Page 33

“I know,” Bethan murmured over her salad. The eighty-fifth salad she’d had as a full meal in the last four days, by her count. She expected that at any moment, she might start sprouting kale out of her ears. And she liked greens as much as the next person, but unlike most of the guests at this wedding, she wasn’t a stick figure. She liked her food. “Ellen and I are so lucky that we got to grow up here.”

And her sister, sitting across the table from her and pretending to listen to one of their aunts, caught her gaze and smirked.

Reminding Bethan that nothing was ever as simple as she liked to think it was when she was locked away in her pink-and-fluffy refuge in Fool’s Cove, with the better part of an Alaskan winter ahead of her.

She might find herself missing the slap of an Alaska morning, the particularly addictive grossness of Isaac’s morning workouts, and the friendships she’d built around tables that were far stickier than the Botanic Garden’s, in places like the Fairweather. But that didn’t change the fact that Ellen still knew her in a way only a sister could. And therefore knew that she had lit out of Santa Barbara like she was on fire and had never had any intention of returning, no matter what she said to Laura from Chicago.

She didn’t know if she liked that simple fact, or if it made her sad that it could be true when the two of them had never quite figured out how to be close. Not in any real way.

“I’ll admit it,” Ellen said on the drive back to the house when the luncheon was over. She’d waved off all her bridesmaids and had slipped into Bethan’s car instead. Jonas’s car, Bethan reminded herself. She had to think of it as Jonas’s car, not hers, because he was supposed to be her boyfriend and she had to remember not to act like she was on a mission. “This performance of yours is impressive.”

“I beg your pardon. I’m no actor. I’m a soldier, thank you.”

“You told Aunt Sarah that you worked insolutions, and I heard her telling people that she thought you worked in IT.”

“Aunt Sarah is famously dim. And I do work in solutions.”

Ellen laughed. “Dad has literally stood there talking about sports teams he doesn’t support rather than indicate he’s even aware you were ever in the army, and you just take it. You never used to take it.”

“What?” Bethan demanded, but she was grinning despite herself. “I can’t mellow with age?”

“You?” Her sister shook her head. “No.”

“This week is about you, El. Not me.”

“Sure it is.”

Bethan was saved from having to further explain herself by Ellen’s phone, which was always ringing. And which she always answered, because you could take a lawyer out of the office, but you couldn’t make them change their habits.

And despite herself, she felt guilty as she drove her sister back toward their parents’ house.

Especially because driving her sister up into the hills over Santa Barbara felt a little too much like déjà vu. It could have been any scene from when they were younger, and Bethan and Ellen had been left to their own devices, as ever, while their parents were engaged in far more weightymatters, like roses and war games. Bethan had driven these same roads while, next to her, Ellen had chattered away, blithely unconcerned with whether or not anyone was responding to her.

There had been years Bethan had found that annoying. Sometimes, if asked, she would have insisted that her sister was the most self-involved creature on earth. But then, other times, it made her feel almost... affectionate.

Maybe that’s just family, she told herself.

But whatever it was, she couldn’t help but feel almost ashamed that she wasn’t simply... here. That the only way she’d been able to do this was to come with a mission. A man who wasn’t hers but was pretending he was. An entire strategy.

As if Ellen were the enemy, when she could still look across a table and see straight through her older sister.

Ellen was talking in that particular fast-paced way of hers that she always adopted when she was in work mode, making decisive gestures with her free hand that called attention to the flowy sleeves of the dress she wore. Bethan was wearing an actual sundress, all bright colors andflouncy, which had to be why she was questioning what she was doing here. It was all theseclothes. She wasn’t used to wearing dresses, day after day. She didn’tflounce. She didn’t keep her hair out of ponytails or put on eye makeup all the time.

A week of this would get to anyone.

She turned onto the long drive toward the house and had to squint against the glare of the sun. She slipped down the visor and as she did, saw a runner out of the corner of her eye. He was off the road, running down along the side of the vineyard, and she got only a quick glimpse of him as he moved, backlit and unidentifiable.

Her whole body went cold.

Ellen kept talking and Bethan held on to that, because her mind wanted to drag her back. Far back, to the flash ofbright desert skies in the relentless, pitiless sun, and another figure, running toward the vehicle between them despite the flames and fumes—

She blew out a breath, trying to center herself. To feel her feet, her legs, her butt in the seat of this car. Her hands on the wheel.

The here and now, not then.

Everything in her screamed to turn around, off-road this car, and chase the man down, but she didn’t.

It’s a flashback, she told herself.Something about the sun here, that’s all.