Delta Force Defender

by Megan Crane

  “Threat neutralized,” Isaac replied, but his gaze was still on the woman who stood there propped up against the wall, her ten-year nightmare in a heap on the floor of this dank lobby. But his nightmare remained the same. And would be worse, now, with this scene etched on it. “Caradine is fine.”

  Jonas took over then, listing potential injuries and requesting medical attention as well as law enforcement to clean up the mess.

  Isaac shut off his comm unit because his attention was on Caradine, who didn’t look fine, no matter what he’d said. Bruises seemed to multiply the longer he looked at her throat. Her pretty face was swollen, cut, and battered. And still, she was glaring at him like she was daring him to do something about any of this.

  It took him a moment to recognize the sensation that soared through him at the sight of that glare.

  Pure joy.

  “Are you?” he asked her, quietly. “Fine, I mean.”

  She smirked, though it must have hurt. And there was a glaze over her eyes, which made him want to shoot things himself.

  “Of course I’m fine. I’m always fine. It’s my defining characteristic.”

  “I can think of other definitions.” He shook his head at her, fighting to keep his fury at bay. “What would you call someone who deliberately put herself in danger the way you did today?”

  “Determined,” Caradine said, and the smirk faded. Leaving only bruises and scrapes and too many ghosts in her eyes. “Desperate.”

  And all he could think about was running through that long tunnel, in that same frozen state he’d been in when he’d gotten that call weeks back. When he’d taken that helicopter flight into Grizzly Harbor to find her restaurant charred.

  “I thought you were dead,” he gritted out. “Again.”

  “Then you’d really know what to do,” she said, and her voice was thicker then. Her words slurred. Adrenaline was draining away and turning into shock, he could tell. She tried to smile. To stand up straighter. “You do like your suffering, Gentry.”

  This time, when he lunged forward, he caught her in his arms before she crumpled into a heap on the floor.

  “I’m not swooning,” she said, sounding disgruntled and faintly horrified. “If you tell anyone I fainted, I’ll kill you. As soon as I can stand up again.”

  “Noted,” Isaac said gruffly. “Now shut up.”

  Her lips curved as her eyes fluttered shut. And Isaac stayed where he was, cradling her in his arms in a way she would never have allowed him to do if she were in complete control. He smoothed her dark hair back from her face, taking care not to touch any of the cuts or bruises or red, angry swelling that made him want to storm across the lobby and finish the job she’d started.

  She let out a breath as if she’d been holding it in a long time.

  Isaac stayed where he was while time flattened out and lost all meaning again. The way it had when he’d been in that tunnel, running to find her. The way it had when he’d been sixteen and had been pulled out of school to discover everything he knew was changed forever. Grief and love, panic and joy, all of them fused together and hummed in him like so many sides of the same coin.

  And all the while, this woman who lied to his face with glee, deliberately misled him, and was affronted when he helped her turned her face toward him and snuggled in closer, breathing him in like he was the only thing that had ever mattered to her or ever would.

  Isaac knew he would pay for that, too.

  But not right now. Not here.

  “Incoming,” Jonas said, tapping his comm unit. “Sirens blaring.”

  Soon enough, too soon, Isaac had to tear his eyes away from his woman yet again. He had to hand her over to the paramedics, though she looked fragile and vulnerable and it made him want to break things with his hands, because she would hate to think anyone saw her like that.

  And then, though he had no interest in any of it the way he normally did, he had to suck up and surrender himself to official business in the form of the deeply unimpressed federal government. Because he was the head of Alaska Force, not the former Julia Sheeran’s boyfriend, and it was high time he remembered that.

  Or better yet, acted like it.

  Twenty-four

  It took days.

  Isaac had spent most of his career building his relationships with officials for use in situations like this. Often, he worked magic in tight spots, thanks to those relationships. But even he couldn’t wave away a decade-old mass murder, the five-year-old murders in Phoenix, Jimmy Sheeran’s new face and rise to criminal prominence after his supposed death, or the ten years Caradine and her sister had spent on the run.

  Much less Caradine’s obvious preference that Lindsay be officially declared dead—and therefore free, he understood.

  He sat in briefing after briefing, up and down the food chain. He called in favors. He played games he’d always been good at but that seemed little more than hollow now. He did his best to control his impatience and focus on the end game—that being Caradine and Lindsay free and clear and no longer forced to run or hide, unless that was what they wanted—when all he wanted was three seconds alone with her.

  Because he wanted to know what the hell she’d meant. You do like your suffering, Gentry.

  It ate at him.

  Four days later, after he’d debriefed and bargained, declined the usual employment offers, and reminded himself why he was glad he was out of government work these days, he was finally released from custody.

  Not that anyone had called it custody, of course, even when they’d issued him an invitation to fly south to the Pentagon and had thoughtfully provided him with armed transport to hurry him along.

  He walked out of the building and squinted in the summer swelter of Arlington, Virginia, still happy to have left his former life behind. He liked his life less classified and with less bureaucracy. He fished out the phone that had been confiscated for two days and monitored for the next two, and called into Fool’s Cove.

