by Megan Crane
When the truth of her was the delicate lines of her strong, sleek body. That dark hair she usually kept in a messy ponytail so no one would know it was this silky. Or that shampoo she used that made her smell like sweet drinks on a tropical night. That mouth that she was always curling into one sneer or another, so no one would notice how kissable it was. She was five nine and looked about 130 pounds, though he estimated she was a good ten to fifteen pounds heavier than that, all of it muscle. When she worked so hard to pretend she was lazy and soft and idle.
“I thought we were building up to a big, dramatic moment here.” She sounded jaded and sarcastic, her specialty. “But apparently you chased me across a continent to bore me to death.”
“I spend a lot of time thinking about that first night,” Isaac told her, not letting her goad him.
She batted her eyelashes at him, not something she normally did. Likely because it would force a man to notice how thick and dark they were and how well they framed her eyes. “It’s cute that the super scary head commando is obsessed with me. Really. If it’s any consolation, I won’t tell anyone. You can go on back to your little fraternity with your big, bad reputation intact. Hopefully soon.”
“You were new in town,” Isaac continued, ignoring her. “And maybe you were looking for a fun night, but you got me instead.”
“I’m so glad to hear you say that. All this time it’s been so awkward. I haven’t known how to tell you that you’re basically the opposite of fun. Always.”
He wouldn’t say he felt goaded, exactly, but there was an edginess in him. “What word do you want to use? Intense? Life-altering?”
Caradine sighed. “It’s those puppy dog eyes of yours, Isaac. Every now and again, they’re just too much, and I take pity on you. Do you really not understand that?”
But he only laughed. “Nice try. But I can see your pulse going wild in your neck. And your skin is flushed. How many times have we played this game? Remember what happened the last time?”
He did. In vivid detail.
“You’re describing my uncontrollable physical reaction of complete disgust,” she said loftily.
“I see that you do. But let me remind you anyway.” He drifted even closer to her, almost entirely to see what she would do. Caradine didn’t disappoint him. She moved back instantly, but then caught herself. And stood firm, tilting her head up to keep her eyes on his as he stood over her.
But he could see that her hands were in fists.
“It was late,” he reminded her, remembering it himself. “You were in those hot springs you like to tell everybody you hate. You came out damp and hot and caught me on a patrol.”
“Is that what we’re calling episode 976,000 of you stalking me? ‘Patrol’?”
“We had this exact same conversation, as I recall. But it was a relatively warm night, and you weren’t wearing much. Just your bathing suit. So I figured I’d check to see if you were as disgusted as you claimed you were. To make sure we were still on the same page.”
He did the same now, reaching over to the waistband of her cargo pants. She swatted at him with one of her fists, but not hard. Not like she meant it.
And having been on the receiving end of a punch from Caradine that she did mean, he could tell the difference.
“You wanted me pretty desperately then, as I recall.”
“I’m never desperate,” she lied.
Isaac ran the backs of his fingers this way, then that, over the soft skin just below her navel. He didn’t have to point out that the jagged breath she let slip betrayed her completely. A lot like the way her nipples hardened beneath the fitted T-shirt she wore.
He knew. And she knew.
And this was one more way this same old game had always been played between them.
“You think I don’t know how you work, but I do,” he said, remembering that call again. Griffin’s voice, completely lacking the icy calm the other man was known for. That helicopter ride. The smoke and the flames and no sign of her. “You spent five years pretending you don’t feel anything. And it’s Alaska. People are prickly. It’s practically a requirement to cross the state border. But I know better. I’ve seen the real you.”
This time when she swung at him, it was hard. He let the punch land. He even let his mouth curve. “Don’t hurt yourself.”
There was murder in her eyes then. But she pushed herself away from him instead of hitting him again, which he could admit was disappointing. Because he liked her hands on him. However that happened.
Isaac waited to see if she would throw herself toward the door and try to make a break for it when he was staring right at her and would run her down in two seconds flat.
But she could do the same math he could.
Her mouth flattened into a line. She moved until the corner of the bed was between them, crossed her arms again, and glared at him. Harder this time. “If you hear nothing else I say to you tonight, I need you to hear this. You don’t know me. You don’t know the real me at all. And that’s not a challenge, Isaac. That’s a gift.”
“There’s nobody here but me and you, four thousand miles away from Grizzly Harbor. You’ll never have a better opportunity to tell me who you really are.”
She laughed, and it was a hard, bitter sound. “I would rather die.”
“You say that about everything, Caradine, and then do it anyway. You would rather die than open the café at whatever hour, but you do. You would rather die than admit you have friends. Or that they care about you. Or that you’re a part of the community, except you are.”
“You mean like you? The one who pretends to be a part of things when it suits him while living out there in his secret fortress in the woods?”
He didn’t like that, but he held her gaze. “You would rather die than ever touch me again, until you do. And you always do.”
“I’m dead inside, believe me, and this conversation isn’t exactly bringing me back to life.”
