by Megan Crane
They made it down to the cabin at last. Isaac reached from behind her to open the door, but Caradine made a noise of . . . protest, maybe.
A last-ditch effort.
“I can’t decide what will be worse,” she said, delaying the moment when she would have to cross this last barrier. When she would have to be in his space. His home. Something she’d made no effort to do, ever. And would have deliberately avoided if she’d ever thought it was a possibility. “What am I about to walk into here? What does the private soul of Isaac Gentry look like? Frat boy central? Or a whole lot of redneck?”
“You can call it whatever you want,” Isaac replied, and she realized he was using that genial tone of his on her. A calm, pleasant lie. She hated it. “Just so long as you accept the fact that it’s home sweet home from now on. Until we find out who’s coming after you and make it stop. Okay?”
But that wasn’t really a question, and he didn’t wait for an answer. He threw the door open, and then his hand was on her back.
If she resisted at all, he would feel it. So she couldn’t let herself. Caradine strode inside, shocked to find that her pulse was flipping out and her head felt light. Almost the way it had when she’d been standing in that dark room in Maine, staring at the doorknob on that locked front door while her past tried to break in.
Though she wasn’t afraid now. There were no wooden boats and red canoes dancing before her eyes. There was only the looming horror of intimacy, which was worse. Caradine would have rather had to fight off more thugs with guns.
Isaac slammed the door behind her, and it felt like doom. It took every bit of self-control she had not to flinch as if she’d been electrocuted. Or as if she’d been tossed headlong into a prison cell.
She didn’t want to look around. She didn’t want to see his things. And she really didn’t know if it was because she expected she would think less of him once she knew how he lived, or if she didn’t want whatever extra information there was to be found about him here. The apartment she’d lived in on the other side of the island hadn’t borne any signs of anything but the life Caradine Scott was meant to be living. But this was Isaac’s actual home.
Was it that she didn’t want to look? Or that she wanted, desperately, to look?
She forced herself to gaze around a bit theatrically then. And to keep a scornful, very nearly disdainful, expression on her face while she did.
Like that could make her pulse settle down.
“This is very disappointing,” she said, finally. “I was led to expect a Batcave.”
“Captain America doesn’t have a Batcave,” Isaac said from behind her. “If you’re going to make comic book references, you should really get them right.”
“Who reads comic books?” Caradine retorted. She sniffed. “I’ve watched a few movies, like a normal person.”
Her neck itched, so she looked at him, and he was staring at her as if she’d kicked Horatio.
“You’re everything that’s wrong with the world,” he said. “Pick up a comic sometime. Maybe you’ll learn something.”
And she needed to stop, because she wasn’t here to banter with him. She certainly shouldn’t have found herself biting back a grin.
This wasn’t foreplay. She was fighting for her life.
And for his, too, though she doubted he would appreciate that if she told him.
He moved past her, and she let herself release a breath. The cabin was neither done up like a frat house nor a monument to his redneck roots, and she couldn’t decide if that disappointed her or not. The room she stood in was large and airy, with a high ceiling that suited a big, tall man like him. There was a roomy fireplace on one wall, windows that overlooked the cove, and comfortable, masculine furnishings. She’d seen the satellite hardware on the roof and wasn’t surprised that there was a study off the main room that looked to be entirely stocked with high-tech electronic equipment, monitors running and lights blinking even now. She could see the kitchen toward the back, through a wide rectangular opening.
Isaac walked across the main room and down a small hall, and she trailed after him, because it was that or stand in the front room staring at Horatio. Who was guarding the door. Literally guarding the door, like Cerberus, and she didn’t care to test him.
Caradine followed Isaac to his bedroom, but stopped in the doorway, trying her best to ignore the way her chest ached. At the sight of the place he slept.
If Isaac Gentry actually slept.
He threw the bags he carried onto a bench at the end of the big bed. The bed was made but looked rumpled, and she knew two things instantly. He was still military enough to get up and make his bed every morning, which shouldn’t have made her throat feel so tight. And the rumpled indentations on the dark quilt were Horatio’s.
When Isaac didn’t frown at those indentations or even seem to notice them, she understood in a flash that this man, this remarkably dangerous, lethal individual who as far as she could tell was afraid of nothing—including her—slept cuddled up with his dog.
Once again, there was no reason at all that should make her want to cry.
“I get it now,” she forced herself to say, in that edgy, insinuating tone of voice that was starting to make her skin feel too tight, like she was poisoning herself. “This is a sex thing. You’re pretending to save me, but actually, it’s really all about your penis.”
Isaac fixed her with that steady gray gaze that made her feel about half an inch tall.
And deeply, horribly ashamed of herself.
“You can sleep where you want,” he said, with a quiet dignity that made her stomach knot up into something gnarled and hopelessly tangled. “You can lock yourself in the bathroom for all I care. But you’re staying in this cabin.”
