by Megan Crane
“I don’t know,” Caradine said desperately. “I don’t know anything about anyone. Deliberately.”
That wasn’t true. Everly treated her like a friend, and sometimes Caradine forgot to police her boundaries the way she should have. This was her own fault.
Everly only rolled her eyes, because she’d appeared to find Caradine entertaining from their first meeting—no matter how rude Caradine was. It made Caradine like her, when she shouldn’t have allowed herself to like anyone.
“We’re doing it here.” Everly sighed. “I mean, not here, obviously. In Grizzly Harbor. And you make the best food.”
“I don’t see how those two things are related,” Caradine muttered.
“We want you to do it,” Everly said, with exaggerated patience. “If you can stop acting like the Wicked Witch of the West for three seconds.”
“Do it?” Caradine echoed, as if she had no idea what Everly meant.
Mariah laughed. Kate looked amused.
“The food, Caradine,” Everly said. With less exaggeration and a whole lot less patience. “Blue and I want you to cook the food for our wedding. Whatever you want, as usual. That’s part of the draw.”
Caradine opened her mouth to say something suitably cranky and was horrified to find that her throat was tight. She had the terrible suspicion that if she tried to form words, she would sound squeaky and thick, and everyone in this room would know that she was capable of crying, after all.
Or worse, that she cared.
She waited a beat. She cleared her throat.
She firmly ignored that horrible, aching thing inside of her that wished she really were Caradine Scott. A curmudgeonly café owner but, deep down, the friend these women seemed to think she was.
When she knew better. And if she’d been tempted to forget, the way she had been these past five years, the past week was an excellent reminder of reality.
She stared at Everly, stone-faced. “I would rather die.”
But that only made Everly laugh. “Of course you would. I’ll take that as a yes.”
And then they were all just . . . sitting there in Isaac’s cabin. Staring at one another while in the other room, his five thousand computers whirred and chirped.
“Are we allowed to talk about you and Isaac now?” Mariah asked after that dragged on awhile. “Since we’re sitting here in his cabin. And not in one of the guest cabins.”
Caradine eyed her, always elegant, though the self-defense course they’d taken together had showed her exactly how much steel lurked in this particular magnolia. “There is no me and Isaac.”
“That sounds like a firm no on the talking about it,” Kate said, with a smirk.
Mariah shifted her deceptively mild gaze to Kate. “What about you and Templeton, then?”
“I’m here in Fool’s Cove in an official capacity,” Kate said loftily. “Templeton is kind enough to play host. We’re not shacked up in a house together like you and Griffin.”
“Funny,” Everly murmured. “I thought Blue told me you two had an apartment up in Anchorage?”
Caradine sat there, feeling like a fraud and a kind of ghost, as they all bickered good-naturedly amongst themselves.
About this life she’d already given up on.
This life she would have said, and had said—loudly—she didn’t want.
But she couldn’t seem to hold on to that quite as firmly as she should have. It was too easy to sit on Isaac’s couch, surrounded by the scent of woodsmoke and leather, with a gorgeous Alaskan cove outside the windows and Isaac’s bed in the other room. And these women she liked against her will, who had made her one of them, despite her best efforts.
Caradine had made a promise. But she still found herself slipping into what-ifs.
You know better than that, she told herself sternly. You know where that leads.
“You look like you’re about to crawl out of your own skin,” Mariah drawled. Then grinned. “Do y’all need another hug?”
“I would rather punch myself repeatedly in the face.” Caradine couldn’t seem to keep control of all the different aches and agonies inside of her any longer. They seemed to swell and hum, right there beneath her skin. She needed to sleep. She needed to run. She needed to get back in control of something or she was going to explode. “And I appreciate this . . . thing you’re doing, but we can stop now.”
“Do you mean caring about you?” Everly asked, and smiled innocently when Caradine glared at her. “That thing?”
“I’m not going to stay here,” Caradine tossed out then, like a bomb. And she didn’t scowl or stomp off, or any of the other things she wanted to do. She looked at each one of them in turn, though it was harder with Kate. Because she was too much a trooper. God only knew what she could see. “I enjoyed my time in Grizzly Harbor, but it’s over now.”
If she expected that to cause a commotion, she was in for disappointment, because none of the other women really reacted to that at all.
“You’re here now,” Mariah pointed out after a moment. Gently.
Caradine sighed. “Isaac has a hero complex. It’s cute. But it’s not reality.”
“What exactly is your reality?” Kate asked, and again, there was no pretending she wasn’t an Alaska State Trooper, used to interrogating suspects and talking down criminals in turn.
Caradine got the distinct sensation that Trooper Holiday knew more about her than she should. Or knew how little there was to know about Caradine Scott, anyway, which amounted to the same thing.
“People come to Alaska for all kinds of reasons,” Caradine said, keeping her voice as even as she could. “For me it was an extended vacation. But all vacations must end.”
The three women on Isaac’s leather couches exchanged glances with one another.
“Where will you go?” Mariah asked.
