by Megan Crane
But he had spent a lifetime controlling himself in far worse situations than this. Caradine might get to him in ways he wasn’t exactly comfortable with, but it was still only the two of them and an incapacitated thug in a summer cottage. It wasn’t a freaking war.
Handle your crap, he ordered himself sternly.
“You will,” he told her, pitilessly. “Because you’ll be locked up in a cabin in Fool’s Cove under my command, whether you like it or not, until you do.”
Most people fell apart when he used that tone. Caradine scoffed at him. “You’re not putting me in your private jail, Isaac. Get a grip.”
“You’ll wish it was jail,” he promised her. “This will be much worse. Because it won’t be a cell, Caradine. It will be my cabin. With me. Until I’m satisfied that you’ve told me every last thing I want to know about your past.”
And Isaac was smiling again as he ushered her out into the predawn darkness, because he’d known Caradine for five years now. But this was the first time he’d ever seen her without a single thing to say.
“Sulking?” he asked her after a solid forty-five minutes in the car, when her brooding silence in the passenger seat beside him was beginning to feel operatic.
“Only because I missed,” she replied.
Isaac supposed that there was something wrong with him that he found that funny. Then again, the fact that he wasn’t like other people had been a theme in his life for so long now, it hardly bore repeating. Even to himself.
You’re not made in the same mold, his father had told him when Isaac had been an angry teenage boy, convinced the world was arrayed against him, so self-centered and awash in his adolescent misery that it had never crossed his mind they’d been living on borrowed time.
You’re the one who isn’t normal, Dad, he’d shot back. Because that was what he’d thought he’d wanted then, with all the righteous fury of a fifteen-year-old in the grips of hormone poisoning. To be like everyone else. Or you’d move somewhere normal people live.
His father had only laughed. That was what Isaac remembered most about him. That he’d somehow found a surly teenage kid entertaining. All these years later, it made Isaac wish he could have gotten to know his father as a man.
It’s easy to move somewhere and pretend that’s going to solve your problems, his father had told him. But what’s hard, no matter where you live, is figuring out the ways you’re an individual. And then honoring those parts of you, whether that makes you normal or not.
After his parents had died, Isaac had leaned in hard to that advice.
The last thing in the world Mom and Dad would want is you to go risk your life, Amy had argued with him when he’d started his officer training courses while still in college. Don’t you understand? All they’d ever want is you safe.
Your job is to stay safe, he’d told his older sister, because she was the one with a collection of normal things. The husband. The house. The baby on the way. My job is to keep you safe.
The way he would have kept his parents safe, if he could have. If he’d had that chance.
Isaac had never regretted his choices. Sometimes he told himself that his parents would have been proud, the way his grandmother in Anchorage was. Even Amy had come around—especially when he’d finally come out of the service, more or less in one piece.
I’m glad you’re home, she’d told him, fiercely, on his first Christmas as a civilian. She’d been making up his grandmother’s pullout couch for him like he was still a kid, and he’d let her, because he figured she needed to feel useful. She’d taken a break from fluffing up the spare pillows—something he really didn’t need, given some of the places he’d slept—to hug him. Hard. But please, Isaac, whatever you do—don’t end up like Uncle Theo.
Admittedly, the fact that their uncle lived out there in his remote cabin, off the grid, like the wild-eyed mountain man he’d always been in Isaac’s memory, weighed on him. Uncle Theo had been an army man, and he didn’t like to talk about that part of his life. He didn’t like to talk at all. If Isaac squinted, it wasn’t hard to see that Uncle Theo might just be his future.
That was why Amy had gifted Isaac with a puppy he absolutely hadn’t wanted when he’d settled down in Fool’s Cove, corralled Templeton and Jonas into starting Alaska Force with him, and started repairing the old family fishing lodge.
It’s great that you still want to save the world, she’d said. But if you can’t actually take care of another creature, maybe try that first.
Isaac hadn’t wanted to take care of anything, including himself. But Horatio as a puppy had been irresistible—and it helped that he was the smartest dog Isaac had ever encountered.
But taking all of that together, he thought on the drive to Portland and the long flight back to Alaska, it made sense that the woman who got under his skin was the one who had shot at him. Merrily. Because when had Isaac ever done anything the easy way?
A normal person would have washed his hands of Caradine a long time ago. Isaac had always liked an intelligent, smart-mouthed woman, because there was usually sweetness buried inside all that surliness and attitude. If he’d believed at any point that Caradine really meant the things she said to him, he would have bailed five years ago. After the first time she’d tossed him out of her bed.
Meaning, after that first night.
Instead, he persisted in believing that if he gave her enough time, she’d come around. She’d finally admit what was so obvious to him that there was no point even talking about it.
I had no idea you were such an optimist, Jonas had said in his stark way on one of the very few times he’d actually mentioned Isaac and Caradine’s thing, which otherwise only Templeton dared to do. To his face. I would have said we left all that crap behind when we left the service.
Isaac would have thought so, too.
