Page 34 of Delta Force Defender

Then he walked past her and out into the hall. And it took her a dizzy sort of moment to realize that he was headed for his own front door.

“You’re not really leaving me here, are you?” she asked, and actually laughed, because she was so off-balance.

Her lips were tingling, and she wanted to press her fingers against them to make it stop. Or to better drown in the sensation, maybe.

But then he looked over his shoulder, and she knew that wasn’t all she wanted.

She wanted him. She had always wanted him.

And remembering the numerous occasions that she’d been naked and at his mercy made everything in her heat up, then run through her veins like a sluggish gold.

“Miss me already?” he asked, that same dangerous light in his eyes.

Pull yourself together, she ordered herself sternly.

“Aren’t you afraid I’m going to go through all your stuff?” she asked, in a decent approximation of her usual brash tone. “Learn all your secrets and use them against you?”

Isaac turned all the way around, then regarded her formuch too long. Caradine made herself stand straight. As if she were unbothered. She told herself she absolutely did not feel that swooping, fluttery sensation in her belly. Or that greedy ache between her legs.

“You’re welcome to test the security measures in place in my office,” he said, almost as if he were encouraging her to try. “And you can dig around all you want. I don’t have secrets.”

“Everyone has secrets.”

“Everyone has stories that they might choose to tell, or not,” he corrected her, a different, harder sort of light in his eyes. “But secrets are a whole different ballgame. Secrets make you sick, baby. They make you believe that you’re all alone when you’re not.”

He needed to stop calling her that.

“That sounds very poignant, Isaac,” she threw back at him. “Other people are just private.”

He looked at her as if she disappointed him, and that was much worse thanbaby. She would never understand how she kept from crumpling into a sobbing mess right there on his thick rug.

Except that, as usual, she couldn’t.

“There’s food in the kitchen,” he said instead. “Help yourself to whatever you want. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

She would not break. She would not sob. She would not lose herself here, in his home, where there were pictures in frames on the mantel that she didn’t want in her head. “I don’t know that I’ll be here when you get back.”

“What are you going to do?” And if she wasn’t mistaken, the unflappable, quietly dignified leader of Alaska Force was taunting her. “You think you’re going to swim somewhere? Have fun with that. The watermightbe above fifty degrees. Or, I know, you’re going to hike Hard Ass Pass. It’s all fun and games until you get to the part where the road’s washed out and you might fall toyour death, if the bears don’t get you first. You can wander around the woods if you like, but it’s steep and wet and rocky out there, and there’s no other trail back to Grizzly Harbor. Also, again, bears. The only thing you’re going to do is exhaust yourself, get eaten, or die. Be my guest.”

“Your hospitality is overwhelming.”

Isaac laughed at her, and then he walked out with Horatio at his side, and none of this was satisfying. She was left alone in this cabin that was entirely too comfortable andnice, and gave her nothing to use to ward him off. Worse, the minute the door closed behind him, his absence was like another living force.

Caradine didn’t know what she was supposed todo.

She felt scraped out. Raw and hollow and wrecked.

It had been hard enough to leave Grizzly Harbor the first time, when she’d spent years preparing for that moment. It had been hard enough to leavehim, she corrected herself.

She didn’t know how she was going to do it again, and she knew she had to. It had been bad enough when he’d simply been a mistake she kept making.

Then he’d come after her.

She was hugging herself tight before she knew it. Still standing there, staring at the door, feeling broken in half in a way she would have vehemently denied if anyone had been there to see it.

Caradine forced herself to look away from the stupid door. She stared at her own feet, blinking furiously until her eyes were clear. She made herself breathe. She counted in, then out. Over and over again, until her pulse slowed down a little. Until she felt a little more like herself.

A little less brokenhearted.

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