by Megan Crane
The lovely seaside town of Camden was three hours or so from Boston, but might as well have been on another planet from the life she remembered there. And it was June. A town on any stretch of the Atlantic coast was filled with tourists this time of year. A whole lot more tourists than ever showed up on a Southeast Alaskan island set off the Inside Passage cruise ship route. There was always the chance that someone might come for her on a busy, happy street or along the much-photographed waterfront, but she thought it was a small one. Along the same lines, she paid too much for a room with bay windows overlooking the harbor, in an adorable bed-and-breakfast that reminded her of the Blue Bear Inn in Grizzly Harbor—
“For God’s sake,” she snapped at herself, staring around the fussy room done up in overt blues, yellows, and whites. “Let it go.”
Something she’d been telling herself for three thousand miles.
She took care of a few practical considerations, almost by rote. She checked the windows and took care to memorize what she could see from them. Then she crawled into the center of the full bed, curled herself in a ball on the floral bedspread, and slept for a long, long time.
When Caradine woke, she was disoriented.
It was night. And it took her several beats to remember where she was. How she’d gotten here, zigzagging this way and that, driving like a maniac on very little sleep and entirely too much caffeine and sugared-up anxiety, all over the country.
She was still a little bit addled from the road. That had to be why her heart was cartwheeling around and slamming against her ribs.
But in the next breath, she knew better.
Because a shadow detached itself from the wall at the foot of her bed.
Caradine launched herself up and onto her feet, grabbing for the .45 she kept beneath her pillow while her body readied itself—
But she recognized him almost as quickly.
“Isaac.”
She sucked in the breath that had nearly been a scream, but she didn’t drop her gun. Because it was Isaac, all right, but that didn’t make him safe.
He had never been safe.
“Put the gun down,” he advised her, in that genial way of his that she’d never believed. And didn’t now.
“I’ll pass on that, thank you.”
She reached behind her, not dumb enough to shift her gaze from him, and found the lamp beside the bed. And glared at him when all the buttery light did was make him look even more dangerous and powerful than usual. Shadowed and gleaming and, damn him, gorgeous.
“I could have taken it while you were blinking, Caradine.”
She believed him, but she sniffed. “Yet you didn’t.”
“Consider it a courtesy.”
His eyes were still that mysterious, impossible gray, and something about them looked silver tonight. His features had predator stamped all over them, and though he wore that beard to hide the truth of who he was, it had never fooled her. She’d never trusted his easy smile or the general amiable demeanor he played at whenever he was in public, because she knew exactly who he was. She always had.
From that very first night, that very first look, she’d known.
The look he aimed at her was feral enough to raise every hair on her body. And she hated that even here, her body reacted to him the way it always did.
Isaac Gentry was a spectacular betrayal of herself in male form, and her curse was, that form was beautiful. More than simply beautiful—he was a perfectly honed, marvelously constructed specimen. She knew, and had soundly mocked, his dedication to keeping himself in peak physical condition, but the woman in her wanted to cheer every time she saw what a T-shirt like the one he was wearing now did to those pectoral muscles of his. To say nothing of that mouthwateringly ridged abdomen.
He had been her doom from the start. She’d known it, and she’d done it all anyway, like a moth on a kamikaze trip straight into the bluest part of the flame.
“When did you pick up my trail?” she asked, studying his grim, gorgeous face.
He had always been a threat, and she’d always understood that, but this was different. This wasn’t their usual tug-of-war in Grizzly Harbor. They were on the other side of a very large continent.
He must have followed her.
She knew this was the kind of thing he and his commando buddies did for a living, but that didn’t make the panic clawing at her subside any. It almost made it worse.
“I thought you were dead,” Isaac gritted out, and he no longer sounded remotely pleasant.
He moved closer in that way of his that was almost as if he weren’t moving. As if he were a part of the shadows, not a man at all, except she knew perfectly well that he was flesh and blood.
She knew it far too well.
“When, Gentry? Spokane?”
He moved closer, and her eyes were fully adjusted now. She could see that wild thing in his gaze. That furious glitter.
“I thought you were dead,” he said again, emphasizing each word in a guttural sort of way that she could feel, like separate kicks.
Each one hurt, whether she admitted it or not. Especially the last.
“Obviously not,” she threw back at him, because what she knew how to do was fight. On and on and on, as long as it took, because it was all she had. “And you couldn’t have thought I was dead very long, or you’d be back in Alaska planning my funeral. Not lurking in hotel rooms in Maine.”
“I got a call.” His voice was . . . terrible. As furious as that half-wild glittering thing in his eyes, but there was something much, much worse than simply furious about it. Caradine shuddered. “There was a fire. In your home. Where I had every reason to believe you were.”
“When did you pick up my trail?” she bit out, because he wasn’t the only one who could use anger like a tool.
“I never lost your trail.” He was too close now. Right there on the other side of her gun. She refused to waver. But then, she doubted he knew the meaning of that word. “I watched you board the ferry to Juneau. And I watched you get off the ferry in Bellingham.”