Optimism was imagining he could save anything in this world, including himself. Optimism was holding on to a person who’d repeatedly peeled his fingers off and shoved him away. There were other words for that kind of optimism, and one of them was foolishness.
And as the private jet hit cruising altitude and headed west, Isaac found himself staring out the window as the world slipped by beneath him. But he wasn’t seeing the clouds, the sky, the hints of the earth far below him. He was thinking about her.
He was always thinking about her.
Caradine had marched on board the plane and wrapped herself in a pile of blankets that covered her from head to foot so she could hide all the way back to Alaska. He couldn’t even see her beneath the lump of fabric that made her reclined seat into a cocoon.
He knew that if she had it her way, she would hide like that forever.
Maybe it was time to accept that the fact she’d unloaded her weapon at him meant exactly the same thing it would have meant if anyone else had done it. That the bullet hole he’d left in the wall of the cottage told him things he should pay attention to—things he should have been paying attention to all this time.
She wasn’t going to tell him anything. Not of her own volition.
She wasn’t going to wake up from her angry, pointed nap on this plane in a sharing mood.
She didn’t do sharing moods.
When given the opportunity, she’d matched action to her intentions. If he hadn’t moved, she would have shot him.
When people show you who they are, believe them, went the famous quote. His uncle Theo had carved it into the door of that hard-to-reach cabin of his.
But it wasn’t until they switched planes in Juneau, going from the private jet that traveled long distances to the much smaller seaplane that would take them to Fool’s Cove, that Isaac pulled a trigger of his own.
Or faced reality, at last.
“You ready to go home?” he asked Caradine as they walked across the tarmac.
“I don’t have a home,” Caradine
replied stiffly, and maybe she really was forcing herself to sound that unfriendly, the way he thought she was. Like it was a mask she had to remind herself to wear. Or maybe she’s actually unfriendly, he snapped at himself, like when she shot at you without hesitation. “You dragging me back to Grizzly Harbor isn’t going to change that.”
“Maybe it’s time you started talking, then. The sooner you do, the sooner we’ll figure out where your home is.”
She glared at him, as always. “Hard pass.”
“Caradine.” He said her name like a warning. But he couldn’t have said which one of them he was warning.
“You know full well that’s not my name, Isaac.”
“Whatever your name is, you’re staying with me.”
Her glare deepened into a scowl, its natural progression. “You mean in one of the little guest cabins? Rumor has it you have a lot of them out there.”
“I mean, with me,” he said. “Because you’re not a client, remember?”
She stopped walking when they reached the smaller plane. And she stared at him, doing that thing that made her blue eyes seem remote. Even when she was right there in front of him.
“I know you’re the mighty Isaac Gentry, lord of all you survey,” she said, ice-cold all the way through. “But has it really never crossed your mind that I’m maybe . . . just not that into you?”
He studied her grimly. “No.”
Her eyes flashed with something he couldn’t read. “Maybe it should. At the very least it would cut down on all the kidnapping.”
That was what stuck with him when she stalked away from him, climbing into the plane and strapping herself into her seat. It was a moody summer morning in Alaska. The mountains were draped in clouds, and the water looked dark and brooding.
Isaac kept thinking about that bullet. The look on her face when she’d taken aim. And her words echoed around and around inside of him, drowning out the activity on the tarmac and the kick of the wind.
He still didn’t believe her. Or he didn’t want to believe her. But there was only one way to end this game, and it wasn’t waiting for her to see reason. Or to trust him. He’d already tried that.
He pulled out his phone and called Oz.
“Local law enforcement is already handling the situation in Maine,” Oz reported when he picked up. “And when they run your new friend’s prints, they’re going to get all kinds of bells and whistles, so that should keep him occupied for a while.”
Isaac knew it was only a matter of time before his buddy with the Boston accent reported back to his employers with information about Caradine, who he certainly hadn’t believed was a rug. And information about him to go with it—like that he existed. That Maine officials had taken the man into custody meant the clock was already ticking toward that inevitable end. He needed to be ready.
But that wasn’t why he’d called.
He needed something else first.
“Speaking of prints,” he said, staring at the small plane Caradine had already boarded and wondering why this felt like a betrayal of her. When it shouldn’t have. Surely it shouldn’t have, when she was the one who’d denied him to his face, gleefully. And, more important, had tried to shoot him. “Run Caradine’s. It’s high time we knew what we were dealing with.”
Eight
Caradine had never actually been to Fool’s Cove.
She liked to refer to the hard-to-reach fishing camp as a secret hideout, or clubhouse—because she liked to minimize Alaska Force whenever possible. Particularly to anyone involved with Alaska Force. She’d seen pictures of the lodge that the Gentry family had run for several generations, because historical pictures of Grizzly Harbor and the rest of the island were impossible to avoid, hung up as they were in places like the post office and the general store.
But she’d never had occasion to poke around on the back side of the island. Not when there was absolutely no possibility that a person could wander that way without Alaska Force knowing it. She’d become Caradine Scott, moved in, and taken over the restaurant before she’d understood what was happening on the island. Or exactly what the men in fantastic shape with those calm—sometimes cold—eyes did for a living. If she’d known about them, she would never have come here.
