Page 69 of Delta Force Defender

“A matter of time, sure. Or, you know, my sister coming straight for me, making a trail for them to follow to my front door.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Caradine saw Isaacagain. He moved lazily around the SUV’s front, then leaned against it, looking idle and vaguely bored when she knew he was anything but.

And the fact he’d put himself where she could see him warmed her all over again. It gave her a little more strength than she’d had a moment ago. Almost like—

But she shoved that aside, because there were miles upon treacherous miles yet to go.

“I live on a remote Alaskan island,” Caradine said evenly. “Not on Maui. You have to work hard to get to Grizzly Harbor.”

“Because it’s a real picnic coming up the road here,” Lindsay said sarcastically. “Tourists do it all the time.”

Caradine ordered herself not to snap at her sister. “If they could find me there, Maui’s got to be a walk in the park.”

“Especially now you’ve drawn them a map to that park.”

“I don’t know what your life is like,” Caradine said fiercely then. “But I know mine. Pretending to settle down but always having one foot out the door. Always knowing that at any moment it could all blow up. And then it did. I wanted to see you, Lindsay, not to make you a target. But to see if together, you and me and my friends, we could figure out a way to make this stop.”

And as she said it, she almost believed it was possible. She almost believed they could do it.

The door to the house opened then and Lindsay turned, a look of wild panic on her face.

Caradine shot to her feet, but even as she started to back up, Isaac was there.

Thank God. Because the man who stepped out onto the porch looked like Isaac’s kind of trouble. He was big, tall. He looked like possibly he played a defensive position in football in between bench-pressing cars for fun. He was Hawaiian, with visible tattoos all over his upper body and up his neck.

But it was what he was carrying that stopped Caradine dead.

Not the gun he held loosely in his right hand. But the tiny little girl he held in the crook of his other arm, who looked like a perfect, pretty little brown replica of Lindsay.

Caradine’s heart... stopped.

Then slammed against her ribs like a train.

Lindsay had a child. A daughter. Her sister had a daughter.

Caradine was an aunt, and she would never have known that if she hadn’t come here. Something washed over her then, a complicated mix of emotion and hope and determination for the future. Because there had to be a future.

And in the next beat came the fear.

Because she and Lindsay were one thing. They could run. They shouldn’t have had to, but life was unfair, and running was still better than life in their father’s house.

She couldn’t bear the thought of passing that on to the little girl with big brown eyes who stared back at her, her middle two fingers tucked in her mouth.

The way Lindsay’s always had been as a little girl, until their father had broken them when she wouldn’t stop.

Caradine couldn’t take that back. She couldn’t change the past. She could never make it okay.

Nothing would make it okay.

But maybe, just maybe, they could make itstop.

And the surge of hope that bloomed inside her then made her feel nauseated and dizzy.

“You know my position on this,” the man said, his gaze moving over Caradine, hard and quick. He lifted his chin in Isaac’s direction, his black eyes glittering. “I’m tired of hiding. I want this over.”

“And I keep telling you, that’s a fantasy,” Lindsay snapped. She moved over to the man and gathered thelittle girl into her arms. “It’s never over. It’s never going to be over.” She glared at Caradine. “And I don’t appreciate you coming here and trying to make the fact they found you into some kind of opportunity when we both know it’s not. If they find us, we die.”

“Unless they die,” Isaac drawled.

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