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He took an audible breath, which from a man of his talents and skills was akin to watching him crumble. Bethan froze a little.

“I never expected to see you again,” he said, clearly surprising them both. “All things considered, I think I’m handling it pretty well.”

She couldn’t let herself care that this was a huge admission for him. She couldn’t let herselfcare. It never led anywhere good. “Do you.”

Her sarcasm hung there between them, like more fog.

“Bethan.” And the few feet between them seemed charged. Bright, when there was only fog and the crash of waves against the beach. “You know and I know what happened. That’s more than enough.”

“And here I was, hoping that I could write a book about it. Maybe make it into a Hollywood movie. Definitely do the talk show circuit.”

“If that means I have to change my behavior, fine. I’mhappy to do that.” He didn’t exactly glare. He didn’t have to glare to slice a person in half. “That’s why I’m out here on the beach, carrying two hundred pounds for no reason.”

She opened her mouth to snap at him, but paused. Considered.

Jonas was a master strategist. He could manipulate the sun into thinking it was the moon and then thank him for it.

This did not strike her as an effective strategy, unless...

“Is this...” She tilted her head a bit to one side. “Is this your form of an apology?”

That muscle in his cheek worked overtime.

“Okay. Wow. I think it is.” There was a fizzy thing inside her then. It seemed to dance around, taking up more space than it should. “I don’t really know where to put that.”

“I’m not apologizing. I have nothing to apologize for.”

Jonas eyed her sandbag, then picked his up, letting out a grunt at the effort to haul the thing up off the ground. Bethan made sure to pick up her own bag while making absolutely no sound, because he might or might not have considered this an apology, but there was always a pleasure to be found in petty victories. Another seemingly small truth that had served her well along her chosen path.

But standing around holding a heavy sandbag was even less fun than talking with him, so she turned and kept going toward the far end of the beach. Because she refused to cut her carry short because he was here, apparently dead set on annoying her even more than usual.

The next time she dropped her bag, because she literally couldn’t hold on to it another second more, they’d made it down to the end of the long beach and halfway back again. Jonas dropped his, too, and they both stood there, panting.

And Bethan honestly couldn’t tell if that racket inside her chest was from exertion or from him.

She definitely wasn’t pleased that after a year and a half of hard work to keep herself from noticing that Jonas wasa man, she seemed to have backslid. Right back into that traumatic space she didn’t like to think about, right after that mission where she’d first met him but before she’d decided on a path of action todo somethingabout those memories.

“This is great,” she managed to get out, still trying to catch her breath. “Is this what friends do?”

“Pick up your bag,” he growled.

And the last, long trudge was the worst yet, but she did it.

Because it was like most things. Or most things in her life, anyway. Sometimes Bethan ended up completing horrendous tasks not because she had such a stellar strength of will, much as she might like to think she did, but because she was entirely too competitive for her own good. And given that the people she was forever competing against were men of Jonas’s caliber, that meant that if she wanted to compete at all, she had to force herself into levels of intensity she would obviously prefer to avoid.

But that was also why she was in such excellent shape.

Still, when she got back inside the box of pain, she threw her sandbag back into the pile with far more force than necessary.

“Well,” she said, eyeing Jonas the way she might any enemy combatant, “this has been delightful. I feel super close. Let’s do it again.”

She headed for the door of the gym, ready to go back to her cabin and take a breather between her workout space and the briefing. Just a little moment to recalibrate.

“Bethan.”

She remembered, suddenly, how she’d reacted out there in that terrible desert to her name in his mouth. It was worse now. It felt more intimate, here in an empty gym with only the fog outside as a witness.

“I never thanked you,” he said, his voice low.