Page 29 of Delta Force Defender

“Like I said. My nightmares. I have a lot of them. Some are more specific than others, and I wanted to know which this was.”

“You’ve never struck me as an idiot before,” he growled at her. “But now it’s like you’re going for the world record.”

She yanked on her arm, and he finally released her. Grudgingly.

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” she threw at him, and he was slightly gratified by how ragged she sounded. As long as it wasn’t just him. “I don’t want youhere. I don’t need you here. Your interference is not required.”

“Do you want to get killed?” Isaac was almost loud then. He barely sounded like himself. And the part of him that wasn’t much too close to losing it couldn’t help but note that she was the only one who could do this to him. The only one who dug beneath his skin and drove him crazy. The only weakness he hadn’t excised. “Is this some death wish you’re acting out here?”

That vulnerable, uncertain expression moved over her face again, but her voice was cold. “I’m not an Alaska Force client, Isaac.”

“No,” he said. “You’re really not.”

And that electricity that was always between them flared, so hot he was surprised the cottage didn’t ignite.

Finally, she looked away, which for Caradine was a major surrender.

“We’re leaving now,” he said shortly. “We’re driving down to Portland, where there’s a plane waiting. I’m taking you back to Alaska.”

“I don’t want to go back to Alaska.”

“I didn’t ask you what you want,” he belted out at her, and took it as a minor victory when she jolted at the sound. “I told you what’s going to happen.”

“I’m not your client, and I’m certainly not one of your Alaska Force subordinates, ready and eager to do your bidding.” She held his gaze, and whatever hint of vulnerability or surrender he’d thought he’d seen on her face was gone. “I’m not going to tell you anything, no matter where we go. I promise you that.”

Isaac wanted to put his hands on her, desperately, so he didn’t. He stepped back instead, before he lost it completely. He was too hot. Tooaffected.

But he had spent a lifetime controlling himself in far worse situations than this. Caradine might get to him in ways he wasn’t exactly comfortable with, but it was stillonly the two of them and an incapacitated thug in a summer cottage. It wasn’t a freaking war.

Handle your crap, he ordered himself sternly.

“You will,” he told her, pitilessly. “Because you’ll be locked up in a cabin in Fool’s Cove under my command, whether you like it or not, until you do.”

Most people fell apart when he used that tone. Caradine scoffed at him. “You’re not putting me in your private jail, Isaac. Get a grip.”

“You’ll wish it was jail,” he promised her. “This will be much worse. Because it won’t be a cell, Caradine. It will be my cabin. With me. Until I’m satisfied that you’ve told me every last thing I want to know about your past.”

And Isaac was smiling again as he ushered her out into the predawn darkness, because he’d known Caradine for five years now. But this was the first time he’d ever seen her without a single thing to say.

“Sulking?” he asked her after a solid forty-five minutes in the car, when her brooding silence in the passenger seat beside him was beginning to feel operatic.

“Only because I missed,” she replied.

Isaac supposed that there was something wrong with him that he found that funny. Then again, the fact that he wasn’t like other people had been a theme in his life for so long now, it hardly bore repeating. Even to himself.

You’re not made in the same mold, his father had told him when Isaac had been an angry teenage boy, convinced the world was arrayed against him, so self-centered and awash in his adolescent misery that it had never crossed his mind they’d been living on borrowed time.

You’re the one who isn’t normal, Dad,he’d shot back. Because that was what he’d thought he’d wanted then, with all the righteous fury of a fifteen-year-old in the grips of hormone poisoning. To be like everyone else.Or you’d move somewhere normal people live.

His father had only laughed. That was what Isaac remembered most about him. That he’d somehow found a surly teenage kid entertaining. All these years later, it made Isaac wish he could have gotten to know his father as a man.

It’s easy to move somewhere and pretend that’s going to solve your problems,his father had told him.But what’s hard, no matter where you live, is figuring out the ways you’re an individual. And then honoring those parts of you, whether that makes you normal or not.

After his parents had died, Isaac had leaned in hard to that advice.

The last thing in the world Mom and Dad would want is you to go risk your life,Amy had argued with him when he’d started his officer training courses while still in college.Don’t you understand? All they’d ever want is you safe.

Your job is to stay safe,he’d told his older sister, because she was the one with a collection of normal things. The husband. The house. The baby on the way.My job is to keep you safe.

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