Delta Force Defender

by Megan Crane

  “We’ve had this connection since the beginning.” She was meeting his gaze in a way that made the back of his neck itch. Foreboding. “We’ve had a lot of sex. We tried a few days of domestic harmony in Fool’s Cove—”

  “Domestic harmony? Is that what you call it? I had to kidnap you and take you there against your will.”

  “Fine, then call it Stockholm syndrome,” she snapped. She shut her eyes a moment, then took another one of her steadying breaths. And when she opened her eyes again, he hardly recognized the expression he saw there. A beat or so later, he realized she was being kind. “That isn’t any better. We fight. We have sex. We fight some more. I spent five years telling myself that it had to be that way, but it doesn’t now. But maybe that’s all you and I have.”

  You’d choke on love, he remembered her saying over pancakes.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to admit we actually have something since the night we met,” he growled at her. “Why am I not surprised that you want to make it into another game?”

  “See? Even now, you want to fight. It’s the only thing you know how to do.”

  “Caradine.” He raked his hands through his hair. “I can’t fight you by myself. You know that, right?”

  “I fought because I had to. Because I had no other choice if I wanted to survive. You fight because you like it. It’s your job and you’re good at it.” Her blue eyes seemed too bright, or maybe that was him. Maybe something terrible was happening inside him. “But I did it. I survived. And I don’t want to fight anymore.”

  “Then don’t fight.” He managed to get the words out, even though it felt as if he were the one who’d been choked. “Tell me what this is. What you want, since you had all this unconfusing time over the past couple of days to change your appearance, play a character for the press, and in your spare time while receiving medical attention, figure out our entire relationship.”

  The Caradine he knew glared at him, then winced, because that must have hurt.

  “Are you offering me something?” she asked. “Because I can’t help noticing that we’re out of your comfort zone now.”

  He let out a laugh. “Do I have a comfort zone where you’re involved? That’s news to me.”

  Her head tipped slightly to one side, which he took as the warning it was. “I don’t need saving any longer. I’m not reeling around, lost and in need of Captain America to swoop in and save me with his magic hammer.”

  “Shield,” Isaac growled at her. “Captain America has a shield, not a hammer. Thor has a hammer, and what did they teach you in that college of yours?”

  She ignored that. “What all that means, no matter what superhero we reference, is that you don’t get to mope around, pining all over Alaska, waiting for my past to catch up with me. I’m over it. I’m moving on. Can you?”

  “Marines do not pine or mope, Caradine.”

  “We both know why I acted the way I have for the past five years.” Her eyebrows arched. “But you don’t have the excuse of being chased by homicidal maniacs and having to hide out to save your own life and protect your sister. What have you been doing?”

  “Right. Of course. I must be the bad guy, because I like you. Because I’ve always liked you. And haven’t made a secret of it.”

  “Who do you like, Isaac?” she asked softly. “Who is Caradine Scott?”

  He wanted to reach for her, but he didn’t. “I’m not the right person to play this game with. I’ve spent years pretending to be people I wasn’t. It’s never the differences that haunt you, in the end. It’s the similarities. The way it bleeds together until what hurts about an extraction isn’t what you leave behind, but what you take with you.”

  It was the most he could recall saying about his career to a civilian . . . maybe ever. Caradine looked almost dumbstruck for a moment.

  Isaac kept going. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me? You think I’m going to believe that I was just something you did to keep your cover?”

  “No,” she whispered. “You were the one thing I did that I thought would blow my cover, and you know it. But that’s the problem. You don’t like me, Isaac. You like what you can’t have.”

  He wanted to roll his eyes. He wanted to shout at her, because once again, she had to be playing some angle. . . . But there was something devastatingly honest about the way she was looking at him. Not smirking. Not challenging him. Not stripping off her clothes to redirect his attention.

  If she was playing him again, she was doing it by being so raw it hurt.

  “You like to prostrate yourself to the impossible, because that’s the only kind of love you understand,” she told him, every word like a stone hurled from a great height. He could feel each one of them hit. And the damage each one inflicted. “The kind you lose.”

  Something roared in him, a wild kind of howl. He wanted it to be temper, fury, outrage—but he had the distinct sensation that it was really more like grief.

  “You don’t know how to love anything,” he told her, and he wanted to shout. To make noise. When instead, he was so quiet it was like he was the one who’d died. “You’ve been running so long that you don’t know how to stop. You asked me to help you and then you manipulated me anyway. You don’t trust anything or anyone, and I don’t think you could if you tried.”

  She swayed a little, as if he were the animal in that lobby, pummeling her. As if he’d landed a much harder hit than her brother ever had.

  And Isaac was always surprised that it was possible to hate himself more. To find a new depth to it.

  But he detested himself tonight.

  “Your response to your parents’ death was to turn yourself into the patron saint of lost causes,” Caradine told him, almost gently. Almost as if it hurt her to say these things to him, and that only made it worse. “The marines weren’t enough. Delta Force wasn’t enough. When you left the service, you had to set up your own thing so you could keep on fighting the good fight, knowing you could never, ever win.”

