Delta Force Defender

by Megan Crane

  He was fiercely, deeply glad she hadn’t had to do it.

  And maybe a little sad that he hadn’t had the opportunity to do it for her. Maybe all he knew how to do was fight. But he was really, really good at it.

  “I can’t really work up any particular sadness about that,” he said now.

  “The two idiots he had with him have been throwing everyone and everything under any bus they can find,” Templeton continued. “Just like the one you left up in Maine. They can’t accuse each other fast enough.”

  “Good,” Isaac said. Maybe a little gruffly. “I like it when they eat each other alive.”

  “Julia Sheeran did a media tour,” Jonas said, and it didn’t matter what name they used. It was her, and thinking about her . . . hurt. Though that was a tame word to describe the raw thing in him. And Isaac couldn’t really place the expression on his friend’s normally stark, unreadable face then. His dark eyes actually gleamed. “All the talk shows. All those news programs.”

  Isaac had a lot to say about that but settled for a curt nod.

  “The level of stupidity it would take to go after her when she made herself such a public figure . . .” Jonas shook his head. “I don’t think anyone would be dumb enough to do it.”

  “And if there was someone dumb enough to do it,” Templeton chimed in, “there would be no point now. Not with Jimmy dead. There’s no one to curry favor with anymore.”

  “She’s always been smart.” Isaac meant that. He did.

  “And then,” Jonas said, his gaze still gleaming, “she announced that she was retreating to Europe to write her memoirs.”

  Isaac let that land. “I’ll admit I didn’t see that coming.”

  “She boarded a plane to Germany, then disappeared,” Templeton said, with great satisfaction.

  “What do you mean, she disappeared?”

  Templeton nodded sagely. “There were heated calls from the feds. You know what they’re like when they can’t find someone.”

  Isaac thought about the wigs. About Caradine in Texas, all those curls and a drawl to match. He thought about how she’d played him, ruthlessly and unapologetically, and would again, no doubt, if necessary.

  He wondered what kind of woman she would be next. What kind of life she would arrange around herself this time. If she was truly free, who would she become?

  Who do you like, Isaac? she’d asked him. Who is Caradine Scott?

  And he hated how that question bounced around inside him the way it had been doing for almost two months, making it all too clear that he was far emptier than he ought to have been.

  He’d had all these weeks to get used to it, but it still snuck up on him.

  Or maybe, that voice inside him, sharp like hers, chimed in, it’s always there. You just can’t drown it out with machine gun fire every second of the day.

  “I appreciate the update,” he said now, and managed not to sound as stiff as he felt.

  He nodded at his friends, both of whom he currently wanted to cause physical harm to. But didn’t, because he was in control of himself and not a complete animal, thank you. Then he moved toward his desk, indicating that the conversation was over. That he had work to do.

  When he looked up again, Templeton had vanished. But Jonas was still there, still standing in the doorway.

  And he was watching Isaac with a certain hooded focus that boded ill.

  Isaac sighed. “You, too?”

  Jonas didn’t smile. Not exactly. “Time was, I dug myself a hole. You came and dragged me out of it.”

  “I’m not in a hole.”

  “And I promised you that someday, I would do the same for you.”

  Isaac tried to control his impatience. And all the rest of it. “I’m not in a hole, Jonas.”

  “I’ll tell you now what you told me then,” Jonas said in that same calm voice of his. “You do no honor to the people you’ve lost by wasting your life. No honor at all.”

  Isaac said things like that all the time. But very rarely did people say it to him. He couldn’t say he liked the reversal.

  “I appreciate what you’re trying to do here,” Isaac said, and it cost him more than he planned to acknowledge to sound that even. That unbothered. “But the situation isn’t what you think it is.”

  “I’m pretty sure the situation is exactly what I think it is.”

  “Not everything works out,” Isaac said. Another thing he’d been telling himself a lot. “What did you expect? Wedding bells? Have you met either one of us?”

  “Have you?” Jonas’s dark eyes gleamed again. Possibly more intensely. “Because it seems to me that you’re so busy not looking at yourself in the mirror that you don’t know who the hell you are.”

  “You’re confusing me with someone else. Maybe you?”

  “I’m fully conversant on this particular mess,” Jonas said quietly, indicating himself. “Men like us, we know too well how to lose. We know how quickly, how easily, things are taken from us. But we also know, better than anyone, that you can’t live your life waiting for accidents to happen. That’s why we train. That’s why we fight. Not to keep them from happening, but so we can respond to them when they do.”

  “I know why I fight, Jonas.”

  His gaze was much too direct. “Then stop fighting for the wrong thing.”

  And if this had been Templeton, Isaac would have rolled his eyes. Argued. Dismissed it, one way or another. But Jonas was not Templeton.

  Jonas never put on a show. He never talked that much, either.

  Which meant Isaac had no choice but to take what he said on board. Even though he really, truly didn’t want to do anything of the kind.

  Jonas didn’t stick around after that, no doubt having gotten in his daily quota of words. Isaac was grateful for the work on his desk. The messages on his phone. He lost himself in both. And had long, involved meetings with Oz, then Bethan, who was running command on the current ongoing missions.