“I don’t know,” Caradine said, trying to imagine what the character of Caradine Scott would say in a situation like this. “I don’t like to be tied down.”
“Right.” Everly nodded sagely. “That’s why you moved here in the first place, instead of living off-grid in the woods. And why you opened a restaurant in the center of town and made yourself a fixture in the community.”
“Live and learn,” Caradine said, and almost smiled, but she figured that would be a bridge too far. “I won’t be doing that again.”
Oddly enough, that was the most honest thing she’d said in ages.
Still, when a sharp knock came at the front door, she was pretty sure it was divine intervention.
Caradine shot to her feet and across the room, delighted to have a reason to stop . . . whatever this was.
When she opened Isaac’s front door, Bethan Wilcox stood there. Her hair was pulled back into a neat bun at the nape of her neck. And she wore the same sleek, tactical attire that all the rest of Alaska Force wore, as if she woke up every morning ready to leap out of planes, scale buildings, save the world, and battle off scores of villains with her bare hands. Which, as the only female member of Alaska Force, she probably did.
Bethan took in the scene in Isaac’s living room, a cool, swift assessment. Then her gaze rested on Caradine.
“You’re wanted up in the lodge,” she said.
“For what?”
Bethan only gazed back at her.
“Fine,” Caradine muttered, as if she were disgruntled.
When the truth was, she couldn’t wait to leave.
“I had no idea you were so obedient,” Everly said from behind her.
“That’s me,” Caradine said. “I live to obey.”
And then she gleefully followed Bethan, letting the other women stay and do whatever they wanted to do in Isaac’s cabin. Talk about their lives and their relationships. Hug more. All that stuff she hated.
All the stuff you tell yourself you hate, a voi
ce in her contradicted. When really, you wish you could sink into this life and make it yours for real.
The what-ifs came for her hard. What if she stopped playing games with Isaac? What if she lived in that cabin and those were her friends and she didn’t have to disappear? What if she could stay Caradine Scott forever?
But she couldn’t break her promise. She wouldn’t.
And even if she’d wanted to, it was too late now. It was only a matter of time before the man who’d tracked her down in Camden passed the information on.
It had all been borrowed time. Every second of the past five years.
“Is something the matter?” Bethan asked.
Caradine shot her a look, surprised that a member of the self-consciously stoic Alaska Force squad would bother to inquire about anyone’s emotional well-being.
Bethan smiled slightly. “You made a strange noise.”
“I stubbed my toe,” Caradine said blandly.
That Bethan was aware she was lying was obvious. But all the other woman did was keep on smiling slightly as she led Caradine down the walkway and toward the main lodge. And everywhere she looked, all Caradine could see was Isaac. His imprint on the land here, the sprawling complex he’d made his own. All of the buildings here were beautifully maintained, which annoyed her. This was coastal Alaska, where the salt got into everything—peeling paint, warping wood, and mildewing everything.
But not here.
Any fantasy she’d had that Alaska Force was nothing more than a bunch of overgrown frat boys running around performing crazy high jinks to remind them of their glory days—something she’d said to Isaac’s face more than once—disappeared when Bethan ushered her into the main room of the lodge. It wasn’t quite a hotel lobby, though it had that feel. It also felt rustic and wholly Alaskan, but upscale enough that Isaac’s more well-heeled clients would feel right at home.
Here again were the hints of state-of-the-art technology in and among the comfortable couches, polished wood floors, and the huge stone fireplace.
And the collection of grim-faced men who waited for her were definitely not frat boys. They were terrifying. Her stomach twisted and her heart kicked at her ribs, because this was clearly not a friendly meeting.
She knew everyone in the room. She’d served them all food, at one point or another, and could have reeled off a list of their dining preferences—whether or not she’d ever honored them. They usually greeted her with whatever their version of a grin was.
But none of them looked happy to see her today. Some looked suspicious. Others looked as if they were trying to take her apart with their gaze.
And over by the giant fireplace, looking scruffy, rumpled, and furious, was Isaac.
His gaze like gunmetal.
She thought she might choke, but she couldn’t. As usual, she had to brazen her way on through.
“This looks like a business meeting,” she said mildly, gazing around from one set, hard face to another. “Which means I shouldn’t be here, because I didn’t hire Alaska Force. I feel like I keep saying that.”
“Why don’t you take a seat?” Isaac suggested in that bossy way of his that was actually a direct order. He gestured to a chair that wasn’t exactly set in the middle of the room, as if prepared for an interrogation—but it was close enough. “You can sit down and tell us your story.”
That hard gray gaze slammed into hers from all the way across the lodge. Intense. Demanding.
It made her think of that bullet she’d shot at him. The way it had punched into the wall after the sting in her wrist that had reverberated all the way up her arm. And how long it had taken her to piece together what he’d done.
How easily he’d disarmed her.
A foreboding washed over her, bright like heat. Like a touch.
But Isaac didn’t waver.
“You can start by telling us about your family,” he said quietly. Too quietly. “Julia.”
Ten
He thought she might try to bolt.
