Page 104 of Delta Force Defender

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?”

Caradine watched, with perhaps too muchsatisfaction, 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 andasked 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, andcrooned.

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.”

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