Delta Force Defender

by Megan Crane

  That sat there for a moment.

  “What happened that night?” Griffin Cisneros asked.

  She didn’t ask which night. She cleared her throat, though it didn’t make her throat any less dry. Then she told them all the story. How she’d been ignoring her father and knew there would be a reckoning. That she’d taken her time driving out to Quincy that night. That she’d been well aware that there would be a price to pay, and she’d been afraid she knew exactly what form this particular price would take.

  Caradine told them about parking down the block out of habit. About standing outside in the dark, gearing herself up to go in. How panicked she’d been that her father would take her degree away from her and keep her from graduating, not because he really cared one way or the other if she was educated but because she’d defied him.

  Then the explosion.

  “I didn’t know what it was at first,” she said. “It’s very disorienting.” Then she remembered who she was talking to. “But I imagine you all know that.”

  No one smiled, exactly. But the mood in the room lightened a little anyway. And this wasn’t the time to wonder what kind of person trained themselves to know how to react to explosions like that. Caradine had now been through two explosions, one significantly worse than the other, but both horrifying. She would be perfectly happy to never experience a firebomb or Molotov cocktail, or whatever other cutesy name people used to minimize the horror, ever again.

  But whatever they were called, they were business as usual for Alaska Force.

  She had to swallow past a sudden lump in her throat that she absolutely refused to name. Or analyze.

  “I’d been dreaming about a way out,” she told them, pretending she couldn’t hear the scratchiness in her own voice. “But there wasn’t one. My father viewed his children as possessions. Currency, even. He told my brothers to jump, and they asked, How high? He was marrying my sister off because the best way he knew to control someone was to make them part of the family, and he deeply distrusted the man he wanted her to marry. He was really good at playing the long game.”

  “What game was he playing with you?” Jonas asked.

  “It wouldn’t only have been that he kept me from graduating,” Caradine said. “There was no shortage of brutal, vicious men he could have handed me to, and he would have. And if he was really pissed, he would also have told them I needed a strong hand. Meaning he would turn a blind eye if I turned up bruised and battered.”

  Mariah hissed out a breath. “He really would have done that? Your own father?”

  Caradine held her gaze. “In a heartbeat.”

  “Where did you go?” Griffin asked. “You survived the explosion. Then what?”

  “You had five years between that night and when you came here,” Isaac added. “Is this a five-year cycle? Did you spend that whole time somewhere else?”

  It was always hard to look at him, particularly when she wasn’t doing her little act. Being nasty just because. Spiteful and prickly, even when she didn’t want to be either of those things. It was easier then, because she was constantly provoking a reaction from him. That was much better.

  Because now, all she was doing was looking at him. And beneath all the fighting they’d done in the past five years, there was just Isaac.

  The man who’d smiled at her when she’d walked into a strange bar, bought her a drink, and made her forget all of this. Why she’d come to Alaska in the first place. Why she should never, ever have let down her guard.

  That was the worst thing about Isaac. And the best. He made her forget. And once she forgot, she began to hope.

  Caradine had never been able to afford either.

  “I had to figure out how I was going to survive once I ran,” she said, to no one and everyone. She focused on Isaac because he was closest. And because he was Isaac. “But I had a few things going for me. My father had refused to pay for college, so I’d gotten myself a job. He took that as a personal affront, but I still did it. That meant I already knew that restaurants were a good way to make money and stay off the radar. It’s not hard to find a place that will pay under the table. But the first thing I had to do was get out of Boston.”

  “One of the reasons it’s assumed that you died in that fire is because there was no activity on any of the family’s credit cards or banks after that night,” Oz said then. Caradine thought, not for the first time, that he looked like no computer geek she’d ever known. It was disconcerting, even at a moment like this. “I would expect your father or your brothers to have access to all kinds of different unmarked accounts, and so on. But if what you’re saying is true, you were legitimately a kid working her way through college. Did you have a secret stash somewhere?”

  “I had nothing.” Caradine had to be careful here to tell her part and no more. “All I had was what was in my pockets. I left my car where it was. Then I walked away from the scene, took the T into downtown Boston, and bought a bus ticket to the farthest distance I could go without bankrupting myself. Because one thing I’ve learned from a thousand movies is that if you think people are looking for you, trying to hide in the same place never works. Sooner or later, someone will see you, no matter how unlikely. So I went to Ohio.”

  “Ohio?” Templeton laughed. “I didn’t see that coming.”

  “No one sees Ohio coming,” Caradine said dryly. “Mostly because if they have any sense, they’re leaving the state as quickly as possible.” She lifted a hand and rubbed at the tension in her neck, though it didn’t help. “Maybe I’m not being fair. I don’t know what I expected from Cleveland. I had enough money for a motel room. I dyed my hair and got a job bartending the next day. Then waited to see what would happen. I watched the news and saw that I was dead. And since I was supposedly dead, but not, I couldn’t assume anyone else in my family was dead, either. So I bought a car off one of the regulars for a couple hundred dollars, and as soon as I could, I moved on.”