“Fine.” Isaac folded his own arms over his chest and reminded himself that she wasn’t the only one who’d been pretending to be something other than who she was. He’d been putting on the same approachable, harmless mask since he’d moved back to Alaska. “You want to act like this is an interrogation? We can do that, too.”
“Oh, goody. Role-play.”
“You wish.” And he smiled a little when he saw her flush. “I haven’t pushed too hard on the question of your real identity because I figured you probably had your reasons for keeping it private.”
“Weird. I still do.”
“But that was before your café took a bomb through the window and I thought you were dead.”
Her shrug was too sharp to come off as indifference. “I didn’t throw it.”
“Someone’s after you, and they found you. Your response was to run, then spend a week zigzagging around the country. Whatever secret you’ve been keeping all this time isn’t yours any longer. It’s in smoldering ruins in Grizzly Harbor, making it my business whether you like it or not.”
“Because you’re the self-appointed savior of Grizzly Harbor, who nobody actually wants racing in and saving them. Is that what you mean?”
“What it means is that I’m going to find out who you are. Whether you tell me or not.”
Her blue eyes flashed. “Is that what we’re going with? You’re threatening to dig around in my private life when you know I don’t want you to because of the town?”
“I should have done it a long time ago. Maybe if I had I could have stopped this from happening.”
Caradine rolled her eyes. “I have no interest in being one of the reasons you martyr yourself, Isaac.”
He glared at her, then reeled himself in. “I’m happy to say I have no idea what that means.”
“It means you can climb on down from your cross, though we both know you like it up there. You didn
’t investigate me the way I’m sure you do everyone else because you’re afraid to look. Afraid it might turn out that Captain America has been sleeping with the enemy.” Caradine made a tsking sound. “What if I’m a criminal? One of the lowlifes you like to put away? Can you pretend to save the world when you might be in bed with the thing you hate?”
“Do you really think I don’t have your fingerprints on file?” he asked, almost idly, though he could feel the tension in his body. And he didn’t care if she could see it. “Or that Oz isn’t sitting there at his computer, ready to turn all that genius on you the minute I give the order? He’ll find out what you had for breakfast on the morning of your fifth birthday, and fast. I’m not afraid of who you are, Caradine. I’ve been waiting for you to tell me yourself.”
He thought she looked a little shaken at that, but she hid it. The way she hid everything. She was the most frustrating woman he’d ever met in his life, and the only woman he would ever have spent a week tracking—to make sure she was safe and maybe find out what was going on with her, not to run her down.
If all he’d wanted was to catch her, he would have handled her in Juneau. Within minutes of her exiting that first ferry.
“Great,” she said after a moment, her voice flat and her blue eyes glittering. “You’re in total control of all things and the biggest and baddest there ever was, blah blah blah. Must be nice to have your very own collection of mercenaries to back up all these threats.”
“That is not what Alaska Force is.”
But if she heard his chilly tone, she certainly didn’t heed it.
“My favorite part is that you came all this way and broke into my hotel room to tell me how you could know everything there is to know about me in two seconds if you wanted, but you thought a week of hard driving sounded like more fun somehow.” He was familiar with the challenging look she threw his way. “Go ahead and dig up all my skeletons, Isaac. Knock yourself out. But you can do that back in Alaska. Why are you here?”
“You know why,” he gritted out, but she gave him nothing. She only glared back at him like he was a stranger. And all the weapons he had at his disposal couldn’t help him with that. They never had. “You don’t want to tell me your story? I can’t make you. But, Caradine. For God’s sake. I thought you were dead. Tell me who’s trying to kill you before they catch up and finish the job.”
Four
And the crazy thing was that Caradine wanted to tell him.
She’d wanted to tell him for years. It had been there, on the tip of her tongue, too many times to count. Because in her few and far between moments of wild optimism—usually when he was grinning at her when they were alone and she was seduced by the possibilities—she couldn’t help but think that if anyone could help her, it was Isaac.
But the moments always passed. Reality always reasserted itself.
Help wasn’t coming. Ever. No matter how tough one ex-marine was.
And she’d made a promise.
More than a simple promise. She’d vowed that she would keep her word, and her silence, to the grave.
And she didn’t get to change that now because, of all the islands in Southeast Alaska, she’d accidentally chosen to hide out on the one that was overrun with superhero commando types. This one in particular.
“You can’t save me,” she told him now, wishing there were something more substantial between them than the bed with its floral bedspread and a selection of her weapons laid out on one of the oversized flowers. Like a giant steel barricade, maybe. Anything but her own stubbornness, which he’d proven a little too talented at puncturing whenever he felt like it. “And you can’t protect me. Do you want to know how I know that?”
Isaac only stared back at her, impassive and steady, as if he already knew what she was going to say. And would handle that, too, as effortlessly as he handled everything else.
Caradine told herself this would all have been a lot easier if he weren’t so annoyingly gorgeous. All the time. Rain, fog, sleet, mud, snow. Genial or pissed, he was still beautiful. If he didn’t always look the way he did now, carved from marble and sculpted to shine, maybe this would be easier.