The smirk toppled off her face, and she couldn’t seem to do anything about it. She compensated by keeping her gun trained on him, aimed directly at his heart.
“You really shouldn’t have done that.” She hated the weakness in her. The catch in her throat, the humming thing low in her belly. The ache that had been there from the start. “I know this is what you do for a living, but I didn’t hire you, Isaac. I don’t need you to save me. You need to let me go.”
“I thought you were dead, Caradine.”
She let out a sound she hoped was scornful and not a sob. “That’s not even my name.”
“It is when you’re with me,” Isaac growled.
Then he did two things so fast she didn’t see either one. She couldn’t react. She couldn’t resist.
He took the gun from her like she hadn’t been gripping it in the first place. As if he’d plucked it from the air.
And with his other hand he hooked her around the neck, yanked her close, and slammed his mouth to hers.
Three
Isaac had spent the last week assuring himself that what he wanted from her was a frank conversation, for a change. That a conversation was all he wanted.
But nothing with Caradine ever went as planned.
The familiar taste of her exploded through him, messing him up like a sucker punch.
The way it always did.
She was smoke and fire, need and longing, and the way they fit together was like a new religion. Every time.
He clicked the safety into place, then tossed her gun aside. And for the moment, he indulged himself.
Isaac angled his jaw, taking the kiss deeper. Pouring all the panic and dread and grief-streaked fury he’d kept locked up inside into her. Making it heat and desire.
That call. That
terrible helicopter ride.
He couldn’t forget any of it.
But she was here. She was alive. She was flesh and blood and kissing him back the way she always did, as if it were all her idea.
As if she were in control.
And for the moment, that was all that mattered.
She was impatient, as always. She surged against him, wrapping her arms around his neck and pressing her body against his.
Isaac let his hands travel, proving to himself that she really was all in one piece. And because he liked his hands on her. She’d been sleeping with her clothes on, and not the kinds of clothes she wore at the Water’s Edge Café while she was cooking only what she felt like cooking, insulting the customers, and throwing out anyone who annoyed her.
And everyone annoyed her, sooner or later. She issued bans like parking citations in big cities, and it always took a lot of wheedling to get back into her good graces.
But there was no oversized novelty T-shirt here. Tonight she wore a formfitting white T-shirt with cute little sleeves that flirted with those biceps she pretended she didn’t have. And a pair of cargo pants that whispered when she moved, telling him before he’d even laid a hand on her that they were made of tactical material.
It was all part and parcel of the same lie she’d been telling all this time, and he would get to that, but for the moment he lost himself a little—okay, a lot—in the sheer joy of kissing her again.
There was a simmering anger, sure. And all that emotion they never talked about. Lust and desire, and loss in there, too, because this never lasted. Every time he kissed her could be the last time he kissed her, and he was never okay with that, no matter what he told himself.
Isaac poured it all into her.
Caradine took it, met it, and gave it right back to him.
And since his hands were on her already, he let them trail down her body wherever they pleased, reminding himself how sleek and sexy she was. Not that he needed reminding when she was burned into him like a brand.
He also helped himself to the weapons she kept stashed away on her person. The knife strapped to her leg. The box cutter in one cargo pocket.
He liked that she was lethal. He’d watched her extricate herself from restraints, easily disarm attackers, and escape all manner of harm in the self-defense class she took in Grizzly Harbor. But that didn’t mean he wanted to give her an easy target.
She jerked her head back when he fished the box cutter out of her pocket, and he had the satisfaction of seeing that her pupils were dilated and her eyes had gone glassy. Those pretty blue eyes that she could never quite wipe clear of her true feelings, no matter how ferociously she scowled.
The way she did now. “Are you trying to distract me while you pat me down?”
“Not trying to distract you. Just distracting you.”
She pushed away from him, harder than necessary. Isaac didn’t move, but she did, and probably would have staggered back a few feet if she hadn’t caught herself. He watched her glance toward the bed, where the three weapons he’d found so far lay, then look back at him, gauging her chances.
“I wouldn’t.” He didn’t quite grin. Though he thought about it. “But you can always give it a shot. See what happens.”
Some people would admit defeat. But this was Caradine, defiant beyond reason and sense, who would probably die first. Her eyes narrowed, she crossed her arms, and she glared back at him like she had some control here.
But just because he’d always given her control didn’t mean she had it or could keep it. A critical distinction. One he intended to make crystal clear to her.
“If you’ve been tracking me since the ferry, you sure have come a long way for that good-bye kiss. I hope it was worth it.” She nodded toward the door to her room that he’d jimmied in about two silent seconds. “Don’t let me keep you.”
“Hilarious, as ever. You should think about a stand-up routine.”
“I’m not trying to be funny. You need to go. You shouldn’t have followed me in the first place.”
