’s never going to be over.” She glared at Caradine. “And I don’t appreciate you coming here and trying to make the fact they found you into some kind of opportunity when we both know it’s not. If they find us, we die.”

  “Unless they die,” Isaac drawled.

  “I like your sister’s friend already,” the man in the doorway said.

  “It’s not just you and me anymore, Jules,” Lindsay threw out there. “And, to be honest, I care a lot more about my daughter than your restaurant.”

  Her man made a low noise. “Lindsay.”

  “That goes for you, too,” Lindsay snapped at him.

  He didn’t look particularly bothered by that. “It’s nice to meet you, Julia,” he said in a friendly sort of tone, nodding at Caradine. “I didn’t think that was going to happen in this lifetime. I’m Koa.”

  “Please,” Caradine replied, still feeling dizzy and a little bit sick. She rubbed at her heart, hoping that would stop it kicking at her. “Call me Caradine. Julia was a very foolish girl who died a long time ago.”

  “While Lindsay has no intention of dying,” Lindsay said wildly, her daughter against her chest. “Under any circumstances, using any name.”

  “Why don’t you come inside,” Koa said, with another look at Lindsay that made her flush but didn’t make her back down. “After all, you’re all ohana, more or less. My house is yours.”

  But he kept his eyes trained on Isaac, who grinned. Disarmingly. The two men moved inside the house together, warily, but Caradine waited for her sister.

  Lindsay was breathing heavily. She caught Caradine’s look over the top of her little girl’s head, and Caradine couldn’t have said what she saw on her sister’s face. Grief. Panic. Resolve.

  Caradine could hardly speak. “Lindsay . . .”

  “I met him on the Big Island,” Lindsay said, sounding defiant and sad at once. “I told him I would never marry him, because I could never stay with him. He took that as a challenge.”

  “Linds. I don’t—”

  “And I didn’t see the harm. Wives leave husbands all the time. I thought being married was an even better cover, to be honest, though I knew you’d freak out if I told you.”

  “Define freak out.”

  Lindsay shook her head. “But then I got pregnant. It was a mistake. Because I could never voluntarily bring a baby into this . . . this disaster.” She coughed to clear her throat. “What kind of person would do that to an innocent child?”

  Their eyes met. And neither one of them mentioned their own mother. But then, they didn’t have to. Donna was the kind of ghost who lingered, even in the Hawaiian sun.

 
“I know I should have done the smart thing,” Lindsay said in a small, anguished voice. “But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

  “Lindsay,” Caradine whispered. “She’s perfect.”

  Lindsay looked down at her little girl, who buried her head in the crook of Lindsay’s neck. There was no mistaking the proud, loving, worried smile on her sister’s face. There was no mistaking the anguish and the determination.

  “She’s two,” Lindsay said quietly. “Her name is Luana.”

  Caradine made a noise. A sigh, maybe. A sob. She couldn’t tell. “That’s beautiful. She’s beautiful.”

  “Her name means ‘happiness,’” Lindsay said. And her gaze was ferocious when she raised it to Caradine’s. “And I might look like Mom, but I’m not her. There is nothing I won’t do to protect my child. Absolutely nothing.”

  Nineteen

  Isaac determined within a single sweep of the house that Koa was exactly what he appeared to be at first glance. A man who was willing to do whatever it took to protect his family, including letting an armed stranger look through his home to make sure it was safe.

  But even if he was a better actor than he seemed, he was outnumbered. Isaac called in the rest of the team and tried to look friendly as Koa took in the information that said team had been out there all along.

  “Not sure I would have invited you in if I’d known you came in a set,” the other man said after a moment.

  “Don’t worry.” Isaac tried to sound soothing. “They’re all housebroken.”

  Meanwhile, Caradine and her sister were talking to each other warily out on the lanai. Through the screen, Isaac watched Lindsay put her daughter down to toddle around on her own feet. While she did, the two women stood next to each other. They both crossed their arms in the same way. They had the same nose. The same stubborn chin.

  It was strange to think of Caradine as something other than singular.

  “We keep the outside looking as down-market as possible,” Lindsay said, sounding defensive.

  “The Francis factor,” Caradine said, nodding as if that made sense.

  She noticed Isaac studying her from inside the screen door. “The man my sister was supposed to marry liked calling her princess. He liked her helpless, surrounded by luxuries, all of which he could take away whenever he felt like it.”

  “What he really liked,” Lindsay added with a brittle laugh, “was making me pay for them.”

  Isaac watched as a very dark look passed between the sisters, while beside him, Koa looked murderous. The rest of the team came in from the jungle then, ambling across the clearing like they’d been out for a hike. And Isaac had been doing this a long time. But he still enjoyed the automatic look of alarm people got when they were wise enough to find an Alaska Force team intimidating.

  Templeton broke the tension almost immediately as he strode onto the lanai, booming out an aloha to Koa and immediately lapsing into a mix of English, pidgin, and Hawaiian.

  “My mother always said that leaving Oahu was the biggest mistake of her life,” Templeton told Koa. He said something in Hawaiian that made the other man laugh. “From the islands to Mississippi, if you can believe it.”

  Koa mock-shuddered. “Sounds like death to me, brother.”

  “Good thing I resurrect well,” Templeton replied blandly.

  They both laughed and clapped each other on the back, lightening the mood considerably. It seemed almost natural for all of them to sit down on the lanai together, but this time more as guests than unwanted intruders.

  As far as Koa was concerned, anyway. Isaac wasn’t sure Lindsay was on board.