  When he’d done as much as he could do in this time zone, he swung by his office again, grabbed his bag, and headed to his cabin.

  He didn’t like that Horatio was “in town.” And he really didn’t like the fact that when he walked inside, he was struck by the memory of those few days Caradine had spent here. Those few days that had allowed him to imagine things he’d never dared imagine before. Not in such detail.

  “Because you’re an idiot,” he muttered at himself.

  He changed, then headed out for a brutal, near-vertical trail run, like he was trying to break himself on Hard Ass Pass.

  But he was hard to break. That was part of what made him who he was.

  Only when he’d made it back to his cabin in one piece, more or less, did he shower, then attempt to work on the wild man he might bring home from a mission but didn’t like to show in town. He didn’t need to give Otis Taggert any more ammunition.

  “I know exactly who’s in the mirror,” he growled at his reflection.

  He headed into town as the August sun began to put on a show, announcing the end of another one of the too-few remaining days of summer. Most of which he’d missed this year. That would catch up with him when the winter dark settled in.

  Isaac liked all the toys that came with Alaska Force. The boats, the helicopters, the jet. But at heart, he was still the Alaskan boy who’d learned how to pilot pretty much anything that could float, thanks to his father. He took one of the smaller boats now, sticking close to the rocky shore as he made his way around to Grizzly Harbor.

  He felt closer to the kid he’d been when he was out in a small boat. Closer to the father who’d loved him even when he was at his teenage worst.

  Closer to that life he might have had, had his parents lived.

  He docked his boat and took a deep breath as he walked toward land. Grizzly Harbor hadn’t been his home in years, but it
still felt like it was. He liked seeing the lights go on in the houses and cabins as folks prepared for the coming dark. He liked knowing that if he showed his face in the Bait & Tackle, the way he liked to do sometimes, Otis Taggert would snipe at him. If he walked into the Blue Bear Inn, he would find Madeleine Yazzie there, her red beehive trembling and her face pressed to one of those paperbacks she got from her sister in Anchorage. He liked knowing almost everybody he saw on the street, especially in winter, when there were never any tourists around.

  He wished that he could go back in time and tell his father that he got it now. That he understood that a town like this wrapped itself around a person, then sunk in deep, so it wasn’t about whether it was normal or not. It wasn’t even about whether or not Isaac liked it here. Grizzly Harbor was part of him. He was part of it.

  Whether Caradine was here or not, he was. The way Gentrys had been for generations, no matter the tragedies that had befallen them.

  That was the thing about belonging. You couldn’t decide on it. It pretty much decided on you.

  It was still summer, so even though it already looked like fall up on the mountain, with the clouds coming in low and that bite in the air, people were still out in what bit of daylight there was left. He nodded to Chris Tanaka, who was sitting down by the beach with a bottle of whiskey, and local fisherman Ben McCreedie, who was never sober on dry land. He smiled at the constantly shifting cluster of romantic drama that was Maria, Luz, the men they traded back and forth, and their babies of uncertain paternity, who were gathered together outside the general store having one of their intense conversations.

  Isaac assumed that Horatio had jumped in a boat with Griffin one night and headed to the house Griffin and Mariah kept here in town, so he walked in that direction. But halfway up the hill, right when he should have turned to climb up toward Griffin’s house, he stopped.

  Because where he expected to see the burned-out husk of what had once been the Water’s Edge Café, he saw instead . . . something else. Something new.

  Brand-new construction, in fact. And where the old sign had once been, painted by Alonzo and Martie Hagan all those years ago and ignored entirely by Caradine, there was a bright new one.

  THE NEW WATER’S EDGE CAFÉ, it shouted, in a big and bold graphic that Isaac knew instantly had been designed by Everly. COME FOR THE FIRE, STAY FOR THE FOOD.

  Isaac’s heart did something funny in his chest, but he was good at ignoring that by now. Instead of heading for Griffin’s, he walked up the street toward the café, his boots making a familiar sound as they hit the wood of the boardwalk beneath him.

  And he didn’t choose to acknowledge what his pulse was doing when he drew close.

  The restaurant was completely rebuilt. There had been one big room, but now there were two. There were more windows in front, letting in the view. He could see that the kitchen had been seriously upgraded. Not only upgraded. It was open and visible—so whoever cooked there wouldn’t be hidden away, banging pots and pans as a communication device instead of talking.

  “Isn’t that something?”

  Isaac didn’t jump, because he was too well trained, but it wasn’t lost on him that old Ernie Tatlelik had wandered up to him without his noticing.

  Get it together, Gentry, he snapped at himself.

  Isaac shook his head. “How did this happen?”

  The old man gave him a look. “You know how it is around here. We don’t like it when outsiders mess up our stuff. And nobody wants to spend the winter living off burgers from the Fairweather.”

  Ernie howled at that, as if he’d made a joke, then tottered off in that particular bowlegged walk of his.

  Isaac couldn’t seem to move.