Isaac grinned then, but not in the genial, good-ol’-boy way he’d perfected for residents of Grizzly Harbor who’d known his parents, ignored his uncle, and really, truly wanted to see him as cuddly. “At what point in the five years you’ve known me did you get the impression that I’m the kind of man who would watch a building blow up in Grizzly Harbor and not dedicate myself to figuring out why? Or who did it?”
“Gas leak,” she offered blandly. “You can go home now.”
“Try again. We caught two clowns in a fishing boat who were only too happy to admit that they threw a weak Molotov cocktail through your front window.”
“Youths today. Millennials. Am I right?”
She wanted him to rage at her, he had no doubt, so he kept his expression as even as his tone. “Some people think you hired them to light your own café on fire.”
“For the supposed insurance money?” Her head tipped to one side as she considered it, the smirk that alternately infuriated and intoxicated him playing with her mouth. That didn’t help anything. “Sure. That sounds like me. Shifty straight on through.”
Isaac eyed the small weapons collection on her bed, pointedly, then looked back at her. “You figure you need all that to fight off the Allstate agent?”
“Isaac.” She shook her head at him, managing to look world-weary and pitying all at once. “What makes you think you get to know why I left? Maybe I just left. Maybe I don’t want to stand around handing out explanations to anyone. Especially you.”
They were standing maybe five inches apart in a tiny, prissy room that made him feel like more than a bull in a china shop—more like a herd of bulls three seconds away from crashing through a glass wall. The double bed took up most of the floor space, and he should have been thinking strategically, but this was Caradine. So what he was really busy doing was picturing the numerous uses he could make of the bed. Not big enough for him to get all that comfortable, it was true, but certainly big enough to cause a little trouble. And adjust her attitude, as he’d done more than once.
But he’d thought she was dead.
And this was supposed to be a reckoning. Not a retread of every other encounter they’d ever had.
“These are the facts,” he said coolly, the way he would if he were briefing his team back in Fool’s Cove. “You arrived in Grizzly Harbor five years ago out of thin air.”
“Or, you know, off the ferry like everyone else. But sure. Make it dramatic if you must.”
“Caradine Scott doesn’t exist,” Isaac continued as if she hadn’t spoken, and she jolted at that. Just a little, hardly a whole flinch, but he saw it. In that second before she schooled her reaction—which was an interesting thing all on its own, and something he filed away—he saw it.
He expected her to say something, but she didn’t. She only glared back at him, obviously prepared to stand there and scowl back at him for all eternity.
“Alonzo and Martie Hagan tried to sell that place for years. Martie had her heart set on getting out of the Alaskan winter and down to a beach somewhere south, where cold means the low seventies. But no one bit. Until you.”
“Are you the only one who’s allowed to open a business in Grizzly Harbor?”
“You bought the place sight unseen, paid cash, and showed up in early October. Which is not a time people generally decide to pick up stakes and move to Alaska from the Lower forty-eight.”
Caradine shrugged. “I’ve never cared that much about what ‘most people’ do.”
“I get itchy when fake people with fake names show up and start wandering around my hometown.” And Isaac’s voice was a little more terse than necessary. “Grizzly Harbor is supposed to be a safe, quiet, idyllic escape, far away from the rest of the world. And its problems. That’s why people move there.”
“Maybe you’ve missed
what’s been happening the past couple of years, then.” She even laughed, right in his face, because Caradine was one of the few civilians who knew exactly how dangerous he was and taunted him anyway. “Safe is not the word I’d use to describe your hometown, what with all the dead bodies and bombs going off left and right.”
“Five years ago it was perfectly safe, aside from the weather and the wildlife.” Isaac studied the defiant way she tilted up her chin, like she’d welcome it if he swung at her. “And you’re not the first person to turn up in the middle of nowhere and think that it would be better all around if you left your real name behind with whatever it is you’re getting away from. I don’t blame anyone who wants a new start.”
“Are you sure? Because this sounds a whole lot like blame. Meanwhile, I guess we can keep pretending that Alaska Force isn’t your version of a new start. Just with bigger guns than most and an exciting club name to go with it.”
“The difference, Caradine, is that while a person might not choose to use their real name in casual conversation while they’re living off-grid somewhere in the Last Frontier, it’s always attached to them anyway. One way or another. But not you.”
She didn’t look cowed. Quite the opposite. He was sure she stood a little straighter and even smirked a little harder. “You sure seemed broken up about that. Each and every time you ended up naked in my bed, using the name I gave you.”
Isaac let himself smile then and watched goose bumps break out down the distractingly elegant line of her neck.
They were in Maine tonight, not Alaska. And maybe they were both done hiding.
He knew he was. “I’m so glad you brought that up.”
Isaac took a step closer to her, and she swallowed, hard. And for a moment, even though his pulse was racketing around and making noise, he let himself simply look at her.
This woman who worked so hard to pretend she wasn’t as pretty as she was. All the scowling. The smirking. The rudeness, the belligerence, and enough armor to outfit the better part of the Middle Ages wrapped around her at all times. Especially with him.