Page 58 of Delta Force Defender

The Caradine who sank to her knees and grinned up at him, her blue eyes sparkling as she took him in deep in her mouth. The Caradine who covered her face with her hands when he returned the favor, and not to hide this time. But to muffle her own screams.

And in the morning, she was still there. Curled up with him in his bed, with Horatio at their feet, like a thousand dreams he’d never admitted he’d had.

As if she were home, at last.

He wasn’t suicidal enough to say that last part out loud. It was too early, and he thrived on very little sleep, but she... did not. Caradine was even grumpy in her sleep. It made him smile as he nuzzled her neck.

“For God’s sake, no morning sex,” she muttered at him, burying her face in the pillow, but not before he’d seen that scowl. “I’m not an animal.”

Obviously, he took that as a challenge.

One he won.

“I’m going out,” he told her when she was panting helplessly beside him, her face soft again and a smile he would categorize asdazedon her face. She was beautiful when she scowled. But when she smiled, she rearranged the world all around him. Maybe he should have been glad she did it so rarely. He rubbed at his chest. “Only for a little while. I expect you to still be here when I get back.”

“Yes, yes,” she said grandly, still smiling. She waved a hand. “The famously revolting Alaska Force morning workout.”

“You’re welcome to join us. Get your sweat on. Learn some things about yourself.”

“I would rather die,” she said. She stopped smilingand focused on him. Isaac was smug enough to enjoy how long it took her to do that. “And in this case, I actually, one hundred percent, mean that from the bottom of my heart.”

Isaac was still grinning when he headed out with Horatio a little while later. He got in a quick, vicious trail run before he made his way to the cabin on the beach that he liked to call hisbox of pain. Particularly when everyone else complained about it.

Everyone not on active missions turned up in the mornings for the community workout, and Isaac enjoyed designing physical tests to challenge each and every one of them. Maybe a little too much. The grosser and more difficult the workout in Fool’s Cove, the more prepared they all were for the kinds of things they had to cope with in the field.

And sure, on days like today when he found the way everyone was looking at him to be a little too smirky, he enjoyed making them pay.

In sweat and tears and unfortunate comments about his parentage.

“My parents were married, Blue,” he said sternly at one point. “As I think you know. Let’s do another round.”

A solid hour later, he felt his honor had been sufficiently avenged when almost everyone was lying on the floor, groaning and spent.

Everyone except Bethan, who was capping off the workout with some blisteringly fast sprints down by the waterline. Isaac stood in the rolled-open door of the gym and watched her, not really surprised that she was pushing herself further and harder than everyone else. Wasn’t that the story of women in her position? She’d spent her life preparing to fight but had been relegated to support positions until the ban on women in combat was lifted. He knew that was how she’d met Jonas, once upon a classified disaster neither one of them talked about. Bethan had gotten into Ranger School once it opened to femalecandidates. Then she’d distinguished herself even further as one of the few women who’d passed.

But the army didn’t see her future the way she did, so she’d come to Alaska Force instead.

Where Isaac had no qualms whatsoever about assigning her to the active, dangerous missions she’d trained for.

No matter how curiously unsupportive Jonas seemed. When, asked directly, he’d had nothing but praise for her skills and abilities.

When everyone could breathe and walk again, more or less, they started heading out to do their various duties, or tend to their personal lives, before reporting to the lodge for the daily briefing.

Jonas hung back, likely to keep up his perpetual avoidance of Bethan. Isaac doubted his solitary friend would otherwise find himself seized with any sudden urge for Isaac’s company. They took the beach route back toward the lodge through the cool summer morning, wreathed in a thick fog that would likely burn off before noon. Horatio ran in big loops around them, not quite herding them.

It was mornings like this that made Isaac the most nostalgic for his childhood here, even though everything had changed. He’d lost his parents. He’d spent those two years of black grief with his uncle Theo, who had never tried to comfort him. Isaac had learned to consider that a gift. Because instead, Uncle Theo had taught him how to become an unstoppable force in his own right. He’d given his grief-stricken nephew new tools and a new future to replace the kinder, gentler one that had been stolen from him.

And all the while, there had been this. The enduring grandeur of Alaska. The simple communion of sea and shore, mountain and sky. Whales in the sound and moose in the woods.

Home.

Though he admitted it felt more like home today thanusual, because Caradine was here. In Fool’s Cove, where he’d never let himself believe she would ever come. Unwillingly or otherwise.

“I expected more fallout from that meeting yesterday,” Isaac observed as he and Jonas walked. Before he did something unforgivable, like break into song. “All I got were a few smug looks and a handful of smirks. I must be more intimidating than I thought.”

“You’re the boss,” Jonas replied. “Your personal life is your business. That’s not intimidation, that’s a professional courtesy.”

Isaac grinned. “Surely I’m alittleintimidating.”

---