  “Or possibly to do good in the world.”

  “You don’t want to win, Isaac,” she said, very distinctly, her blue gaze on his like a revelation. “You want to suffer.”

  He thought he was reeling, but the wall was at his back. “You keep telling me that, but it doesn’t make it true.”

  “Okay, then let’s test it.” She crawled to the side of the bed, in nothing but the T-shirt she was wearing. His T-shirt, and his chest felt tight enough to blow. Then she knelt up and laid her palms on his chest, still looking at him. Through him. “I love you, Isaac. We don’t have to date, let’s jump right in to the real stuff. You want to move in with me? Or should I move in with you? It’s been five years, why wait?”

  He felt numb, everywhere. “Do you think this is funny?”

  “I’ve never been more serious in my life. You want me?” And that look on her face wasn’t the usual challenge. If anything, she looked sad. But resolute. Something in him . . . broke. “Here I am. I’ve been fighting for years, but I’m done. I’m not running anymore.”

  Isaac wanted to wrap her in his arms. He wanted to tell her she was wrong about him, and about this. He wanted to prove it. He wanted to fight.

  The truth of what she was saying might as well have been another pipe bomb. He felt his foundations go up in flames. He thought about the choices he’d made after high school, in college. Officer training, then the corps. And every choice since then.

  Always to fight.

  He always, always wanted to fight.

  Isaac had no idea what waited for him on the other side of the fight, and he didn’t want to know. If he thought about it at all, he’d imagined he’d live out his days doing what he did now until he couldn’t do it any longer. And he’d never imagined himself growing old.

  He’d figured he’d die in battle first.

  His heart thudded at him. Tim
e flattened out again, and there was nothing but Caradine’s hands on his chest. Her blue eyes seeing far too much.

  “Caradine . . .” he whispered.

  She nodded as if it hurt her, and not because of the injuries she’d sustained.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, her voice rough.

  And when she dropped her hands and sat back on her heels, he felt grief plow into him again, black and bright and blinding.

  “Caradine,” he said again, like her name could make the difference here.

  Like it was still her name. Or had ever been.

  “Isaac.” She said it in that same rough way that sounded like a sob. That felt like one inside of him. That he knew he would carry with him, always, like too many other things he didn’t want to look at. She shook her head, her blue eyes filling. “I already said good-bye to you.”

  And later, he had no idea how he left, only that he did.

  He staggered out into the hallway and alerted her security detail that they sucked. Hard.

  “I didn’t try to get past you,” he growled. “I walked right up to her door and let myself in.”

  He called Blue in the safe house and ordered him to find and manage a far better security force to keep her safe.

  “You got it, boss,” Blue said. “Are you—?”

  But Isaac hung up before he could ask the question. And he didn’t call Templeton or Jonas, who wouldn’t accept that kind of nonresponse.

  He found himself in the Public Garden in the dark. There was music coming from somewhere, and he was vaguely aware of people moving on the dark paths, but all he saw was Caradine.

  That’s the only kind of love you understand. The kind you lose.

  God, he wanted to fight . . . something. Anything.

  Everything.

  I love you, Isaac.

  He took a breath, and then he called Griffin.

  “I’m going to take the Brazil job myself,” he said. “And I’m leaving tonight. Now. I want to be in Manaus by morning.”

  “We’re talking about a month down there, potentially,” Griffin argued, sounding less than his usual icy self. “Maybe two.”

  “I’m headed for the jet,” Isaac told him shortly, because there was no room for debate. There was only the next fight, the longer and more complicated, the better. Because what he loved most died, and so he saved what he could. The things he didn’t love but could help. As if that could make up for it. As if somehow, that might make him whole. “Make sure it’s ready.”

  Twenty-five

  It was getting toward the end of August when Isaac finally returned to Grizzly Harbor.

  Though summer in Alaska after almost two months in the Amazon felt a whole lot like the dead of winter. He actually almost shivered while walking across the tarmac in Juneau. As a native-born Alaskan, he was appalled.

  He’d immersed himself completely in the tricky situation he’d had to monitor and guide toward a fruitful resolution down there, relying on texts and the occasional e-mail to keep him updated about what was happening at the office. That was the only takeaway he cared to acknowledge from earlier in the summer—that Alaska Force ran smoothly.

  Whether he was obsessively monitoring it or not.

  And if relying on infrequent texts cut down on his friends’ and colleagues’ ability to ask him extraneous questions about his personal life, that was more than all right with him.

  The seaplane he took from Juneau delivered him into Fool’s Cove with a showy jump or two on the water, letting him get a good look at the place he’d called home for years now. The home he’d built for himself and had made into a haven for men like him who didn’t fit anywhere else. The cabins set into the rocky hillside, which was already starting to look like the coming fall. The fog draped over the mountain and dancing through the trees.

  That was the thing about Alaska. No matter how roughed up he was, no matter what he’d lost, it always felt like home.

