Page 50 of Delta Force Defender

“As long as I have to,” Isaac said, his voice much darker than the night around them. “Which you know, because that’s what I told you, too. Do I still have to prove it?”

“Sometimes,” Jonas said quietly, into the soft stillness of the evening, as bright as day though it was coming up on ten o’clock, “it’s better to miss them.”

Isaac couldn’t get that out of his head as he made his way down the wooden path to his cabin. He’d prefer Templeton poking at him all day, every day, to one of Jonas’s seemingly offhanded remarks that always landed on him like some kind of prophecy.

He couldn’t regret the things he’d done today that had made him and Caradine an open topic of conversation, instead of the usual whispers, innuendos, andsignificantlooks. But that didn’t mean he had to like it. Maybe he’d had this wrong the whole time. Maybe it would have been better to wait. To enjoy the stolen moments. To keep it theirs.

A secret everyone suspected was still a secret. It was different from everyone knowing.

Caradine was the only secret he’d chosen to keep after leaving his shadowy life in the service. The only secret that was his, not the government’s.

But as he walked toward his cabin door, he couldn’t help but imagine what it would be like if this were normal. If Caradine actually lived here. With him. If he solved her problem, slayed her dragons, and got to be with her. Just like this.

It was shockingly easy to imagine, when he would have said neither he nor Caradine were remotely domestic. He would come back to her from putting out fires all over the world, and he would always wonder exactly what he’d be walking into. Because one thing she never was, no matter what she called herself or where she stayed, was predictable.

Good thing he liked a storm.

Better still, she’d be here. Right here.

He couldn’t decide if he was unsettled or filled with anticipation when he opened the door.

Inside, he could smell the remnants of whatever food she’d cooked. He glanced toward the kitchen, his stomach reminding him he hadn’t eaten in a while, but he was more interested in finding her. He half expected her to be in his study, attempting to break into his computer system. But she wasn’t there.

He walked farther into the house, down the small hallway, and stopped at his bedroom door.

And it wasn’t until he saw her there, lying sprawled out across his bed, that he understood two things.

One, that he’d fully expected her to dramatically make herself a bed on his couch, clutching her pearlsand denying him so much as a touch, just to be a pain. Just to prove that she could.

And two, that he had absolutely no defenses in place for what it did to him to see her lying there like that.

She stirred as if she sensed him and looked over toward the door, but didn’t sit up. She looked scrubbed clean, her hair gleaming damply. He could smell his soap on her body, which struck him as almost unbearably intimate. And then, completing the picture, curled up next to her with his head on her belly while she scratched behind his ears, was Horatio.

His dog looked at him and whined. But didn’t move.

“You’re supposed to be guarding her,” Isaac told him.

But all he got in response was the clearly unrepentant thump of Horatio’s tail.

“I made food,” Caradine said in a voice he hardly recognized. It took him a minute to realize she sounded relaxed. “You didn’t have all the ingredients I wanted, but I did my best.”

“I’m sure I’ll love it,” Isaac said, but he didn’t make a move for the kitchen. He couldn’t think of a reason he’d ever move again. “You know what I like.”

She must have shifted then, because Horatio lifted his head. Caradine rolled up to a sitting position, letting her legs dangle over the side of his bed. And what could he do but look at her? She was here. It wasn’t a few rushed hours after the Fairweather closed. She couldn’t kick him out of his own home. He had a mind to look at her for a good long while.

Once again, she was dressed the way she often was in his head but rarely in reality. She wore a black T-shirt, another formfitting one. And what he was almost certain would be classified as yoga pants. Not that he could imagine Caradine doing yoga.

“What name do I call you?” he asked. “Have you picked a new one already? From a phone book in Maine, maybe?”

She studied him with those haunted eyes that made him think of long-lost summers, and that little half smile that made his chest ache.

“I don’t want to talk,” she said, still sounding relaxed, and her gaze changed. It got hotter, and he did, too. “I’ve done more talking today than I have in ten years.”

Sometimes it’s better to miss them, Jonas had said.

Isaac had felt the truth of that out on the porch by the lodge. But here it hit harder, looking at Caradine in his bed at last, but not the way he’d imagined her. Not naked and grinning wildly, with that wicked light in her eyes that drove him crazy. Because it was like this. With ghosts all around them, too many names to hide behind, and no clear way forward.

What he would give for a clear way forward.

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