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Besides, she couldn’t imagine explaining it to her sister.One of your wedding guests reminds me of a man who’s supposed to be dead, El. A man I shot. Excuse me while I run him down in Mom and Dad’s pinot noir vines.

She blew out another breath that was more of a laugh, because that obviously couldn’t happen. And Bethan didn’t have that many flashbacks, generally speaking. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t kick in at any time. Like the nightmares that sometimes claimed her, because like it or not, that was part of the deal.

She’d seen nothing, she assured herself. She was safe. She washere.

Bethan kept repeating that to herself as she made it up the drive. She parked the car at the front of the house, where Charlotte was always waiting.Lurking.

“Hey,” came Ellen’s voice, not sounding quite as staccato as before. It meant she’d finished her call. “Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

A choice of words that had her gut telling her things she didn’t want to hear. But Bethan made herself smile. “The ghost of high school, maybe. It’s been a long time since I came back here. That’s all.”

Ellen laughed at that as they walked into the house and the cool grip of its air-conditioning. “I went to my last high school reunion, believe it or not. You don’t actually knowthe ghosts of high school until you’re face-to-face with them, discussing the so-called glory days.”

“Why on earth would you do that to yourself?”

Her sister shrugged, still laughing. “We all have our preferred ways of proving that our lives are better. Yours was becoming Wonder Woman. Mine involves staring at the high school boyfriend who cheated on me with the woman he eventually married and reveling in their quiet despair. No one’s perfect.”

And Bethan found herself grinning all the way back to her suite.

Where Jonas was waiting, like a thundercloud.

Bethan eyed him as she walked in, feeling frothy and frilly and instantly safe from whatever ghosts had been haunting her out there. And something about that made her whole body hum as she beheld him. Dark. Grim. Serious.

It made her want to...dosomething. Not the kind of thing she knew how to do in a professional capacity, or even in some kind of training scenario. But far more intriguing and strange, the kind of thing she never, ever let herself do in a feminine capacity.

Like dance for him.

A thought that was so outrageous she couldn’t keep herself from laughing. And when he looked up from the couch where he was sitting with his tablet, the usual query in his dark gaze, that only made it worse. She could dance for him. Or, if she were really his girlfriend, walk over to where he was sitting and slide herself onto his lap, flouncy and flowery, her hair down and her skin bared. She could loop her arms around his neck and make him smile whether he wanted to or not.

Suddenly, she could not only envision doing that but couldfeelit.

In such a tactile way that her inner thighs actually prickled, as if she’d settled herself astride him. But then, if she were astride him, she doubted she would be overlyconcerned about her thighs. Not when she would be able to rub herselfright there, right where she needed him, right where she wanted him—

But she was not going to do that.

Just like she was not going to entertain certain dreams she’d had in the light of day.

“The look on your face,” Jonas said, his voice dark. Clipped. Repressive in every way. Which he probably didn’t know only made everything in her hum. “Rethink it.”

She wiped her face clear of all expression. Or she hoped she did, anyway. Bethan had considered this suite spacious and over the top when she’d first walked in. But after a few days of carefully sharing the space with Jonas, it felt cramped. Tiny, in fact. Not only because he took up more space than he ought to, with all that brooding intensity of his. But because there was all that...stuffbetween them that neither one of them acknowledged.

Sometimes it did her head in. Other times her feelings about it seemed to be centered significantly farther south.

Today she decided she was far too feminine and silly in this dress to risk putting herself too close to him, particularly after that strange flashback on the drive in. Instead of sitting down in the chair she usually took across from him, she walked over to the sliding glass doors and looked out. As if the sea, silently watching in the distance, could keep her safe.

From herself.

“Any news?” she asked. “I was trapped with the ladies who lunch.”

“Oz came back with a detailed account of the movements of two of our three generals,” Jonas said, and she knew from the tone in his voice that whatever information he’d received, it hadn’t been the evidence he wanted. “And your father.”

“My father.”

“I thought we should be sure.”

Bethan was surprised at the pop of something like outrage at that, when she knew that if the situations were reversed, her father would not hesitate to investigate her. How strange that she’d come back here on a mission she was thrilled she could use as a buffer against her family, only to discover she cared a lot more than she thought she did.

“Not our guys, then?” she asked.