She didn’t move, standing in her usual crossed-arm stance like she was prepared to fight, if necessary. But her gaze moved from his, coolly assessing the exits. And all the Alaska Force members she must have known would stop her. Easily.
When the door opened again and more people walked in—Everly, Mariah, and Kate—he thought he saw a flicker of something cross her face. But she didn’t indulge it. She looked at the women she liked to swear up and down weren’t her friends, and then looked back at Isaac.
Another time he would have smiled and told Kate she could stay in her professional capacity but asked the other two to go while they discussed Alaska Force business. But it wasn’t Alaska Force business. It was Caradine business, and he knew no one would budge.
So he waited while they found seats, Everly communicating silently with Blue as she sat near him, Mariah smiling enigmatically and looking only at Caradine. Kate took a place near the main entrance, near Bethan.
But Caradine stood still. There in the center of the biggest room in the lodge with her head high, looking straight ahead. Straight at him.
She looked like the loneliest, most solitary woman in the world—but Isaac assured himself he was much too pissed to let that get to him.
“I haven’t heard that name in a long time,” she said finally. “I’d rather not hear it now, if I’m honest.”
It was still her voice. A little raspy with an undercurrent of something he wanted to call fear, but likely wasn’t, but otherwise Caradine all the way.
“Julia Colleen Sheeran,” Isaac said. He didn’t have to look at the files Oz had prepared. It was all burned into his brain. “Born outside of Boston thirty-two years ago in Massachusetts General. Grew up in Quincy. Went to Boston University, but never graduated.”
“I’m especially pleased that I get to take this trip down memory lane in a crowd,” Caradine said in that cool way of hers that he knew too well. It matched that murderous gleam in her eyes. “You know how much I love sharing. Particularly personal details.”
Everly muttered something, but Isaac didn’t ask her to repeat herself when it looked like Blue was handling it. It didn’t matter anyway. Nothing mattered but the contents of that file—and whatever faint hope he might have had that Oz was wrong for once was gone. Because, clearly, this was her.
She was Julia Sheeran.
He finally knew everything about her, and it didn’t make a single thing better. Not one thing.
It was that damned optimism, taking his knees out from under him. Making him imagine there were such things as happy endings. A person didn’t disappear under a fake name without a reason. And they certainly didn’t cling to the fake part when reality came crashing in. Or go on the run. Or do any of the other things Caradine had spent the last week doing.
Not Caradine. Julia.
“As interrogations go,” she said now, glancing around the room and then shifting that narrow blue gaze back to him, “I have to tell you, this is a little bit lame. I don’t like being stared at, sure, but it’s not going to make me cry and tell you all my secrets.”
“I don’t need you to tell me your secrets.” Isaac stared back at her, hoping he looked impassive. “I know them all now.”
“Then I see even less reason for me to take part in this performance.”
“You’re Julia Sheeran,” Isaac said again, as if saying it repeatedly could make her Julia to him.
He already regretted how he’d set this up, because now he wished he’d handled this privately. How many times was he going to learn the same lesson? When it came to this woman he wasn’t Isaac Gentry, owner and cofounder of Alaska Force, a man with all kinds of medals and commendations to his name, trained in the battlefields of too many wars to count and consistently approached by the government to give his country a few more years. He was just a guy.
“Not for a while no
w,” Caradine said, as if this were a game. “I have the ID to prove it.”
His jaw felt like stone. “You’re the oldest daughter of Mickey Sheeran, internationally renowned scumbag, arrested but never convicted of crimes ranging from gunrunning to murder.”
“He wasn’t the greatest father in the world, either. Shocker.”
“But the funny thing is that you’re both supposed to be dead.” Isaac’s voice matched his jaw. Or maybe he’d simply turned to stone. “Blown up ten years ago, in that house in Quincy with the rest of the Sheeran family, presumably by one of Mickey’s enemies. And he had so many, I wouldn’t know how to begin counting them.”
“Before you say something flippant about Mickey Sheeran’s enemies,” Templeton said, his voice unusually grave, “you should know that most of the people in this room have put their lives on the line to clean up messes Mickey Sheeran caused. Indirectly or not.”
“Your father is in prison,” Caradine replied, moving her glare to Templeton. She glanced at Kate by the door. “So is Kate’s. Are we blaming ourselves for our fathers’ actions now? When did that change?”
“Ouch,” Blue muttered, though Everly glared from beside him. At him.
But Isaac’s attention was on Caradine.
“Are you enjoying this attempt at a public shaming, Isaac?” she asked. “I am. If nothing else, it tells me exactly who you are.”
“You know exactly who I am. You always have. I’ve never lied to you or anyone else. I’ve never pretended to be someone I’m not.”
“You do pretend to be a good man, though,” she drawled, malice in every syllable though her voice was light. “Can’t get past that one.”
There was a kind of indrawn breath that shuddered throughout the room, and part of Isaac was almost amused, really. Everyone knew Caradine had a mouth on her. But it was almost entertaining for the rest of these people he called his friends and brothers to see the kind of wallop she packed into every swing she took.
Almost being the operative word.