Delta Force Defender

by Megan Crane

  Caradine watched, with perhaps too much satisfaction, as Isaac turned his head and finally looked at the person she was having a drink with tonight.

  “Uncle Theo,” he said, his tone forbidding. “I thought that was you. But why would my famously antisocial uncle be out here in civilization when he could be tucked away in his off-grid, nearly unreachable cabin? Far out of reach of the government?”

  “A man likes an invitation,” Theo replied, through his acres of beard. He nodded at Caradine. “She came all the way up the mountain and asked me.”

  “Besides,” Caradine said after a moment, when Isaac’s gray gaze pinned her again, “it turns out that your uncle can build pretty much anything. Like a new restaurant, for example.”

  “I saw that.” Isaac’s eyes narrowed. “Looks like you expanded.”

  “This is the new, improved Caradine Scott,” she said loftily. “Who knows what I’ll do? Maybe I’ll make up a menu, or one of those adorable daily chalkboards. Or start dispensing hugs at the front door.”

  She didn’t see Isaac’s gaze so much as flicker, but he reached out and picked up her hand. Not to hold it. But if she was reading that expression on his face correctly, as an accusation.

  Caradine tilted up her chin. “That’s right. That’s a bright pink nail polish. Not chipped, but glossy and perfect. Do you know how hard it is to keep shiny magenta nail polish from chipping, Isaac? Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m doing it. That’s the level of commitment I’m prepared to deliver.”

  And for a moment there was nothing but his hand touching hers. The weight of his gaze, all gray and no hint of silver. Distantly, it occurred to her that he might have taken her comment on commitment to mean something else entirely.

  Her head felt light. As if she were drunk when she’d been nursing the same beer since she’d gotten here.

  How had she forgotten that he could do that? When he wasn’t even looking at her as if he wanted to tear her clothes off?

  “Are you trying to steal my dog?” he asked her, quietly.

  He shifted his gaze to Horatio, whose tail battered the floor. But the dog didn’t move until Isaac nodded, and then, once again, Caradine could only stare while Isaac smiled at the dog, took his furry head in his hands, and crooned.

  Her heart exploded into a million pieces, so the good news was, she’d already gotten used to living without it the past couple of months.

  “Horatio’s been my best friend this summer,” she told the man who’d taken her heart with him when he’d left. On a mission no one here would give her any details about, not even when he might come back. Jerks. “Dependable. Loyal. Always here, and always happy to see me. Really, the perfect man.”

  She didn’t know which jerk had transported Horatio over from Fool’s Cove. But a few days after she’d arrived back in Grizzly Harbor to see what was left of this life of hers, the only life she’d liked so far, Horatio had appeared. He’d been her shadow ever since.

  And if she’d fallen asleep cuddling him a little too tight, that was no one’s business but hers. Also, she would deny it.

  “That dog has more sense than you,” Theo chimed in.

  Isaac glared at his uncle. A look that would have made even Caradine shake a little and rethink some things.

  But Theo Gentry only laughed. “It’s good to see you, too, Nephew. You should come by sometime. Remember you’re not alone out here. It might do you some good.”

  “You told me not to visit you,” Isaac pointed out. “With a shotgun in hand.”

  Theo laughed again. “When you were a self-righteous, sanctimonious lieutenant fresh out of OCS. Never let it be said a Gentry doesn’t know how to nurse a grudge.”

  And then he hefted up his drink, nodded at Caradine, and wandered over in the vague direction of the pool tables.

  Isaac took his time turning all of his considerable attention back on her. “I’ll ask you again. What are you doing here?”

  “Do you really want to have this conversation here?”

  Isaac studied her, and she hated that she couldn’t read him. “I’m not the one who usually likes an audience.”

  Of all the things he’d said to her, that struck her as perhaps the most unjust.

  Caradine stood up in a rush. She was tired of glaring at him. Of scowling and sniping endlessly. She wanted to hit him, but then, she always did. That chest of his looked like sculpted marble beneath the henley he wore, and some months, that was the only way she got to touch it.

  But she’d told him she was tired of fighting. Now she needed to show him.

  “If I wanted to fight with you, sure,” she said, striving to sound serene. Or at least even-keeled. “We’re not doing that.”

  “Aren’t we?”

  With a tremendous dignity she only wished she’d had with this man in the past, she turned and walked toward the door. Horatio looped around her as she pushed her way outside, letting the dog run in front of her. Out in the street it was getting on to full darkness, though a hint of indigo still remained.

  The crisp Alaskan air filled her lungs, and she still wasn’t finished marveling at it. Not when she’d taken a tour of so many other places this summer, none of which got to her like this. She loved the quiet that hung all around the town, as if it poured out of the mountain itself. No traffic, no crowds, no oppressive heat or humidity. She could hear the music from inside the bar. There were people wandering around, talking in the mild evening. Somewhere in the trees, she could hear a guitar and some singing.

  But in and around all of that, there was Alaska.

  It felt like peace, no matter how far from that she might have been feeling inside. It made her imagine that if she stayed here long enough, breathed deep enough, she would get there, too.

