Page 99 of Delta Force Defender

And it was a strange thing to acknowledge that he didn’t know if he should feel pleased that it turned out he wasn’t indispensable after all, or if he should indulge the raw thing inside him instead. Probably both.

He didn’t head to his cabin, because it was one thing to be largely unreachable while in the Amazonian jungle. Now that he was back, it was time to go to work.

Another good thing, to his way of thinking, was that he felt a kind of relief when he walked into the lodge.

“I don’t believe it,” came Templeton’s booming voice from down the length of the lobby-like great room. He was sitting oh-so-casually on one of the couches with his tablet in one hand, as if he hadn’t seen the seaplane come in. “Do my eyes deceive me? Or is this the ghost of Gentrys past?”

“Do I look like a ghost?” Isaac grinned. Blandly. “And here I thought it was a successful mission.”

“I guess that depends on how you measure your successes,” Templeton drawled, stretching out his legs. “Me,I have a different metric than running off to the jungle to avoid—”

“The end of the world?” Isaac interjected with an edge in his voice, daring his friend to come back at him. “Because that’s what I was doing. And I didn’t realize that we were back in middle school.”

“Never left,” came Jonas’s voice from the opposite side of the big lobby.

Where he was leaning in a doorway like he, too, was casually wandering around the lodge in the middle of the day for no particular reason. Or like he everleaned.

Isaac decided he didn’t want to deal with either one of them, so he headed for his office. And he didn’t have to turn around to see them following him. He could hear them. They stuck with him as he pushed through the doors, then headed down the hallway toward his main office. The one he took clients to when they came here, not the one he kept in his home.

The home he hadn’t gone to yet, because the last time he’d been there, she’d been there, too.

Isaac would have ordered himself to stop thinking about Caradine, but what was the point? It hadn’t worked in almost two months. What made him think it would work now?

He expected to find Horatio waiting for him in his office, curled up on the sofa with a baleful glare, ready to punish him for being gone so long. But his dog wasn’t there. He tossed his bag on the spot Horatio normally claimed and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror on the wall. A little too wild man and not enough easygoing boy next door, but he didn’t have it in him to care. Not enough to do something about it.

There were stacks of papers on his desk. The light on his desk phone blinked wildly. Ordinarily he would dive right in.

But instead, he eyed his unwanted entourage as they loomed about in his doorway.

There were a thousand things he could have asked them. He went with, “Where’s my dog?”

Templeton whistled in that way he had that put Isaac’s teeth on edge. The way it was meant to, he knew.

“Cold as ice,” Templeton said.

“Your first question is about your dog,” Jonas said carefully, as if he were giving Isaac the opportunity to change his answer.

“Normally I don’t have to ask about Horatio, because he’s right here. I assume that if something happened to him, someone would have informed me.” He lifted a brow. “Or am I supposed to interpret your dog and pony show another way?”

“Cranky,” Templeton observed, apparently still narrating. “And this from the individual who once lectured us all on how breathing into the solar plexus could cure jet lag.”

Jonas, who normally did not engage in such shenanigans, actually cracked a smile. Or a faint curl in the corner of his mouth, which was the same thing when it came to Jonas. “All I wanted to do was punch him in the solar plexus.”

“Good talk, thank you,” Isaac said impatiently. “If that’s all, I have two months to catch up on.”

“The thing about Isaac,” Templeton said conversationally, as if he had nothing better to do than lounge in the doorway, looking as boneless and lazy as those eyes of his were sharp, “is that he sure does love to dish it out. Taking it?”

“That, he doesn’t like,” Jonas answered.

Templeton shook his head. “No indeed.”

Isaac sighed. “What is it that you would like me to take?”

“Your dog is fine,” Templeton told him. “He’s in town.”

That was strange, but Isaac didn’t pursue it. Because he could see there was no point. If Templeton had wantedto give him more information—like why Horatio, who normally hung out at the lodge while Isaac was away so he could be fawned over by everyone, would go to town in the first place—he would have given it. If Templeton didn’t want to give out the information, Isaac certainly wasn’t going to beg for it.

“Great,” he said. “Thank you.”

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