“Kinky,” she said, because she couldn’t stop. Because she didn’t know what would become of her if she stopped. “Everybody loves a captivity narrative.”
He stalked toward her, and she wanted to run. But she didn’t, of course, no matter what her pulse was doing. And then he was on her, crowding her where she stood in the doorway and sliding a hand around to grip her by the nape of her neck.
She was stuck between a rock and a hard place, as always with him, because if she wrenched herself away, that would tell him things she really didn’t want to tell him. And if she stayed still, she had to suffer his touch.
Which wasn’t suffering at all.
That was the problem.
“But to clarify,” he said, his voice a rough silk, and his eyes bright like silver, “you know where you’re going to sleep. Because you can pretend all you want, but we both know what really happens when we’re naked together. It isn’t me begging you, Caradine. It never has been.”
She thought he would kiss her again. She was ablaze with heat and that terrible longing, and she craved the taste of him. Better still, the way he claimed her so easily and made her forget she could never, ever be the woman she was pretending to be, who had nothing weightier on her mind than the ingredients for the next day’s meals. . . .
But all he did was brush his thumb over her lips.
A different, more dangerous claiming.
Then he walked past her and out into the hall. And it took her a dizzy sort of moment to realize that he was headed for his own front door.
“You’re not really leaving me here, are you?” she asked, and actually laughed, because she was so off-balance.
Her lips were tingling, and she wanted to press her fingers against them to make it stop. Or to better drown in the sensation, maybe.
But then he looked over his shoulder, and she knew that wasn’t all she wanted.
She wanted him. She had always wanted him.
And remembering the numerous occasions that she’d been naked and at his mercy made everything in her heat up, then run through her veins like a sluggish gold.
; “Miss me already?” he asked, that same dangerous light in his eyes.
Pull yourself together, she ordered herself sternly.
“Aren’t you afraid I’m going to go through all your stuff?” she asked, in a decent approximation of her usual brash tone. “Learn all your secrets and use them against you?”
Isaac turned all the way around, then regarded her for much too long. Caradine made herself stand straight. As if she were unbothered. She told herself she absolutely did not feel that swooping, fluttery sensation in her belly. Or that greedy ache between her legs.
“You’re welcome to test the security measures in place in my office,” he said, almost as if he were encouraging her to try. “And you can dig around all you want. I don’t have secrets.”
“Everyone has secrets.”
“Everyone has stories that they might choose to tell, or not,” he corrected her, a different, harder sort of light in his eyes. “But secrets are a whole different ballgame. Secrets make you sick, baby. They make you believe that you’re all alone when you’re not.”
He needed to stop calling her that.
“That sounds very poignant, Isaac,” she threw back at him. “Other people are just private.”
He looked at her as if she disappointed him, and that was much worse than baby. She would never understand how she kept from crumpling into a sobbing mess right there on his thick rug.
Except that, as usual, she couldn’t.
“There’s food in the kitchen,” he said instead. “Help yourself to whatever you want. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
She would not break. She would not sob. She would not lose herself here, in his home, where there were pictures in frames on the mantel that she didn’t want in her head. “I don’t know that I’ll be here when you get back.”
“What are you going to do?” And if she wasn’t mistaken, the unflappable, quietly dignified leader of Alaska Force was taunting her. “You think you’re going to swim somewhere? Have fun with that. The water might be above fifty degrees. Or, I know, you’re going to hike Hard Ass Pass. It’s all fun and games until you get to the part where the road’s washed out and you might fall to your death, if the bears don’t get you first. You can wander around the woods if you like, but it’s steep and wet and rocky out there, and there’s no other trail back to Grizzly Harbor. Also, again, bears. The only thing you’re going to do is exhaust yourself, get eaten, or die. Be my guest.”
“Your hospitality is overwhelming.”
Isaac laughed at her, and then he walked out with Horatio at his side, and none of this was satisfying. She was left alone in this cabin that was entirely too comfortable and nice, and gave her nothing to use to ward him off. Worse, the minute the door closed behind him, his absence was like another living force.
Caradine didn’t know what she was supposed to do.
She felt scraped out. Raw and hollow and wrecked.
It had been hard enough to leave Grizzly Harbor the first time, when she’d spent years preparing for that moment. It had been hard enough to leave him, she corrected herself.
She didn’t know how she was going to do it again, and she knew she had to. It had been bad enough when he’d simply been a mistake she kept making.
Then he’d come after her.
She was hugging herself tight before she knew it. Still standing there, staring at the door, feeling broken in half in a way she would have vehemently denied if anyone had been there to see it.
Caradine forced herself to look away from the stupid door. She stared at her own feet, blinking furiously until her eyes were clear. She made herself breathe. She counted in, then out. Over and over again, until her pulse slowed down a little. Until she felt a little more like herself.
A little less brokenhearted.
“It’s exhaustion,” she told herself stoutly, her voice loud in the airy, empty room. “You’re exhausted, that’s all. Who knows what would have happened if you’d had to handle that man alone?”