  “The rest of the team got released yesterday,” Griffin told him once the line was secured. “They kept them all in Boston, so I’ll send you the coordinates to the safe house they’re staying in while they wait for you to finish doing the dance.”

  “I hate dancing.”

  “You can dance until the music stops,” Griffin replied. “Everything here is under control.”

  “The music ended a while ago,” Isaac said shortly as he walked toward the Metro station, some ten minutes away. “Give me the highlights.”

  Griffin launched into a breakdown of active missions, including a developing situation in Brazil that everyone was hoping wouldn’t blow up.

  It occurred to Isaac then, walking away from the Pentagon with as little interest in looking back as he’d had when he’d left the service, that of all the things he’d worried about over the past four days, Alaska Force wasn’t one of them.

  He’d offered explanations to men who required salutes. He’d explained himself to men who’d declined to introduce themselves. Mostly, he’d worried about Caradine. And throughout the process he’d had absolutely no doubt that his business was in safe hands. That the people he’d hired could take care of it themselves.

  Meaning that, after all this time, this overcompensating workaholic could maybe let go a little.

  A notion that might have felt revolutionary if he’d known where Caradine was.

  “Do we think Brazil is going to heat up?” he asked. And rubbed at the back of his neck, because he had the feeling he already knew the answer.

  Griffin sighed. “Oz thinks we should send a team, but there’s no way of telling how long we’ll have to be there if we do. Typical quagmire.”

  “Okay.” Isaac moved swiftly to get around a group of tourists. “Let me think about who we can send down there on an open-ended op.” It was a different math these days, now that the bette
r part of his first string had personal lives back in Alaska to consider. He still wasn’t used to it. “No fires to put out?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  Isaac didn’t want to ask, but he’d scrolled through all the messages on his phone. He’d checked all his voice mails. She hadn’t contacted him, which wasn’t a surprise.

  It was another kick in the gut, but it wasn’t a surprise.

  “Where is she?” he made himself ask.

  He thought of the way she’d closed her eyes and put her battered face in the crook of his neck. He figured he’d carry that with him.

  Griffin paused. “She didn’t tell you?”

  “How would she do that? With telepathy? They don’t allow that in the Pentagon.”

  And when the icy, emotionless sniper laughed, Isaac gritted his teeth.

  “She’s still in Boston, though not in the safe house,” Griffin told him. “She’s giving press conferences from the Four Seasons.”

  * * *

  * * *

  It was entirely too easy to slip past Caradine’s security, such as it was. And even easier to break into her hotel room.

  The same way he had in that little bed-and-breakfast in Maine.

  Isaac had attempted to cool off his temper by flying commercial up to Boston. It was good to remind himself that not everything was private jets and the most restricted halls of the Pentagon. It was even better to spend time around all the regular people who didn’t know what evil lurked in the world, who had no idea what he did to combat it, and to remember that there were good reasons he did what he did.

  Better still, the hours of inconvenience and overcrowding had allowed him to catch up on what he’d missed over the past few days. He’d read all the headlines in the Boston Globe about Jimmy Sheeran’s arrest ten years after his death, Julia Sheeran’s escape all those years ago, and her sister’s subsequent death, and flicked through all the old articles they referenced from back then.

  But he was most interested in now.

  In Julia Sheeran herself, notably blond and pale in all the coverage of her, which the cynic in him couldn’t help but note made the beating she’d taken all the more noticeable. She’d stood outside the FBI building in Chelsea, leaning on the arm of an attorney as if she were too weak to stand. She’d been wearing pastels, as she spoke in a trembling voice about how scared, yet determined, she was.

  Caradine in pastels. Caradine making public statements in a soft, shaking voice. Caradine weak and trembling or scared.

  He had a lot of follow-up questions.

  Isaac made his way into the hotel suite, silently. He took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the dark, then he made his way to the foot of yet another bed where she slept, hard.

  With one hand under her pillow where he felt certain she still kept her gun.

  He couldn’t have said how long he watched her. Or when her breathing changed.

  She woke in a rush in the next moment and sat up straight—one telltale hand sliding beneath her pillows, confirming his suspicions.

  He took his time wandering over to the far side of the bed, then switched on the bedside light.

  “This is like déjà vu,” she drawled, without the hint of any shake. Or any softness, either. “Or, wait a minute. Is this a dream? If I pinch myself, you blow away like smoke?”

  “I can pinch you if you want.”

  He enjoyed, maybe more than he should have, the way her eyes widened as she took in his expression. “I believe I’ll pass on that.”

  She sat in the center of the king-sized bed, cross-legged and looking the sort of calm that would normally require medication. He knew she was faking it. Just like he knew she’d stolen that T-shirt she was wearing from his cabin in Alaska. The blond hair made her blue eyes look different, but it was still her face. The face that had haunted him for years now.

  The face that would always haunt him.