But even if he’d been ugly, he still would have been Isaac. Less distracting, maybe, but just as lethal. And dangerous in every possible way. Especially to her.
Particularly when he looked at her the way he did now.
“Enlighten me,” he said.
Daring her.
And the thought of what could happen to him if he insisted on sticking close to her made her wish that one of the bombs that had been lobbed her way over the years had actually gotten her, because that was the only surefire way she knew to make sure he was safe.
Too bad none of this is about him, she snapped at herself. You need to get your head together.
“If you were capable of saving me, you would have saved me already,” she threw at him, as spitefully as possible. It should have come easily to be mean, after all these years of practice, but it didn’t. It never did. It made her tongue taste like acid. “Aren’t you the unofficial, unelected, unwanted mayor of Grizzly Harbor? In addition to being the king of all the commandos?”
“I’m a local boy and a small-business owner. Does calling me names make you feel better?”
He wanted to shame her. She refused to be shamed. Or to show it, anyway. “Yes, actually. It makes me feel alive.”
When nothing made her feel better. Nothing could.
“That’s not what makes you feel alive, Caradine.”
Her stomach flipped over, but she pushed on. “You can’t save me, Isaac, because if you could? You would have. The Water’s Edge Café wouldn’t have a gaping hole where the restaurant used to be, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, and neither one of us would have been traipsing around the Lower forty-eight for the past week. But that’s not the situation, is it?”
“You don’t have a lot of choices here,” he said in a voice of quiet command, and she hated the way those eyes of his changed colors, like a storm. There was that dangerous silver from before, which heralded intensity. The usual unreadable gray, like Alaskan fog.
But right now they were a thunderous steel she’d never seen before. And the more she stared at him, the harder it was to breathe. Caradine understood, suddenly, that while she had always seen beneath that mask of his, he’d always been wearing it anyway.
He wasn’t now.
A wild sensation shivered down the length of her spine, from the nape of her neck to her tailbone, as she realized she was looking at the real Isaac Gentry.
At last, a voice inside her whispered.
This was the Isaac who didn’t grin and laugh and make people around him feel so comfortable they somehow forgot to look at the truth of him, which was packed into every lean, hard inch of his body. The Isaac who might have grown up in Grizzly Harbor but was certainly no local boy. He wasn’t a boy at all.
This was the man who admitted to having been a Force Recon marine when it was unavoidable, but only smiled edgily when it was suggested he’d advanced to an even higher level of special forces than that. This was the man who ran teams of other dangerous operatives, because they all looked up to him. This man could change regimes, topple governments, carry the world on his broad shoulders, and turn her inside out with a single glance.
If she’d been smart, Caradine would have looked away that first night and never looked back.
You need to stop sniping at him, she snapped at herself. Because pretend as she might, she knew it showed passion. One of the friends in Grizzly Harbor, who she refused to call a friend—because she couldn’t have friends at all and certainly not ones like Everly Campbell, who genuinely seemed to like her and would pay for it, if the people after Caradine got their hands on Everly one day when she wasn’t with her ex-SEAL fiancé—had once called it her love language.
That was obviously
unacceptable.
Try indifference, she ordered herself now.
“What exactly do you plan to do?” she asked him, keeping her voice flat. “There are other people staying in this bed-and-breakfast, you know. It’s booked solid. All I have to do is scream.”
His mouth curved. “You won’t.”
He was right, she wouldn’t have. She didn’t want that kind of attention. But it irritated her that he was so confident, so she pulled in a deep breath as if she planned to get operatic.
“If you do,” Isaac said, very calmly, “I’ll let you. And then you can explain to all the other guests that you were having a nightmare while fully dressed with a pile of weapons on your bed. Because there won’t be anybody but you in this room when they get here.”
“That sounds like . . . exactly what I want.” She made a shooing motion with one hand. “Don’t let me keep you from disappearing.”
“And they’ll remember you forever as the lunatic who woke up half of a tourist town at two in the morning. Not the best way to keep a low profile.”
Caradine shrugged with elaborate unconcern. “They’ll get sunburned and drunk tomorrow, overdose on lobster, and forget it ever happened.”
“I tracked you for a week and you didn’t notice,” he pointed out, his bland voice at odds with all that thunder in his eyes and all over his face. “Just like you didn’t notice me breaking into your room tonight. Do you really think a little scream is going to change anything?”
“It might make me feel better.”
“If you wanted to feel better, Caradine, you would tell me who was chasing you. And let me do what I do best.”
“It sounds like you’re the one who’s chasing me, Gentry.” That steady gaze of his made her want to curl up into a ball, so she stood straighter instead. “You could try stopping.”
“The two idiots who did the deed were hired help. Local talent, contacted in Juneau, and they didn’t have much to say about the person who hired them. Another intermediary, if I had to guess.” Isaac’s voice was like steel now, to match the storm in his eyes. “But their orders weren’t to kill you. They weren’t even supposed to grab you, if you were worried about a kidnap attempt.”