Page 5 of Delta Force Defender

Isaac realized he’d been running when he stopped. He’d reached the semicircle of villagers and Alaska Force members who’d formed a perimeter around the fire. All were engaged in fighting what looked like the last of it, some of them half-dressed or in their pajamas, because this really was the middle of nowhere. If they didn’t put the fire out, it could sweep through the whole town.

That was when he realized he’d showed up in nothing but the T-shirt and cargo pants he’d been wearing while not sleeping back in his cabin. Not exactly his tactical best.

Isaac nodded at the Grizzly Harbor residents he knew, which was most of them. His brain filed away the rest into a mental file markedSUMMER TOURISTS.But when his gaze found Griffin, it stayed on him. Hard.

He didn’t ask the question.

“It’s a garden-variety Molotov cocktail,” Griffin told Isaac immediately when he came over to him, sounding cold and assessing again. Which was precisely how Isaac wanted his favorite sniper. “It went through the front window of the café. And it was a weak one, because all it did was blow out the windows and make a mess of the front room. The structure appears sound, and the living quarters upstairs are undamaged.”

“Undamaged,” Isaac repeated, while everything in him that had stopped still clicked over, an engine starting up again. His heart, maybe.

“But empty.”

“Empty?” There was a thud inside him, like a mortar shell hitting its target, but he refused to acknowledge it. “Signs of a struggle?”

“None.” Isaac recognized the voice before he glanced to the side to find Jonas Crow had materialized from the ether, or the night itself. Because Isaac hadn’t seen him in his initial sweep of the area. As one of the few men still alive who knew exactly what Jonas had done in the service, Isaac shouldn’t have been surprised that the man still managed to make like a ghost. Yet he always was. “If I had to guess, my take would be that there was an attempt to flush her out, but she didn’t go down the back stairs. There are tracks leading away from that side window, but they disappear at the hot springs. One set of tracks, moving fast.”

Isaac tried to take the information in, and everything it meant, but he was stuck on the most critical part. She was alive.

She was alive.

“This is good news, right?” Rory asked, on Isaac’s six.

Former SEAL Blue Hendricks, who had caught the helicopter with Isaac, was closer to the fire perimeter. He shook his head. “Caradine in the woods? I don’t see it. She doesn’t even like the hot springs.”

“She likes them fine,” Isaac retorted without thinking.

It was a measure of how completely he’d lost his cool tonight. Since when did he show his hand? Since when did he fail to think everything through and strategize before speaking? He needed to pull himself together.

Meanwhile, he thanked whatever deities still bothered to check in on a man like him that Templeton Cross—his best friend and brother since they’d survived the six-month hellscape called the Operator Qualification Course for what was known in some circles as Delta Force—wasn’t around to witness his slip. Isaac could hear Templeton’s booming laugh anyway, the way he was sure he would in real time once Templeton heard what Isaac had inadvertently admitted.

Someone was probably texting him right now to tell him.

She’s alive, Isaac reminded himself as the silence dragged on around him, because no one dared actually get in his face. Jonas could have, but wouldn’t. That was Templeton’s job.

He concentrated on the fact they hadn’t found her body and not the fact he’d just contributed to the endless gossip concerning what was or wasn’t happening between him and Caradine. She was alive. She’d understood what was happening and extricated herself from the situation. Then she’d taken off.

And had yet to return, though the fire looked contained and most of the village was milling around on the wooden boardwalks that served as streets.

That told him a whole lot.

Isaac scanned the scene. The one official firefighter in the village, Chris Tanaka, was barking out orders to the rest. Most of whom he’d trained at one point or another, whether they were part of the official crew or not. No one wanted Grizzly Harbor, with its boardwalks and huddled-together houses, to go up in flames. Their one truck, parked on an angle in front of the blackened, smoky front of the café, pumped water up from the harbor while a few men were supplementing with buckets. The fire was down to a smolder now, which supported Griffin’s theory that it had been a weak firebomb in the first place. It had been about damage, not death.

Which meant Jonas was right, too. They’d been trying to flush her out.

He had a flash of her then, bright and hot, lighting up all the parts of him that had stopped still when he’d gotten that call. Caradine Scott, mouthy and bad-tempered and beautiful. Prickly and stubborn and wedged deep beneath his skin since the day she’d arrived here. That chipped black nail polish she always had on her fingernails. Those too-blue eyes. The baggy clothes she wore, like that could fool anyone into overlooking her toned, fit body beneath. Her astonishingly goodcooking, which he’d told her once was basically her true heart on display.

That had been the first time she’d thrown him out of the Water’s Edge Café. It wasn’t the last time. Not to mention the many times she’d thrown him out of her bed upstairs, too, then slammed the door in his face—and locked it—in case he’d missed her point.

He felt that mortar shell hit him again. Artillery fire rained down inside him, pummeling him.

Isaac had seen her scowl at him a thousand times. He’d kissed her silly. He’d even made her laugh—though she’d told him he was mistaken and it had simply been a coughing fit gone wrong. He’d seen her stare down drunken locals three times her size, and he’d seen her intimidate tourists with a single arched brow.

What he couldn’t imagine Caradine doing, ever, was running scared.

The very idea made him want to tear apart the world with his own two hands.

“I want to know who threw the bomb,” Isaac said tersely to the suspiciously silent group around him. “Now. And then I want to know why, once again, people are rolling up into Grizzly Harbor and getting bomb-happy without us seeing them coming. I thought we were done with this.”

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