Page 101 of Delta Force Defender

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 itto 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. Helost 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 ina small boat. Closer to the father who’d loved him even when he was at his teenage worst.

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