  It was good for everyone, of course, that the Water’s Edge Café continued to exist. Grizzly Harbor didn’t have much in the way of restaurants, so losing this one would be a blow. He hadn’t even gotten around to thinking what winter would be like without it. Everybody in town relied on this place. On it opening early when folks had to get their boats out. On the holiday meals Caradine cooked, creating a festive atmosphere that it occurred to him now, looking back, was as much for her as it had been for the rest of them. Not that she’d ever admit it.

  But he didn’t know how he was going to act like it was the same now. How he was going to walk in and see someone else back there in the kitchen, cooking food that would never be as good as Caradine’s.

  The new owner might even have a menu, like a regular restaurant. Everything in him rebelled at the thought.

  For someone who’d lost almost everyone he’d ever loved, Isaac thought darkly, he sure was bad at it.

  Against his will, he found his gaze moving up the hill in the direction of that blue house where he’d grown up. The house that Amy had always wanted to sell, let others live in, or something. But Isaac had insisted they leave it as it was. A dedicated museum to loss and grief. And the life he’d thought he was going to live when he was sixteen.

  The things Caradine had said to him in that hotel room seemed to hum inside him then.

  Your response to your parents’ death was to turn yourself into the patron saint of lost causes, she’d said. And worse still, You don’t want to win, Isaac. You want to suffer.

  It was hard to argue with the truth of that when he was staring at a house he’d made into a gravestone.

  He turned and headed down the hill, but instead of going to Griffin’s, he headed for the Fairweather. Because it seemed he was going to need a little whiskey to handle being home.

  The sky was turning pink when he reached the bar, reminding him unpleasantly of the tropical sunset he’d shared with Caradine in that damned waterfall. He didn’t think he was ever going to get that out of his head.

  He pushed through the heavy door, certain that a long pour from his favorite bartender would get his head on straight. Things would get back to normal soon enough. He would do his job. Life would go on.

  Because that was always the hardest part. Life went on whether he was finished mourning or not. Life went on no matter how he grieved, no matter what he’d lost, no matter how broken he felt.

  Life went on. All Isaac had to do was live it.

  He stepped into the familiar, dim embrace of the best dive bar on the planet, and his gaze went almost instantly to the bar.

  More specifically, to the once again dark-haired woman who sat at the bar with his dog at her feet. The woman who looked like she’d been engaged in conversation with the man to her left, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Isaac’s hermit of an uncle.

  But even as he thought that, she turned. As if his entrance had been magnetic and her eyes were pulled straight to him, against her will.

  The way it had been five years ago.

  Caradine.

  Here.

  And this time, Isaac was the one who walked to the bar, his gaze locked on to hers.

  When he got there, she turned around on her bar seat and leaned back lazily. It was a fair representation of how he had greeted her all those years back.

  Horatio whined at him, but as he’d clearly chosen sides, Isaac did, too.

  Caradine. Here.

  He couldn’t look at anything or anyone but her.

  “Good Lord, Gentry,” she drawled, sharp and spiky, the way he liked her best. “What took you so long?”

  Twenty-six

  Caradine had never been normal.

  Deciding she was going to live like a normal person now that she wasn’t dead, and might in fact live a long and happy life, was easy in theory. In practice, however, it was . . . harder.

  There had been the publicity she’d thrown herself into, theorizing that the best defense was a calculated offense—and the more noise she made about being the last remaining Sheeran, the less anyone would even think of looking for Lindsay. Or be tempted to come after her.

 
But all that had come to a screeching halt when Jimmy died.

  She’d been surprised to find that his death made her more emotional than she would have imagined. Not because she mourned him, specifically. She didn’t. But because, with his death, she could finally mourn what had happened ten years ago. Because she didn’t have to run anymore.

  We’re free, she’d told Lindsay when she’d gone ahead and called her. On a regular phone, no codes or protocols. You don’t have to be dead if you don’t want to.

  Like we know how to be alive, Lindsay had replied, sounding shell-shocked and possibly happy and, like Caradine, maybe swamped with too many conflicting feelings about all the things they’d been too busy surviving to process.

  Julia had laid down one last trail, just in case.

  Then Caradine had taken all her conflicted feelings home. Where she belonged.

  “What are you doing here?” Isaac asked, looking brooding and beautiful, and maddening, all at once.

  And he was still the only thing she could see when he walked into a room.

  “I’ve decided to stay here,” she said, the way she’d imagined saying it to him approximately nine million times. Casually. Not coldly, but not warmly, either. Just a simple statement of fact. “Turns out, I like it here. I like being Caradine Scott.”

  “Does that mean you like hiding from the FBI?”

  “The FBI didn’t know where I was for maybe twenty-four hours. But they’re the FBI. They found me.” She saw his jaw tighten, but she was getting to the main point. “In exchange for Julia Sheeran’s testimony when necessary, they’re going to issue me documents making me . . . me. Legally.”

  When he only gazed back at her in the same impassive manner, she sighed. “I’m going to be Caradine forever, Isaac.”

  His reaction was underwhelming. If it weren’t for that hard jaw of his looking more like marble by the second, she might have thought he didn’t hear her.

  “Caradine forever,” he repeated. “Is this a joke?”

  The man beside her, whom she’d forgotten about, let out a raspy laugh. “You never were any good at taking on information you didn’t want, boy, were you?”