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He’d chosen a job—a life, a calling—where it never mattered what he felt, only what he did.

God willing, it never would.

Jonas sacked up, shoved his unpleasant memories aside, and walked back in to carry out his mission.

The way he always did.

***

The next morning, he wasn’t at all surprised when Bethan came out of the bedroom in their suite on the dot of 0500 hours.

“Was the couch comfortable?” she asked in that even, impenetrable way of hers. Was she being sardonic? Was it a real question? It was impossible to tell.

“I slept on the floor,” Jonas told her, because if it was a competition about who was more unreadable, he knew he would win. “Like a baby.”

Her lips twitched, and he shouldn’t have liked that. But there were so many things he shouldn’t like. Including his own attempts to be entertaining when that was definitely not in his wheelhouse.

But then he stopped thinking about anything else because he finally noticed what she was wearing.

In some distant, rational part of his brain, he recognized that there was nothing particularly noteworthy about a pair of spandex running shorts and a tank top.This is unremarkable running gear, that distant, rational voice inside him informed him.

But this was Bethan. Whom he had never, ever seen out of uniform or tactical gear when she was engaging in physical activity.

And whom he had certainly never seen informfitting spandex, God help him.

Jonas had prided himself for years on his ability to turn off all remnants of the kinds of things that made most people falter. But here, now, he was forced to acknowledge that despite all the work he’d put into locking himself down and turning into ice, he was only a man, after all.

Just a man looking at a woman.

That simple. That prosaic.

That much of a freaking problem.

Bethan didn’t quite smirk at him. Not quite.

“I’m going to get some miles in,” she told him as if she didn’t notice the way he was looking at her, when the gleam in her cool green eyes told him she most certainly did. “Are you interested?Boyfriend?”

And that was how Jonas found himself wrestlingphysical reactions he hadn’t allowed himself to have in a very long time, out on a run with Bethan Wilcox dressed in almost nothing, as the California dawn began to break.

They spent the first ten miles running at an easy pace. Then pushing each other to increase their speed, which forced Jonas to admit, once again, that Bethan was ridiculously fast.

She pulled ahead of him at one point, and he told himself he was admiring her form in a purely academic sense.

Though every part of his body protested that.

She was a pageant of lean, honed muscle. That she not only trained but took excellent care of herself was obvious in every single movement she made. She was fast. She was sleek and capable. She was a deadly weapon in clingy—

He ordered himself to settle down.

The final part of their run was a big loop around her parents’ property, allowing them to truly case the place. Without discussing it, they maintained the same steady, leisurely sort of pace, running side by side around the edge of the vineyards and then looping back around so they could see the property spread out before them from above.

It was turning into a pretty morning—which he supposed was the entire point of California—when they saw another couple out running.

“My sister and her fiancé at three o’clock,” Bethan said.

“I see them.”

But Jonas saw more than that. His own body was a highly trained weapon, and the kind of training he’d had made him an expert on movement. Sometimes he wondered if civilians had any idea there were people on this earth who could simply look at them and see their choices, their hopes, and their fears, stamped all over them as if they were walking billboards. Because they were.