  She could remember those strange weeks in Cleveland so vividly. They stayed relentlessly bright in her head when so much else since had blurred at the edges. Had she slept at all? She could remember doing nothing but watching the news round the clock, then working in the dive bar that had taken her, no questions asked. There was no part of her new, postdeath life that hadn’t felt precarious and terrible, and it had still been better than life in the Sheeran family.

  It had been sharp and cruel, but it was still freedom.

  And even running for her life was living it, which was more than would have been allowed her if she’d stayed trapped in her father’s clutches. Or if he really had died in that house, whoever rose to take his place.

  Isaac studied her, and she bit back the near-overwhelming urge to snap at him the way she normally did. To divert his attention, because if she didn’t, how long would it take him to realize that there was nothing underneath but the same sickness that ran through the rest of her family? Because what else could there be?

  “It must have been hard to go from being Mickey Sheeran’s daughter to living on tips and driving a two-hundred-dollar clunker,” he said.

  Caradine directed her attention toward her clasped hands and her knees, because that was less troubling than the way his gray gaze made her feel. “The first couple of years, I moved around a lot. The minute people started to greet me by name outside my job, I would go. After a while, I learned that it was easier to tell everyone that I was a recovering addict. Because that way when I disappeared, no one would look for me. Everyone thinks they know what happens to addicts, don’t they? They’re disposable. No one comes looking. It was easy enough to keep dyeing my hair, keep taking off in the middle of the night, and keep making money waiting tables, tending bar, whatever. The problem with moving around that much is that it provides a whole lot more opportunity to be recognized.”

  “Who did you think was chasing you?” Jonas asked.

  �
��Somebody blew up my parents’ house,” Caradine said coolly. “On purpose. I didn’t know if they knew whether or not I was in it at the time. And I also didn’t know how the bomb detonated.”

  “It was C-4 with a cell phone activation,” Templeton said, his voice a low rumble. “Someone called in the number and that was that.”

  “Yes,” Caradine said, “but who made the call? And from where? If they were outside the house, did they see me?” She blew out a ragged breath. “I had to operate from the assumption that they saw me survive, then walk away. And then, after five years of moving around the way I had been from the start, I thought that maybe it might be better to construct an entire alternate identity. I figured that if I found a remote place and settled there, it would be more difficult, even if I was recognized, for anyone to connect the new me with that college girl who was supposed to be dead.”

  She was glossing over some details there, but the end result had been the same. So she told herself it really wasn’t a lie. It was an omission. She was both breaking her promise and keeping it at the same time.

  That should have made her feel better, not worse.

  Especially because Isaac was looking at her as if he already knew what she wasn’t telling him. “How did you find Grizzly Harbor?”

  “I was looking at remote places. So obviously, I was looking at Alaska. I saw the ad for the Water’s Edge Café in an online magazine. I had some money stashed away, so it seemed like a good match. And, of course, I was under the impression that Grizzly Harbor was a sleepy, remote fishing village where nothing ever happened.”

  She found she couldn’t look away from Isaac then. No matter how much she wanted to, it was as if she were stuck.

  Maybe the thing she didn’t want to face was that she always had been.

  “It occurs to me after telling this whole story that I’d like to hire you after all,” she said, because that was probably the only way she could complicate this situation further. But as the words came out, seemingly of their own accord, she found they were true. “I’d really like to know how they found me.”

  “We’ll be more than happy to answer that for you,” Isaac said, mildly enough. Which was a clue, of course. It was always a clue. The milder his voice, the more dangerous he was. She braced herself. “But the first question I’m going to ask you as an Alaska Force client is who.”

  “That’s what I’m hiring you to find out, Gentry,” she said. Maybe with a little heat.

  “Not who’s after you.”

  The world narrowed down to his gorgeous face. The steady demand of his ruthless gray gaze. And how safe she always felt when she was near him. She knew better, and still, there was Isaac.

  And he wasn’t finished wrecking her.

  “Who did you make a promise to? You said you were breaking a promise by talking about what happened to you.” He was all steel then, head to toe. No give, and no matter that she couldn’t breathe. He didn’t soften at all. “Caradine, who else survived that bomb?”

  Twelve

  Isaac watched that question go through her like a body blow, and there was no part of him that liked delivering it.

  But he didn’t take it back. He didn’t make it easier for her. They were way past that.

  “I don’t think that’s relevant,” she managed to say, with a clear attempt to lift that belligerent chin of hers.

  “If you hire Alaska Force, the expectation is that we’ll decide what’s relevant, not you.”

  He threw that out there like it was another round in their endless punching match. But Caradine—he couldn’t think of her as Julia—was sitting there, her legs pulled up and her arms tight around them, and he had the strangest notion that this was the soft underbelly she’d been hiding all this time. Behind all the sniping. Behind every sharp word.

  Isaac wanted to tear apart the whole of Boston, and the world, to get her back to her usual cranky, smart-mouthed self. Even if the target of that mouth was him.

  Especially then.

