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“We don’t know if there are physical eyes on us,” she murmured, and it was like torture. Her lips moving against his back. He couldfeelthem. What was he supposed to do with that?

Especially because she was right. It was dark. All kinds of things could be lurking in the dark.

He turned to face her, though that wasn’t better. All it did was create a new host of problems, especially when she slid her arms around his neck.

“I want to find where these feeds are originating,” he muttered. His hands found her hips a little too easily, too naturally. But if anyone was looking at them, they would look like lovers in an intimate, private dance. That was the point, he reminded himself.

“I want to know what changed,” Bethan replied.

He lifted his head enough so he could see her expression.

“There weren’t cameras this morning,” she said, though she looked dreamy. Nothing like the highly trained operative she was, and he should have had absolutely no reaction to it. She was doing her job. The way he should have been doing his. “What happened today that we became a threat?”

“Good question.”

Jonas smoothed his hand over her hair. Standing like this, not kissing her and not rushing to get inside her, felt a little too much like battering himself with information he really didn’t want. Like the way shefithim. He couldn’t get past it. It was too easy to hold her. His hands liked being right where they ended up, wrapped around her hips like she was his.

He had the terrible notion that this game they were playing wasn’t a game at all. That it was more like an infection, and once it set in, he was a goner.

But he’d been a goner before, and here he was anyway. He ordered himself to stop worrying aboutfittingand to start treating the situation they were in with the respect it deserved.

Or at least with the benefit of his full freaking attention.

“I don’t think that Oz is going to be able to narrow it down any further than this property,” he said, like an imitation of the ice-cold, strategic genius he was supposed to be.

“That’s no worry at all.” Bethan grinned. “I was a teenager here, remember? Trust and believe that I know how to sneak around this house.”

She stepped back from him, pulling him with her toward the hot tub. She made a show of kicking off her flat sandals as if they were high heels. Then she went over to the side and pulled out a screen he’d thought was purely decorative. Maybe it was, but Bethan arranged it like a privacy screen. For the benefit of whatever silent audience they might have watching them, she tugged it across the front of the hot tub,blocking off any lines of sight. Better still, it was wide enough that it covered over a good foot to the side of the patio, giving them an exit option.

And once the screen was up, Bethan instantly looked neither giggly nor tipsy at all.

Something thudded through him, unpleasantly, because he understood that while Bethan leaning into her femininity had disarmed him, none of that was the real problem.

Thiswas the problem. His no-nonsense soldier, the one who impressed him and everyone else in Alaska Force daily. The one who, long before she’d tested her mettle in Ranger School, had held off insurgents single-handedly while he was too injured to do anything but babble out his life story.

Even tonight, while she was wearing one of those dresses of hers, this one a sleek sort of a shape that both emphasized her figure and yet did not cling to it, she looked like the Bethan he knew best. Her gaze was cool, considering. She was all business.

She was so beautiful it actually hurt. Particularly where he was already too hard and ready.

“There are too many guests in this house for us to be rolling around with visible weapons,” she said, which he took to mean she had nonvisible weapons stashed on her person. Like he did. “Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Jonas replied.

As shortly as possible, for fear that what was happening inside him might show in his voice.

Because now the blinders were gone. All the walls he’d built up were in rubble.

He was screwed.

But there was no time to think about that. She nodded at him, shoved her hair back behind her ears, and slipped into that foot-long space overlapping the patio next door. She was already at the glass doors by the time he followed her.He expected her to pick the lock, but she tested the handle first, and then soundlessly slid the door wide. Jonas was impressed with the way she did it, confidently walking inside even though the lights were on and there was the sound of the television from the next room.

He followed, knowing that whoever was staying here would never know that they’d had visitors at all. He and Bethan were both so quiet, they might as well have been the kind of ghosts he’d always considered himself.

A notion that sat on him a little strangely tonight.

Once in the hallway, Bethan didn’t head toward the main part of the house the way they normally did. Instead, she looped around, leading Jonas up a short flight of stairs and then into a second-floor gallery that stretched from this new addition into the old. He followed her silently, on alert for signs of life in any direction, but it was quiet.

They were lucky that it was late. Or late enough, anyway, for the guests staying here. He doubted they would have found the place so quiet if the wedding party were staying here.