  “The only question I’m really interested in,” Koa said when they were all seated, “is how this ends. I want my family safe.”

  “I’m interested in that question, too,” Isaac agreed.

  “I’d like it to end,” Caradine agreed. Too cautiously, Isaac thought. “But I’m also very interested in who’s doing this.”

  She and Lindsay looked at each other then, and Isaac didn’t like it.

  “Is there something you two aren’t telling us?” he asked.

  Lindsay glanced at Caradine beside her, then frowned at Isaac. “There are probably a million things I’m not telling you. You’re going to have to be more specific.”

  Caradine smirked. “Isaac is used to a greater level of deference, Linds. If you genuflected, that wouldn’t go amiss. That’s the level of reverence he prefers.”

  Her sister didn’t grin, but the light in her eyes changed in a way that was too much like Caradine for Isaac’s peace of mind. “Have you taken up genuflecting? That doesn’t really sound like you.”

  “I don’t know how I feel about this,” Templeton said, looking back and forth between the two women.

  “Two of them?” Blue laughed. “I know how I feel about it. Freaking terrified.”

  Even Jonas looked amused at that.

  “If the two of you have thoughts about who’s behind this,” Isaac said, finding it harder than he should have to keep his voice level, “this is the time to share that.”

  Again, Caradine and her sister exchanged a look that clearly communicated all kinds of information they had no intention of sharing with everyone else.

  “After Phoenix you must have started to think about who it could be,” Isaac pushed.

  Lindsay paled a bit at that, but Caradine only scowled. At Isaac.

  “Of course,” she said. “But then five years passed. As far as I know, that bomb through the front window of my restaurant was the first sighting we’ve had since then.” She glanced at Lindsay, who nodded. “So the list remains the same. It has to be someone who would benefit from getting rid of my father in the first place. The question then is, Did the call come from inside or outside the house?”

  Isaac waited for Templeton or Blue to make the requisite horror-movie joke, but neither one did. Possibly because the real horror was more than enough.

  “Everyone thinks we died in that fire, too,” Lindsay said after a moment. “It’s never been much of a stretch to imagine that other people, who are supposedly dead, aren’t.”

  “Who do you think would be most likely to hold a grudge that long?” Jonas asked from his place near the wall.

  Caradine and Lindsay studied each other.

  “It could always be Dad,” Caradine said, almost tentatively. Almost as if she didn’t want to put that out there.

  “I don’t think it is,” Lindsay replied quickly. Too quickly. And she looked at her husband and Isaac, not her sister. “He was holding court the way he always did, sitting in his favorite chair in the den like it was a throne. And he didn’t allow any cell phones in the den with him on Sundays, because he was talking business. So in order for him to set off that bomb, he would have had to get up, go out of the room, grab his phone, and then run out of the house.”

  She shook her head as if she’d proved something.

  Caradine found Isaac’s narrow gaze. “My father didn’t run anywhere. Ever. And when his cell phone wasn’t on his body, he kept it locked up in the kitchen.”

  “Add to that the fact that if he got up and ran out, everyone else in the room would have gone with him like the little bootlickers they were,” Lindsay said caustically. “They all would have gone outside, which would defeat the purpose of blowing up the house.”

  “Why?” Koa asked.

  “Because if my father and all his lackeys were out of the house, only my mother and I would have stayed inside,” Lindsay said, her eyes on her husband while their little girl sat on the floor at her feet, singing to herself. “And no one thought either one of us was important enough to take out like that, believe me.”

  Isaac looked to Caradine, who was nodding as if that weren’t any kind of revolutionary statement.

  And she sounded perfectly calm when she chimed in. “I ha
ve no doubt that if my father could have faked his death, he would have. What I don’t see is him managing to keep under the radar for ten years. He loved his notoriety way too much. I can’t see him hiding out anywhere.”

  Lindsay snorted. “Yeah. No. Our father didn’t hide. He preferred to taunt the FBI openly, daring them to try to take him in.”

  “There were external factors,” Caradine said, as if she were turning it over in her head. “There always were. People jostling for position. Trying to push Dad out of the business, or cut him off. And, you know, his clientele weren’t exactly the most upright and honorable of people, so it could have been them, too.”

  “Irish mob. Italian mob. Street gangs. Creepy private collectors.” Lindsay rolled her eyes. “And that’s just in Boston.”

  “Do you think it was an external party?” Isaac asked.

  “I don’t,” Caradine said, carefully, as if she were waiting for Lindsay to disagree with her. But her sister only shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about it. And the fact it’s been ten years is the troubling part. Because, sure, let’s say it was the people who took the credit for killing him. The Connollys have their own troubles. Local disputes, infighting, and that court case. Are they really going to waste time worrying about the possibility that two of the least important people in that house might still be alive? I don’t see it.”

  “A year is a long time for your average dirtbag,” Lindsay agreed. “Much less ten years.”

  “So that means you think it was family,” Blue said.

  “Inner circle?” Templeton asked.

  “There was only inner circle in the house,” Lindsay said. “Mom was in the kitchen. So was I, because that’s where we waited for the men to be finished talking about important things. Like my life.”

  “Don’t be silly, Linds,” Caradine drawled. “Why would they waste time talking about your life in a big meeting like that?”

  Lindsay actually laughed, and Caradine did, too, and Isaac felt like he’d sustained a blow. Because Caradine laughed so rarely. And Lindsay sounded just like her. And his chest hurt, when he was trying to think strategy and probabilities, because they sounded so amused. And it wasn’t the least bit funny.