  And the man who she knew was behind her, though she couldn’t hear him and didn’t look, was the same kind of presence. That huge. That intense.

  That perfect.

  She didn’t wait for him. She headed down toward the beach. Before she reached the docks, she took a turn and climbed up a set of rocks that were almost like stairs. She navigated out to the large, flat boulder that jutted out toward the water.

  He didn’t make any noise, but she knew when he climbed up and stood beside her, there on the edge.

  Below them, the tide was coming in. The dark water surged against the stone, retreating but always returning. Five years ago she’d stood right here and identified with the water. Always fighting, always failing.

  Tonight, she was thinking about the rock. Still here. Still solid.

  No matter what the water threw at it.

  “Do you remember?” she asked him. She turned then, as the stars got bright above them and the inky night seemed to grip them, hard.

  “Caradine.” He ran a hand over his face, which made her pulse kick at her, because this was Isaac. He didn’t do things like that. He didn’t fidget. Unless, something in her whispered hopefully, because she let herself do that now, he’s just as agitated as you are. “I remember everything.”

  And his voice was so raw it hurt.

  It actually hurt.

  She even lifted her hands as though she were going to put them on him, but he gave her a look that was so intense she dropped them to her sides.

  “Why did you come back here?” he demanded, and he wasn’t loud this time. He didn’t shout. But his voice was ragged. Uneven. And somehow, that was worse. “After all the things you said in Boston?”

  She wanted to do what she normally did. Scowl. Glare. Say something mean and storm off.

  But if she kept doing the same things with him, she would end up in the same place with him. You couldn’t expect things to change if you weren’t willing to change, too. The fact that motivational quotes made her feel dead inside didn’t make them untrue. And she didn’t have to festoon them around her restaurant on chee
rful plaques, decorated with butterflies, to take them on board.

  That was a performance. Here in the dark, on a cold rock above a pitiless sea, she could do the hard work.

  All she had to do was let herself be vulnerable.

  She thought she really did die then. But that didn’t change what she needed to do here.

  After all, she’d basically died at least once already.

  “What is it you want from me?” he asked, still in that rough, un-Isaac voice.

  Maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t the only one feeling vulnerable tonight. She clung to that.

  “Everything,” she told him, and she didn’t look away. She didn’t hide. She held his gaze, and she let him see whatever he wanted to see. She let herself . . . open. “I want absolutely everything, Isaac.”

  He looked away, down toward the rock, but this time, it wasn’t to tighten that jaw she was afraid might shatter one day. It wasn’t to look over to where Horatio waited on land, as if he were guarding them. This time, Isaac was breathing too hard.

  As if he were running when he was standing still.

  Tears pricked at her eyes, another thing that she would normally dive into the cold water rather than let someone else see, but this was Isaac. And she was doing this, so she did nothing. She didn’t blink them away. She didn’t wipe at her face.

  “The first night I saw you,” she said quietly, “we walked down here after we left the Fairweather. We stood on this rock, just like this.” Her throat was dry, and swallowing didn’t help, so she pushed on. “I said I couldn’t imagine coming from a place like this. And you said, it’s not the winter that ruins you. It’s the summer. Because you can resign yourself to winter, but summer reminds you how to hope for better. And then there you are when fall blows in, left to pick up the pieces and start all over again.”

  He made a low noise. “I know what I said.”

  “You made it sound like you were joking when you said it. I’m pretty sure I laughed. But you weren’t joking, were you?”

  “It was something my father used to say. He thought it was funny.” He cut his gaze to hers. “We’re really going to talk about the weather?”

  “It’s not really about the weather, is it?” She tilted her head as she looked up at him, and if there was vulnerability in him, he was hiding it well. “It’s the way you see the world. It’s all endurance. Struggle and pain and hopelessness. And any little sliver you have of something better you treat like the enemy.”

  “It takes real guts for you, of all people, to stand here and say something like that.”

  “I had to act that way. You didn’t.”

  “You concealed your identity from me for five years,” he belted out at her.

  So loud that back on shore, Horatio whined.

  But Caradine had to bite back a smile. Because Isaac Gentry had just shouted at her. Right out here in the open, displaying a shocking lack of his much-vaunted control for anyone to hear and see.

  What had happened in her hotel room in Boston wasn’t a fluke.

  “You’re the only person I ever wanted to tell,” she told him, solemnly, because it was true. “I came close to telling you a thousand times.”

  “But you didn’t. And then you ran. You let me think you were dead. You wanted me to think you were dead.”

  She studied his face as he said that. The wildness in his eyes, like a storm.

  “You can endure anything, can’t you?” she said softly. “Except the possibility that you might be happy.”

  Isaac muttered something under his breath.

  Caradine decided to take that as encouragement. “All my worst fears came true this summer, Isaac. They found me. And worse, you discovered who I really was.”

  “How could that be worse?”

  “Because, Captain America, I’ve spent my whole life thinking it was only a matter of time before the ugliness in me spilled over. And then corroded everything around me. I’d already watched it happen. That was what being a member of my family did to people.”