  When he jumped down to the dock, the cool air smelled like woodsmoke and salt, and the slap of it against his face made him think about smiling—which was more than the humidity in Brazil had done. He slung his bag over his shoulder and climbed up the stairs to the lodge, happy to see that everywhere he looked, everything seemed to be just as he’d left it.

  And it was a strange thing to acknowledge that he didn’t know if he should feel pleased that it turned out he wasn’t indispensable after all, or if he should indulge the raw thing inside him instead. Probably both.

  He didn’t head to his cabin, because it was one thing to be largely unreachable while in the Amazonian jungle. Now that he was back, it was time to go to work.

  Another good thing, to his way of thinking, was that he felt a kind of relief when he walked into the lodge.

  “I don’t believe it,” came Templeton’s booming voice from down the length of the lobby-like great room. He was sitting oh-so-casually on one of the couches with his tablet in one hand, as if he hadn’t seen the seaplane come in. “Do my eyes deceive me? Or is this the ghost of Gentrys past?”

  “Do I look like a ghost?” Isaac grinned. Blandly. “And here I thought it was a successful mission.”

  “I guess that depends on how you measure your successes,” Templeton drawled, stretching out his legs. “Me, I have a different metric than running off to the jungle to avoid—”

  “The end of the world?” Isaac interjected with an edge in his voice, daring his friend to come back at him. “Because that’s what I was doing. And I didn’t realize that we were back in middle school.”

  “Never left,” came Jonas’s voice from the opposite side of the big lobby.

  Where he was leaning in a doorway like he, too, was casually wandering around the lodge in the middle of the day for no particular reason. Or like he ever leaned.

  Isaac decided he didn’t want to deal with either one of them, so he headed for his office. And he didn’t have to turn around to see them following him. He could hear them. They stuck with him as he pushed through the doors, then headed down the hallway toward his main office. The one he took clients to when they came here, not the one he kept in his home.

  The home he hadn’t gone to yet, because the last time he’d been there, she’d been there, too.

  Isaac would have ordered himself to stop thinking about Caradine, but what was the point? It hadn’t worked in almost two months. What made him think it would work now?

  He expected to find Horatio waiting for him in his office, curled up on the sofa with a baleful glare, ready to punish him for being gone so long. But his dog wasn’t there. He tossed his bag on the spot Horatio normally claimed and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror on the wall. A little too wild man and not enough easygoing boy next door, but he didn’t have it in him to care. Not enough to do something about it.

  There were stacks of papers on his desk. The light on his desk phone blinked wildly. Ordinarily he would dive right in.

  But instead, he eyed his unwanted entourage as they loomed about in his doorway.

  There were a thousand things he could have asked them. He went with, “Where’s my dog?”

  Templeton whistled in that way he had that put Isaac’s teeth on edge. The way it was meant to, he knew.

  “Cold as ice,” Templeton said.

  “Your first question is about your dog,” Jonas said carefully, as if he were giving Isaac the opportunity to change his answer.

  “Normally I don’t have to ask about Horatio, because he’s right here. I assume that if something happened to him, someone would have informed me.” He lifted a brow. “Or am I supposed to interpret your dog and pony show another way?”

  “Cranky,” Templeton observed, apparently still narrating. “And this from the individual who once lectured us all on how breathing into the solar plexus could cure jet lag.”

  Jon
as, who normally did not engage in such shenanigans, actually cracked a smile. Or a faint curl in the corner of his mouth, which was the same thing when it came to Jonas. “All I wanted to do was punch him in the solar plexus.”

  “Good talk, thank you,” Isaac said impatiently. “If that’s all, I have two months to catch up on.”

  “The thing about Isaac,” Templeton said conversationally, as if he had nothing better to do than lounge in the doorway, looking as boneless and lazy as those eyes of his were sharp, “is that he sure does love to dish it out. Taking it?”

  “That, he doesn’t like,” Jonas answered.

  Templeton shook his head. “No indeed.”

  Isaac sighed. “What is it that you would like me to take?”

  “Your dog is fine,” Templeton told him. “He’s in town.”

  That was strange, but Isaac didn’t pursue it. Because he could see there was no point. If Templeton had wanted to give him more information—like why Horatio, who normally hung out at the lodge while Isaac was away so he could be fawned over by everyone, would go to town in the first place—he would have given it. If Templeton didn’t want to give out the information, Isaac certainly wasn’t going to beg for it.

  “Great,” he said. “Thank you.”

  He waited for them to go away, but neither one of them moved.

  “Jimmy Sheeran, on the other hand, is not fine,” Jonas said. He and Templeton were staring at Isaac like this was the opening gambit in a tough interview, so Isaac kept his expression locked down. “Someone took him out in police custody.”

  That thudded in him. A direct hit. “What?”

  “It turns out that your average dirtbag doesn’t really like it when another dirtbag lies about who he is for almost ten years.” Templeton shrugged. “They found him in a cell. Whoever did it didn’t even bother to dress it up like it was a suicide.”

  Isaac thought of that look on Caradine’s face, back in Boston. In that cursed lobby. The gun in her hand and that bleak acceptance on her face, because she’d been prepared to do what had to be done.

  What he’d wanted to do, too.