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“We can always come up with different strategies if thisis a no-go for you,” Isaac said, still studying her a little too closely. Looking for weaknesses, as always.

There was no reason Jonas should hate that.

“Not at all.” Bethan sounded the way she always did, Jonas thought. Steady, sure of herself, and committed. It had never occurred to him before that it was as much a mask as anything else. “I’m trying to adjust my thinking on this, from it being the one event I most wanted to avoid this year to something that will be significantly more enjoyable if I have a job to do. Other than, you know.” She looked around the room and smirked. “My primary job, which is maid of honor.”

“You were going to not attend your sister’s wedding, where you’re the maid of honor?” Templeton asked. “That’s cold-blooded.”

He sounded impressed.

Beth was gazing back at Isaac. Serenely. “The issues we have to consider are that my parents’ house has excellent security that will no doubt be on high alert. My sister’s fiancé’s family isn’t military, but they are wealthy. Between the two of them, there’s no way they’re not going to have the place locked down. And that’s not even getting into which guests will come with Secret Service details.”

“We’ve handled a lot worse,” Griffin protested.

“I have no doubt that we can handle it,” Bethan agreed. “But if we go ahead and handle it our way, there’s no need to go to the front door. If we want to go through the front door, we need to come up with a softer, gentler footprint than usual.”

Oz pulled up pictures of the kind of house that as a kid Jonas had assumed was simply a made-up Hollywood thing. A gorgeous, sprawling, gleaming white affair, with a tiled red roof that screamed Southern California. So many graceful arches and different wings that he found it hard to imagine that anyone had been a kid there. It sat at the top of a hill, surrounded on all sides by rolling fields,cypress trees, and vineyards. And in the distance, the Pacific Ocean.

Paradise, in other words. He didn’t know why that bothered him. Why it mattered to him one way or the other how Bethan had grown up.

As if it mattered at all what different worlds they came from.

“Home sweet home,” Bethan said, irony in her voice. She crossed her arms over her chest and looked like she was perfectly at her ease. But he remembered that raw expression on her face earlier. And he could see the difference. Maybe he’d always seen the difference. Maybe that was the trouble. “There will be too many guests for all of them to stay on the property, but if I had to guess, I would suspect that the highest-profile guests will probably take over that far left wing and the guesthouses. If you’re looking for all five to be in the same place while not in the middle of the wedding ceremony, that’s probably where they’ll be.”

“Do you rate a guesthouse?” Jonas heard himself ask.

When she looked at him, there was no trace of the woman he’d seen on the beach. She was pure soldier, completely contained, and it was his problem that he liked both versions of her, whether or not he wanted to admit it.

“I doubt very much that the black sheep of the family is considered high-profile enough to rate the stellar guest accommodations,” she said.

“You’re the black sheep of your family?” Isaac asked, with a laugh. “How is that possible?”

“My father’s an air force man,” Bethan said with a grin. “He would forgive me anything... except the army.”

The briefing quickly devolved into the usual ribbing about which branch of the military was the best—a pointless conversation as far as Jonas was concerned, because it was obviously the navy—and when it died down, Bethan was grinning.

Jonas was not.

“This is the most excited I’ve been about my sister’s wedding since I got the invitation,” she said. “Viewing the whole thing as a tactical endeavor can only make it more enjoyable. All I need—”

“Is a date,” Jonas said, his voice cutting through the room. And he didn’t falter when every eye in the place turned to him. He was looking at Bethan instead. “No problem. I volunteer.”

Five

Hours after the briefing had finally ended, Bethan still hadn’t managed to get herself back under control.

She was aware that they’d sat around hashing out more things about the scientist, his sister, and the confluence of jackholes that would be at her sister’s wedding, but she was unable to remember a single word of it. Much less the other scenarios and missions they’d run through afterward, one after the next, making sure that the plan they had in place—the one where she was going to basically go deep cover as herself in her family’s home—was the best.

Bethan was...

Well.Astonisheddidn’t begin to cover it.

She was perilously close to emotional, a state she avoided as if her life depended on it—because it often did. Men spent a lot of time substituting anger for fear. Bethan had learned a long time ago to do the same, because the alternative was to feel what she actually felt and cry, and she allowedthatabout once a year, and in private.

Though sometimes it happened more than once a year,like when she’d finally found herself alone in a hospital in Germany after the transport that had lifted her and Jonas out of that terrifying hellscape that should have killed them both. She’d crumpled, right there against the nearest wall, sinking down into a ball of anguish. Her clothes covered in stains she didn’t want to identify. Her hands smelling like him.

Sometimes she dreamed about all that and woke up with her eyes wet, but she told herself it was nothing more than a nightmare. Par for the course for anyone who’d spent any real time in the field.

Today she did not think she was at any risk of crying over Jonas Crow.