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“Honey.” He drew her close. “You looked so happy a couple of minutes ago…”

She laughed. Laughing was often very close to crying. If she were careful, she’d be able to substitute the one for the other.

“It’s the onion. I always have trouble slicing onions.”

“They make you cry?”

She nodded.

“These sweet ones aren’t supposed to do that. Tell you what. I’ll do the onion. You cut up the tomatoes. Deal?”

“Deal,” she said, and she gave him a quick kiss and turned away.

• • •

They ate on the deck, by candlelight, and talked about lots of things.

How delighted he’d been to make the SEALs, and how amazed and thrilled he’d been when he was selected for STUD.

How she’d loved growing up in the Sicilian hills, and what a shock it had been to discover she had half-brothers and half-sisters in America.

“A painful shock at first,” she said, “but then, as I got to know them, I came to love them all. I know you—” She caught herself in mid-sentence. I know you’ll come to love them too, she’d almost said, but wasn’t that foolish? He’d spent time with them when Alessandra was kidnapped and again at Alessandra and Tanner’s wedding, but there was no reason he’d ever see her family again. “I know you liked them when you met them.”

He nodded. “But your father wasn’t there.”

“The general.” Bianca stabbed a piece of tomato with her fork. “No,” she said quietly. “He’s pretty much been, you know, banished from our lives.” She looked up. “I’d probably be accused of treason by the rest of my family if I ever admitted that sometimes I think maybe he’s been punished enough. I mean, he did what he had to do.”

“We all do what we have to do,” Chay said. “The thing is, sometimes we’re not sure exactly what that is.”

She nodded. “Yes. Exactly.” She smiled. “In fact, spoken like a true shrink.”

They both laughed. She reached for his open bottle of ale. Surprisingly enough, it had a taste she thought she might just come to like.

“Tell me more about you,” she said. “About what you were like growing up.”

“What I was like,” he said, with a quick smile, “was hell on wheels. I lived only for trouble. Riding horses. Hunting. Fishing.”

“Hunting?”

“Yeah. For meat. I get how some people feel about hunting—”

“No. I think it’s different if it’s for food.”

“Well, that’s what it was.” Chay took the bottle of ale from her and tipped it to his lips. “In fact, Tanner and I had this thing we did whenever we came across trophy hunters.”

“What?”

“We’d send them in the wrong direction. Or, if we knew there were animals they’d want in the area, we’d scare the animals away.” He laughed. “One time, there was this big old male grizzly. We sent him running, except he apparently stopped and ask

ed himself how come he was running when he outweighed us by a thousand pounds, so he stopped on a dime, turned around and took off after us.”

“Oh my!” Bianca put her hand to her heart. “But you got away!”

“Did you ever see that old movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? That scene where they leap off a cliff into a river?” Chay grinned. “That’s exactly what we did.”

“You could have been hurt. Or you could have died!”

His expression softened. “And what a waste that would have been,” he said, “because then I’d never have found you.”