Page 23 of Delta Force Defender

The words came out so fiercely it took them both by surprise. He could see it on her face. He could feel it flare between them, surprise rolling into all the rest of it, in this battle of theirs that only got hotter and more dangerous with time.

Especially right now.

For a moment, a scant breath, they stared at each other. Almost—

But this was not the time. Isaac shoved everything ruthlessly aside, wishing he could compartmentalize her the way he did everything else in his life. God knew he’d tried, and that was before she’d been in trouble.

She had always been the one thing in his life he couldn’t put in a box.

“How did they pick up your trail in Camden?” he demanded, low and urgent.

Outside, there was the sound of wheels crunching up the drive.

“They didn’t pick it up,” Caradine whispered back in that same fierce way. “I called them.”

Of all the things she could have said, he hadn’t been expecting that.

Isaac felt winded, as if she’d kicked him in the solar plexus. “You did what?”

“I called them.” Her chin tilted up, and he was sure he could see her eyes glittering with the emotion she liked to deny. “I wanted to see who would show up. I needed to see which nightmare I should be having. The same one I’ve been having? Or a brand-new one?”

The sound of the wheels stopped. That was worse.

Isaac stared at Caradine, not sure if he wanted to strangle her or pull her into a hug she would claim she hated. Both, probably.

“Caradine,” he began, quiet and furious, and more of the latter, “don’t you think—”

But that was when the front doorknob, three feet away from them, began to turn.

Six

“Please tell me you checked that door,” Caradine whispered, her heart pounding even as her stomach plummeted to the floor. And then stayed there, in a hard, ugly knot. “Please tell me it’s locked.”

It was the closest she’d come to prayer in a long, long while.

“Yes, I checked it,” Isaac muttered in an undertone. “And yes, it’s locked.”

He sounded different, and that caught at her, yanking her out of the dizzy, nauseating spiral she was in. Memories of other terror-filled moments like this one, always scared and always in the dark and always sure that this was the end of it all—

But Isaac was here this time.

Deep inside, where she could be honest with herself, she acknowledged that what she felt was relief.

And when she glanced over at him, he no longer looked like any of the versions of him she’d been so sureshe’d seen and known and cataloged. He was hewn from stone, as ever, but there was something different about him tonight. A crackling sort ofpresence.

He looks like a warrior, something in her whispered, from deep in that place where she kept her truths hidden.

He pulled her behind him as he headed back toward the kitchen, away from the front door and that doorknob that was rattling, just slightly. Just enough. Caradine squinted hard in the gloom, trying to keep her eyes on the dead bolt. As if she could actually see it.

As if she could make it hold with her will alone.

What was funny was that she’d planned this. She’d made that call from the phone beside her bed in the inn. She’d planned to do this all by herself. Accordingly, she’d made contingency plan after contingency plan. If they did this, she’d do that, and so on.

Caradine had been positive she’d worked out every angle. A hundred times over.

But she hadn’t banked on the panic.

Because all of a sudden, it was like ten years ago all over again. Her head ringing. That pressure in her ears.

---