By the time she understood, thanks to Isaac and the epic mistake of that first night, it was too late. It would have been much harder, and more conspicuous, to leave.
She had hunkered down and ridden out her first Alaskan winter. Then four more. And she could have tried to drive or hike over what all the locals called Hard Ass Pass—the only so-called road that went over the mountain and wound down and around into Fool’s Cove, which was rarely passable—but she’d never done it. She’d never wanted to do it, because she wasn’t suicidal.
And because the less she knew about Alaska Force—and Isaac—the better.
As the plane flew in that morning, the summer sun was kicking its way through the clouds, and Caradine hated that the hideaway she’d mocked all this time was . . . pretty.
Though that was a small word for so much Alaskan splendor.
She’d wanted it to look shoddy. Even though nothing Alaska Force did was anything but first-rate, she’d secretly hoped their headquarters would run more toward the dilapidated side of the scale. She’d envisioned a scary hunting cabin aesthetic, off-putting and dire.
The historic fishing lodge seemed promisingly decrepit from the air. But as the seaplane went in for a landing, skidding across the water of the cove, she could see all too well that while the lodge sprawled there along the rocky shore like many Alaskan waterfront dwellings, it wasn’t ramshackle at all. It looked like what it was—the base of a private security firm that lacked for neither money nor clientele. There was a main part, two stories high there on the steep hill, and a lot of wooden walkways to connecting cabins. And there were hints of smoke in the trees, alerting her to the fact that other cabins sat farther back in the thick woods that climbed up the side of the steep mountainside. On the East Coast, people liked to build giant mansions on the waterline, but that wasn’t the Alaskan way. The lodge here looked unpretentious and serviceable—until she looked closer.
Isaac led her down a dock, then up a steep set of stairs. It was impossible not to notice the quality of the wood, everywhere. At the top of the stairs, she saw that the walkways and many decks overlooking the water were in far better condition than the public boardwalks in Grizzly Harbor. The windows were clear, and the roofs all looked tight and snug. The attention to detail made what should have been a broken-down, gloomy sort of off-grid compound into something that exuded a quiet, rustic elegance.
Which should not have made her chest feel too tight, like a sob was building up in there and making it hard to breathe.
Isaac skirted the two-story main building, then led her down a walkway that led toward a large cabin set away from the rest.
Halfway along the cabin’s walkway, she heard a sharp bark. Then Isaac’s dog was bounding down the path, cavorting about with more energy and joy than she’d ever seen him display in Grizzly Harbor.
Everyone knew Horatio. He was usually Isaac’s shadow in the village, waiting outside the Fairweather when it was warm and sitting next to his master’s barstool when it was cold. He accepted some patting and the occasional treat, but mostly he watched. And judged, Caradine had always thought. Harshly.
She had to fight to keep her expression blank when Isaac broke into a smile as Horatio reached him. He bent over and took the dog’s face in his hands, making low, crooning noises that spoke of love and companionship and a part of him that had nothing to do with sex or controlled violence or the battles they’d waged against each other for years.
It made her want to cry.
And not in the shower this time.
Caradine tried to tell herself she was tired, but she couldn’t, because she was fine. Disconcertingly
fine, in fact, when she really should have been riddled with anxiety and panic. Instead, she’d slept for most of the long flight here, because she felt, if not safe when Isaac was near—safer than she did at any other time.
Something she could seem to admit only to herself when she’d constructed an actual blanket fort, like a toddler, and then hid in it.
She’d had to bite his head off to regain her equilibrium, and her reward for that had been to watch his gray eyes get hard and dark. Congratulations, she’d snapped at herself. You’re the actual, literal worst.
Watching the way he openly, happily lavished affection on his dog made her hurt.
She was so sick of herself in that moment that she felt weak with it. And this close to doing something she would regret forever, like telling this man exactly what it did to her to watch him love on something. This tough, dangerous man, whose face lit up when he saw his dog.
While all she ever seemed to do was make him go grim.
Which is exactly what you should do, she rationalized. So he’ll wash his hands of you the way he should.
Isaac murmured something as he straightened, and Horatio sat down, then tilted his head and regarded Caradine with those odd eyes of his, one blue and one green. Isaac did much the same.
And she didn’t get to do what she wanted. Forgetting that only hurt more, in the long run. How many times did she need to learn that lesson?
She glared at him. “I’m allergic to dogs.”
“Then I guess you’ll sneeze a lot,” Isaac replied, and indicated with the jut of his chin that she should move in front of him and carry on down the walkway.
Like walking the plank, though at this point she would have preferred to fling herself into the icy cold water of the sound. It would feel like a vacation.
Instead she walked forward as commanded, because her other alternative was throwing a temper tantrum. And she had the very distinct impression that just because she couldn’t see anyone around this morning, that didn’t mean they weren’t all there. Watching Isaac escort her back to Alaska like she really was the person who’d blown up half a building in Grizzly Harbor.