  “I’m guessing it’s your sister,” Isaac continued in a low voice, sounding like who he was. The leader of the group who would solve her problems, as soon as she was honest about them. The way he sounded in every other meeting like this he’d ever held with a client. But who was he kidding? This wasn’t any other meeting or any other client. This was Caradine. “I’ve never heard a single thing about one of your brothers or either of your parents, from you or anyone else, that suggests they’d be worth protecting.”

  Her face didn’t crumple. Not exactly. He saw her lips tremble, slightly, before she flattened them into a line.

  “I made . . .” But her voice cracked. She looked down at her hands for a moment, then out toward the cove. And in all this time, and all the many ways she’d put up walls, pushed him away, outright tossed him aside, he had never seen her look as remote as she did now. As lost. “I made a promise. And until today, I’ve kept that promise.”

  Isaac was so used to pretending nothing had ever happened with Caradine or ever would. Or changing the subject when someone brought her up. He was so used to the secrets, the too-short nights, that look she gave him that dared him to do something about it. It wasn’t that he’d never dared. It was that he’d chosen to wait her out instead.

  But then he’d gotten that call and thought she was dead for twenty hideous minutes. Even if she’d sat here and admitted that she’d burned down her parents’ house with her family inside, he would still be relieved that she wasn’t dead, and he didn’t know where to put that. His career in the military had pretty much cured him of thinking in black-and-white terms, but Caradine felt far more complicated still.

  He was done waiting.

  Isaac crossed over and squatted down in front of her chair and then, because he was a go big or go home kind of a guy, he took her hands in his.

  Her blue gaze flew to his, startled. But she didn’t pull her hands away.

  “Let me keep your promise for you,” he said. “I promise you, I’ll protect it, and you, and whatever else needs protecting, as if it was my own.”

  He forgot that they weren’t alone. All he could see was the conflict on her face. She squeezed her eyes shut, and her fingers tightened on his. If she were anyone else, he would have expected her to cry.

  But she was still Caradine.

  She opened her eyes and they were clear. And she nodded once, hard. Then she pulled her hands from his and Isaac shifted back onto his heels but stayed where he was, there beside her chair.

  Caradine cleared her throat. “It was my sister, Lindsay, yes.”

  She outlined the differences between her sister and herself. While Caradine had been at college, Lindsay had been ransomed off to one of her father’s business associates.

  “He used to call Lindsay his princess. She was the youngest and she was very pretty, in that delicate, skinny, waifish sort of way he thought was the most feminine. Because she looked breakable. A certain kind of man likes that.” And it was the Caradine he knew best who looked around then, that cool indictment in her gaze moving from one man to the next. Including him. “They like to break their toys. The man my father wanted her to marry could barely contain his excitement at getting his hands on Mickey Sheeran’s princess. Still, Lindsay thought that was a better option. The other choice being defying my father. That always came at a price. Usually a very painful price.”

  “I take it you defied him, then.” Blue didn’t voice that as a question.

  “You’d probably consider it a weak little attempt at defiance,” Caradine replied. She made a face. “It’s hard to remember, now, what a commotion there was when he said I couldn’t go to college and I went anyway. I thought I was proving myself, but what I was actually doing was showing him that I was willing and able to go against his wishes. He killed men for that. He couldn’t let it stand from a girl. Whatever he had planned for me that night was goi
ng to be a lot worse than a few bruises or broken bones. Lindsay was in the house. She told me it was weird.”

  “I know that there are tough fathers out there,” Bethan said carefully. “My own wasn’t exactly a joy to grow up with. But it’s one thing to be hard-ass. And another to be . . .”

  “Sadistic?” Kate asked brightly. “I’m familiar with that version.”

  Caradine smirked. “That. And also a raging, homicidal narcissist.”

  “It’s like you’ve met my dad,” Kate murmured.

  “Lindsay was in the house that night?” Oz asked from his place at a desk in the corner, where he was dividing his attention between a laptop and a tablet.

  “Lindsay was inside when I got there,” Caradine said. “I texted her when I parked, and she came out to meet me. She warned me not to go inside.”

  Isaac watched the tension in the room shift, from whatever lingering suspicion of Caradine remained to a different sort of tightening altogether. The kind that usually cropped up when details came together to form bigger pictures. Everyone’s second-favorite part, right after a decisive win.

  “Now, why would she say that?” Templeton asked in a musing sort of way, though his gaze was hard.

  “Before your imaginations run wild,” Caradine said coolly, “the explosion knocked us both flat. Lindsay texted me from inside the house, then came outside, and was talking to me when it happened. My understanding of the particular ignition system on this bomb is that the lag time after making the call would be a second. Maybe two. Not enough time for Lindsay to sneak out of the house, then talk to me in the street, all without touching her phone.”

  For a moment, everyone processed that. Not only the information but the way Caradine had delivered it and what that meant.

  “You considered your sister a suspect?” Isaac asked.

  “Of course.” There was a bleakness in her gaze then. “We all come from the same blood. The same dirty gene pool. We’re all polluted by the same father. I knew that I’d dreamed about killing all of them. Why shouldn’t she?”