Page 16 of Delta Force Defender

But the moments always passed. Reality always reasserted itself.

Help wasn’t coming. Ever. No matter how tough one ex-marine was.

And she’d made a promise.

More than a simple promise. She’d vowed that she would keep her word, and her silence, to the grave.

And she didn’t get to change that now because, of all the islands in Southeast Alaska, she’d accidentallychosen to hide out on the one that was overrun with superhero commando types. This one in particular.

“You can’t save me,” she told him now, wishing there were something more substantial between them than the bed with its floral bedspread and a selection of her weapons laid out on one of the oversized flowers. Like a giant steel barricade, maybe. Anything but her own stubbornness, which he’d proven a little too talented at puncturing whenever he felt like it. “And you can’t protect me. Do you want to know how I know that?”

Isaac only stared back at her, impassive and steady, as if he already knew what she was going to say. And would handle that, too, as effortlessly as he handled everything else.

Caradine told herself this would all have been a lot easier if he weren’t so annoyingly gorgeous. All the time. Rain, fog, sleet, mud, snow. Genial or pissed, he was still beautiful. If he didn’t always look the way he did now, carved from marble and sculpted to shine, maybe this would be easier.

But even if he’d been ugly, he still would have been Isaac. Less distracting, maybe, but just as lethal. And dangerous in every possible way. Especially to her.

Particularly when he looked at her the way he did now.

“Enlighten me,” he said.

Daring her.

And the thought of what could happen to him if he insisted on sticking close to her made her wish that one of the bombs that had been lobbed her way over the years had actually gotten her, because that was the only surefire way she knew to make sure he was safe.

Too bad none of this is about him,she snapped at herself.You need to get your head together.

“If you were capable of saving me, you would have saved me already,” she threw at him, as spitefully as possible. It should have come easily to be mean, after allthese years of practice, but it didn’t. It never did. It made her tongue taste like acid. “Aren’t you the unofficial, unelected, unwanted mayor of Grizzly Harbor? In addition to being the king of all the commandos?”

“I’m a local boy and a small-business owner. Does calling me names make you feel better?”

He wanted to shame her. She refused to be shamed. Or to show it, anyway. “Yes, actually. It makes me feel alive.”

When nothing made her feel better. Nothing could.

“That’s not what makes you feel alive, Caradine.”

Her stomach flipped over, but she pushed on. “You can’t save me, Isaac, because if you could? You would have. The Water’s Edge Café wouldn’t have a gaping hole where the restaurant used to be, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, and neither one of us would have been traipsing around the Lower forty-eight for the past week. But that’s not the situation, is it?”

“You don’t have a lot of choices here,” he said in a voice of quiet command, and she hated the way those eyes of his changed colors, like a storm. There was that dangerous silver from before, which heralded intensity. The usual unreadable gray, like Alaskan fog.

But right now they were a thunderous steel she’d never seen before. And the more she stared at him, the harder it was to breathe. Caradine understood, suddenly, that while she had always seen beneath that mask of his, he’d always been wearing it anyway.

He wasn’t now.

A wild sensation shivered down the length of her spine, from the nape of her neck to her tailbone, as she realized she was looking at the real Isaac Gentry.

At last, a voice inside her whispered.

This was the Isaac who didn’t grin and laugh and make people around him feel so comfortable they somehow forgot to look at the truth of him, which was packed into every lean, hard inch of his body. The Isaac whomight have grown up in Grizzly Harbor but was certainly nolocal boy. He wasn’t a boy at all.

This was the man who admitted to having been a Force Recon marine when it was unavoidable, but only smiled edgily when it was suggested he’d advanced to an even higher level of special forces than that. This was the man who ran teams of other dangerous operatives, because they all looked up to him. This man could change regimes, topple governments, carry the world on his broad shoulders, and turn her inside out with a single glance.

If she’d been smart, Caradine would have looked away that first night and never looked back.

You need to stop sniping at him, she snapped at herself. Because pretend as she might, she knew it showed passion. One of the friends in Grizzly Harbor, who she refused to call a friend—because she couldn’t have friends at all and certainly not ones like Everly Campbell, who genuinely seemed tolikeher and would pay for it, if the people after Caradine got their hands on Everly one day when she wasn’t with her ex-SEAL fiancé—had once called it herlove language.

That was obviously unacceptable.

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