Page 24 of Delta Force Defender

She had to keep checking to see if she was sprawled out on the ground. Bleeding, even.

But no. Isaac positioned her in the small hall between the front room and the kitchen, then left her there. Caradine stared at the walls that seemed to close in on her, covered in peeling paint and framed prints of wooden sailboats and bright red canoes. She felt something on her face and was sure she was bleeding again, there on the sidewalk—

Isaac was back, there in front of her and wider than the walls. Bigger and tougher than the world. He pressed a gun into her hand and then he grabbed her chin.

His grip was electric. It shocked her.

“Focus,” he ordered her.

And Caradine had spent so many years making fun ofAlaska Force in general and Isaac in particular. But right now she was grateful for every scrap of experience that lent that unmistakable note of authority to his voice. For that uncompromising look in his gray eyes.

For every last choice he’d made in his life that had made him into who he was. This warrior before her.

She nodded, jerkily, despite that grip of his. She ignored the panicked ringing in her ears, held tight to the handgun, and found herself standing straighter.

“I’m focused,” she told him. Or maybe herself.

He didn’t argue with her. And there was something about his instant, automatic acceptance that made her believe in herself, too.

One more thing she would have to excavate—or ignore—if they survived this.Whenthey survived this.

“Anyone walks through the door, take one second,” Isaac told her. It was another order. “Inhale, see if it’s me, then exhale. If it’s not me, shoot. Got it?”

And suddenly, here in a lonely cottage on a remote lake deep in the Maine wilderness, when it was much too late, Caradine wanted to say... everything. All those things she’d refused to say when she had the chance. All those things that crowded in her throat and made her tongue taste bitter in her own mouth.

There was a man at the door, her past was coming at her too fast and too deadly, and Isaac looked like some kind of warrior god. And she wanted to tell him all the things she’d never dared. Now.

While she still could.

Instead, she swallowed it all down the way she always did. No matter what shade of gray his eyes were in the quiet darkness of the old house.

“Got it,” she said.

And then she stayed there, rocked inside and out, as he melted off into the shadows. She could still feel where he’d gripped her chin, and she focused on that when herpulse picked up. She concentrated on the heat and strength his fingers had left behind and that controlled look he’d worn while his eyes had glittered—because it was better than spiraling into a panic attack she couldn’t afford.

She thought she heard the faintest whisper of sound from the kitchen, but when she tensed—ready to aim and fire—nothing happened.

That was the back door,she told herself.It was Isaac going outside.

Straight toward the threat, the way she supposed he always did. That was what he’d spent his entire adult life doing. While she’d run, hidden, and panicked—

Focus,she ordered herself, the way he had.Breathe.

Everything was silent then. Dark.

As if the night were going to sit on her like this forever. Living in Alaska should have made her shrug off the dark, but not tonight. She tried to breathe more quietly. She tried tolisten.

She tried to fight off the fear instead of surrendering to it.

But that was a lot easier when she wasdoingsomething. Climbing out her window, stealing a boat from a remote inlet, and so on. Even staying awake for days and driving crazy distances fueled only by caffeine. It was allaction.

Sitting still like this—still and quiet and alone—reminded her a little too strongly of her childhood. Of hiding from her father’s temper or worse, his business associates and so-called friends. And of the first five years after she’d run away from Boston, always crouched down somewhere, waiting to be discovered. Waiting to be hurt.

Waiting to see if this time, they would win.

If this time, they would finally get what they wanted.

Caradine hated waiting. She watched the front door, but the knob stopped moving back and forth.

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