She could still see that red, bulging neck of his. She could still hear his voice. That accent that brought back the worst of her memories.
She wheeled around and made her way to the back of the cabin, where his kitchen did not look as if it was the sort of efficiency bachelor setup in which he maybe made the odd cup of noodles. Evidence suggested that Isaac knew how to cook.
More intimate information about the man that she did not require.
She opened his refrigerator and found it stocked with staples. Again, in a manner that suggested that he actually prepared food, and ate it, with some degree of competence.
She helped herself to a banana, making herself eat it because she needed energy. And wondered who in Fool’s Cove was responsible for restocking people’s cabins while they were off having Alaska Force adventures, since as far as she knew they had no staff. She entertained herself imagining the various growly commandos on housekeeper duty. And when she was done, she threw the peel away and headed for the door.
Because everybody knew that Fool’s Cove was inaccessible. Isaac had helpfully outlined all the reasons why. Still, everybody knowing something didn’t make it true. Caradine’s entire life was a monument to defying the accepted wisdom.
No point stopping now.
She threw open the door to the cabin, ready to go out and see for herself what inaccessible meant.
But there were people clustered on the wooden walkway, right there on the other side of the door. She stepped back, her hands up instantly as she went on the defensive, ready to fight—
Even as she shifted her weight to block whatever was coming her way, she stopped herself. She had a split second of recognition, and then Everly Campbell was hurtling herself through the doorway.
At Caradine.
Not to harm her, but to hug her.
Which was much, much worse.
Nine
“I can’t believe you’re here!” Everly was saying excitedly, holding Caradine.
Holding her. Tightly. She was pressed against her.
And Everly was still talking. “Blue kept telling me that Isaac found you, that you were fine, but I didn’t believe it until now. I saw the restaurant! I was sure you were charred to a crisp somewhere!”
“Everly.” Caradine was surprised she didn’t actually scream the way she wanted to. The way she was inside. “For God’s sake. Why are you hugging me?”
But Everly didn’t respond. And the hug went on and on.
And that empty thing inside Caradine yawned open again, wider and deeper than before.
Because once upon a time, Caradine had been a different person. And that girl might have had few friends, but she’d been wildly affectionate with them. She hadn’t needed all this armor.
Now she thought her armor might choke her.
Caradine looked past Everly’s red hair and endless embrace to the other two women in Isaac’s doorway. “Oh my God. Please don’t tell me this is some horrible girlfriend thing. I don’t even like you people.”
“Buckle up, sugar,” drawled Mariah McKenna, cool and blond and Southern. “It’s about to get obnoxiously feminine up in here.”
“She does, too, like us,” Everly said.
Mariah nudged Everly out of the way. And then, to Caradine’s enduring horror, flung her arms around Caradine, too. And then, worse, rocked her a little bit from side to side.
While hugging her.
“You’re doing that to be mean,” she complained.
Mariah laughed. “And because it’s fun.”
Approximately seventeen ice ages later, when Caradine had died inside so many times she’d come back, haunted herself, and died again while still being hugged against her will, Mariah finally released her.
“I’m not going to hug you,” Trooper Kate Holiday announced, standing behind Mariah. She looked faintly appall
ed at the very notion, which made Caradine like her more than she wanted to, given that Kate was a law enforcement officer and Caradine preferred to avoid the police in all their various forms. “Though it is nice to see you survived a Molotov cocktail in one piece.”
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Caradine protested.
But then she was being borne backward on a tide of enthusiasm. None of it hers.
And the next thing she knew, she was sitting on one of Isaac’s couches, glaring balefully at this pack of women, who were acting like she was one of them.
“Welcome home,” Kate said with a smirk, as if she could read Caradine’s mind.
“I knew you were going to come back,” Everly said staunchly.
Caradine glowered at her. “You literally just said you thought I was dead.”
Everly waved a hand. “At first, sure. Don’t do that again.”
“I didn’t blow up my own café.”
“No,” Everly said, her gaze uncomfortably direct, “but you did go on the run without telling anyone you were okay.” She smiled faintly. “I can actually tell you from personal experience that people who care about you don’t love it when you do something like that.”
“I can cosign that,” Mariah said.
“When I went on the run, I was trying to get away from people who should have cared about me but didn’t,” Kate said in her mild cop’s way. “My take on this involves less hugging.”
“I don’t want to be in this club,” Caradine said, making a face. “And I didn’t want to be found, either. I was running to get away from people, not find them.”
“It sure is a hardship when you can’t throw people out of your restaurant, isn’t it?” Mariah asked, laughing. “You have to sit and talk to them.”
Caradine didn’t actually say that they couldn’t make her talk. Not out loud. But she was pretty sure her body language conveyed the same message.
“I have a very important question to ask you, Caradine,” Everly said after a moment. “Blue and I are getting married this summer, as I’m sure you know.”