  He looked astonished then, and it was gratifying. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “For years I’ve been sure that at any moment, that switch could flip. That when I least expected it, I could just . . . turn into a murderous sociopath. Burn down houses filled with people I knew. Commit unspeakable acts of violence. That was the other reason Lindsay and I split up after Phoenix. We were responsible for what happened to those people. We had to live with that—and with the worry that one false step and we’d sink even further, and maybe start doing hideous things like that ourselves.”

  “I don’t think it works like that.”

  “You hope it doesn’t work like that. So did I, but I went off on my own anyway, just in case.” She smiled when he looked like he was going to argue with her. “But then I went to Hawaii. And I discovered that my baby sister—the one who I’d always thought was more likely to turn bad, because she was the one who’d given in to Dad—hadn’t just survived our time apart. She’d thrived. Made a life. Lindsay got married and had a baby.”

  Caradine shook her head, aware that there was moisture on her cheeks but doing nothing to hide it. “All that time that she’s spent living, I’ve been hiding away up here. Because I thought that at any second, boom. I would turn into my father.”

  Isaac was staring at her now. There on that rock that, despite herself, she had always considered theirs.

  Because it was the first place he’d kissed her.

  Back when she’d imagined she could kiss a man like Isaac and then let him go.

  “Caradine,” he said, very deliberately. “There isn’t a single part of you that is anything like your father.”

  But she couldn’t stop, or she’d never keep going. “Then we went to Boston. And I saw what it really looks like to be made in my father’s image. Head to toe, no matter what face he bought to hide behind.” She shook her head, tasting salt on her lips. “And that wasn’t something that happened to Jimmy. He was like that from the start. As long as I can remember, he was openly, happily psychotic.”

  “You’re nothing like him, either. You couldn’t be if you tried.”

  And she loved how fierce he sounded then. Like he would go back in time and punch Jimmy in the face all over again if he could.

  “I wanted to kill him, but you wouldn’t let me,” she said. “And at first I didn’t understand that. Why wouldn’t you let me do what had to be done? But then I got it. You knew what that would make me. The exact thing I didn’t want to become.”

  “There are things you can’t take back,” he said gruffly.

  This time, she reached over and took his hand in hers. And she could tell that he wanted to pull it back, but he didn’t. It was another victory.

  So she held his hand between her palms, feeling all of his strength. And heat. And the sheer Isaacness that fueled the fire in her, the electricity, and that beautiful spark that lit up even the darkest night. Here and always.

  “Isaac,” she whispered. “Baby. You can’t take things back, but some things don’t need taking back. That you’ve had to make hard choices doesn’t mean you’re responsible for the losses you suffered. You’re no more of a monster than I am.”

  She felt the jolt go through him, a full-body affair. His hand tightened in hers, but he didn’t jerk away.

  “I know exactly what I’m responsible for,” he said in that low, uneven voice.

  “You know what you blame yourself for,” she corrected him. “That’s not the same thing.”

  Caradine reached over and took his other hand, and she wanted to laugh at that startled look on his face, as if he couldn’t believe this was happening. She laced her fingers with his, and she tipped her head back to look at him.

  “I’m not going to argue with you,” she said. “We could argue forever. We already have.”

 
“Caradine.”

  And she realized, belatedly, that her name was a full sentence as far as he was concerned. She could hear the exasperation. The resignation. The affection and the longing. All of their history, all of that need and denial, wrapped up in three syllables.

  She was definitely going to be Caradine forever.

  “You need to listen to me,” he said, and he sounded like himself again. The commander of the universe. “For a change.”

  “You’re in charge of everything,” she reminded him. “But not me. We’re not on one of your missions.”

  “Let’s talk about that. The part where you took off your wire and walked into a situation when you knew you could—”

  She put her hand over his mouth.

  His eyes darkened with astonishment. And the promise of retribution.

  “I told you I was done fighting, so let’s cut to the chase before you have another temper tantrum and disappear into the jungle for another two months.” She ignored his sound of protest. “You are head over heels in love with me, Isaac.”

  His mouth was firm and hard beneath her hand, but he went still. Very. Very still.

  “And that was easier to take when you thought it was a lost cause, because surrendering yourself to something you can never have requires nothing of you. You know it.” She dropped her hand, but she kept her gaze glued to his. “I ran away from you, yes, and you thought I was dead. For maybe ten minutes.”

  “Twenty, Caradine. Twenty.”

  “But you ran away from me, too, and I knew perfectly well that you were alive. I don’t think you can convince me that what you went through was worse.”

  She could see everything in him tighten. That gunmetal gaze, so dark tonight. All the strong, tough muscles in his body, which was always a weapon, but could also hold her so tenderly she’d actually slept like that. In his arms. So tenderly it had hurt to wake up and remember that she couldn’t have him.

  Caradine pushed on. “Deep down, you think you could have done something to keep your parents alive. Sometimes I think I could have done something to keep my whole family alive. You think you’re a monster. I know, given the chance, I could be, too.” That muscle was flexing in his cheek. His mouth was a hard line. So she smiled, big and bright, and watched his pupils dilate. “Don’t you see? You’re not going to scare me, Isaac. Because I love you, too. I think it started right here on this rock that very first night. Or why else would I have been so scared to let you in?”