  And he knew that while he would remember each and every moment he’d gazed at her when she was nothing short of perfect, he would catalog how she looked tonight, too, and wear it like some kind of talisman. Every bruise on her that had bloomed into deep purple and black. The scrapes that looked sore and angry. The mottled patches of abrasions that stood out against the skin of her throat.

  He would add each and every one to his nightmares.

  “Press conferences?” he asked, keeping his voice as quiet and almost-friendly as possible. And enjoying it when she tensed. “Is that smart?”

  “I think it’s very smart, actually, thank you for asking.” She rubbed at her eyes, taking care not to touch any of the tender parts of her face. “Why not accuse my brother of his crimes on as grand a stage as possible? I tried hiding for ten years and I ended up getting beat on in the lobby of a crappy building in Southie. Figured I’d try a different way this time.”

  “Blond.”

  She held his gaze, as challenging as ever. And slowly, deliberately twirled a piece of blond hair around her finger. “Not a wig, this time. Just to give it that extra dose of reality.”

  “What’s your actual, natural hair color?”

  “What does natural even mean? It will be gray soon enough, now that I have a life expectancy longer than the average carton of milk.”

  “So this is like your name. Do you pick out dyes while you come up with new identities?”

  “One-stop shopping is everyone’s favorite, Gentry.”

  He knew she liked to call him Gentry to keep him at a distance. He should have heeded that years ago. “Do you really think you can taunt him into leaving you alone?”

  Caradine studied him, and Isaac had the lowering notion that while some of the military’s finest interrogators couldn’t get him to say a single thing he didn’t want to say, she could. And probably would. All it took were bright blue eyes he couldn’t resist and her attention.

  He could take apart the world with his bare hands, easily.

  But this woman had him in the palm of one of hers, and worse, he suspected she knew it.

  “What I think is that he’s going to go to jail,” she said after a moment. “He might not have killed all the people in that house, but I’m pretty sure the difference between seven and ten bodies is more or less academic at this point.”

  “What if he sends some more of his lackeys to handle you?”

  “He’s not a Mafia don. He just knows Mafia dons. A crucial distinction.”

  “They’re all splashing around in the same sewer, as far as I can tell.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Whatever she saw on his face made her sigh. “It really doesn’t. Lindsay gets to stay dead as far as Jimmy knows, and that will keep her safe. What would he gain by sending people after me?”

  “You’ll be dead. That’s the gain. And bonus, you won’t be able to testify.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But I’m not running anymore. I’m done.”

  “Maybe is not acceptable. We’re talking about your death, Caradine.”

  “You’re talking about my death. I’m talking about my life.” And when he’d dreamed of her smiling at him, it wasn’t like this. As if he made her sad. “I survived my homecoming when I was sure, for ten years, that coming back here would kill me. I’m not scared anymore. Jimmy’s in custody, and I don’t see him getting out anytime soon. Even if he did, he’s compromised. He lied about who he was to people who take that kind of thing very, very seriously. I’m the least of his problems.” She shrugged. “And the more press conferences I give, the more attention I draw to myself, the more he would have to lose by coming after me with so many other problems to worry about.”

  There was a certain logic to that. If he were a better man, Isaac wouldn’t resent that, surely. “You played me. Deliberately.”

  She didn’t look away. “I did.”

  He wanted to rage at her about how she’d
put herself at risk. He wanted to pick apart the decisions she’d made. To plan good-bye speeches in the car, then walk into Sharkey’s knowing he might not make it to her in time.

  He wanted to ask her what she thought would happen to him—and the whole world—if he’d burst into that lobby to find her gone. Or worse, in pieces. What did she think he would do? How did she think he would survive that?

  “Is there ever a time when you’re not playing games with me?” he demanded.

  Caradine blew out a breath. “Really, Isaac? Have you noticed that we’re in a fancy hotel room?” She stretched out in her bed. “Is an interrogation the only thing you can think of to do?”

  And something in him snapped.

  “Not everything is about sex!” he roared at her.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d yelled outside the job. Not once. He’d made it his art and calling to exude calm no matter what. To be friendly and approachable and— Too bad. He was done.

  Isaac had watched her get manhandled because she’d thrown herself headfirst into yet another situation that could have killed her. She could have died, and he was trained to be the exact person she should run to when she found herself in trouble.

  He was not supposed to be the guy she ran away from, again and again and again.

  Almost like she knows, too, he told himself.

  She blinked at him, and he saw her pulse in the undamaged part of her neck. He saw her glance at the hands he’d curled into fists at his side, then up to his face, and he heard her pull in a steadying sort of breath. He couldn’t deny it was gratifying that maybe, for three seconds, she might not see him as a freaking teddy bear.

  But he didn’t like it when she smiled again, as sadly as before. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” she said. “Nonstop, actually, since I woke up in the hospital and you weren’t there to confuse me.”

  “I was in federal custody at the Pentagon,” he bit out. “And I wasn’t aware that I confused you. Or that anything could.”