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“Bethan,” he began, and she took a strange sort of solace from the fact that he didn’t sound as frigid as he usually did. How sad was that?

But he didn’t finish what he was about to say, because a door opened. Directly across from the small hall where they were standing.

“There you are, Bethan,” her mother said in her cultured tones. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”

Bethan was still seething inside, whether she wanted to admit it or not, and more than spoiling for a fight. Jonas was maddening. The situation was worse, though she supposed it was the same as it always had been. Maybe that waswhyit was worse.

But she couldn’t deal with any of that—withhim—because she had to plaster a smile on her face and try to look as if it made all the sense in the world that she was standing here,in the little back corridor that was for family only. Where they could go back and forth without staff or guests any the wiser.

“Looking for me?” she asked lightly, though it cost her. “Why?”

Birdie opened the door wider, and Bethan saw that her entire family was gathered in the sitting room adjacent to her father’s office.

“We’re having a family summit,” Ellen said, waving the tumbler in her hand a little too carelessly. Next to her, Matthew was looking on indulgently while rattling the ice cubes in his own drink.

“We’ve been trying to contact you all evening,” Birdie continued. “It’s not like you to have your phone switched off.”

Because it was never switched off. Which was how Bethan knew her mother was, at best, exaggerating. If she’d texted Bethan, it could only have been in the last hour—while her cell phone was back in the room in the clutch she’d discarded once she and Jonas had returned from town.

“My fault,” Jonas said from behind her. Bethan wished she had a word to describe what it was like to be this annoyed by someone and yet absurdly comforted when his hand came around to rest on her hip. Like a real couple. “We’ve been out to dinner, and I’ll admit, I like to keep her attention on me.”

If Bethan let herself think about that—about all her attention on him, or his insisting upon it in some alternate reality where this relationship they were faking was who they actually were—but she couldn’t. She couldn’t go there.

He ushered her into the room with his hand a faint weight in the small of her back, and she let him do it while her mind raced. It was impossible not to wonder if, after all, her family was responsible for those cameras. But as she scanned all the faces around her, no one seemed to look anything but mildly interested that Jonas had a phone rule.

No one seemed to think that they ought to have been tucked up in a hot tub, even now, but she figured it wouldn’t hurt to cover their bases.

“We’ve been having a very Santa Barbara evening,” she told them, lying brightly. “We had dinner in town. Then we wandered State Street, looking at all the shops. We went down to the beach to say hello to the Pacific Ocean, then came back to make use of that hot tub on our patio. Then I decided it was a fine time to take Jonas on a nostalgic tour of the house I grew up in. Although to be honest, so much of it’s changed now that it’s hard to be too sentimental.”

“It’s practically a hotel,” Ellen agreed. She eyed their mother. “A very pretty boutique hotel, of course.”

Jonas pulled his phone from his pocket, making a show of checking to see if it was switched on. She saw him send a swift text and knew that he was making sure Rory and the rest handled those cameras. If she had to bet, she’d say he told them to create some kind of disturbance in that feed because they weren’t going to be able to track it as planned.

“Sit down, sit down,” her father said in his overly hearty host voice. He handed out drinks, then settled back in the armchair he’d vacated, smiling a bit indulgently. “We’re plotting out a war, apparently.”

“Not a real war,” Ellen said with that smirk of hers that it turned out Bethan was very fond of. “Down, military people. No need to call in the cavalry.”

Bethan found herself exchanging glances with her father and Jonas, which unsettled her. They were two of the most maddening men she’d ever met, she had complicated relationships with both of them, but if she wasn’t mistaken, all the soldiers in the room were... having a moment.

She didn’t know where to put that. She would have said—shehadsaid, repeatedly—that her father bent over backward to act as if he didn’t have a daughter who had ever gone near the military.

“It’s time to separate,” Matthew intoned. “Since the girlsare doing their thing, I’m hoping you’ll join my groomsmen and me.”

It took Bethan a long moment to realize that her soon-to-be brother-in-law was addressing Jonas. And if it took her a long moment, she could see that it was going to take Jonas a whole lot more than that.

“Are you and your groomsmen doing something exciting?” Bethan asked when Jonas only stared.

“Matthew and I thought it would be fun to split things up for the last time,” Ellen said. Bethan watched the way her sister smiled at her fiancé. She’d always thought that smile had to be fake. A show of some kind, but she was revising her opinion. Because when Ellen smiled at Matthew, it was softer. Her nose wrinkled. She didn’t look like the Ellen that Bethan knew, but maybe that was the point. “All the girls and all the boys are going to split up. We’ll see each other tomorrow night at the rehearsal dinner, then again at the wedding.”

“What do you mean bysplit up?” Jonas asked, sounding utterly baffled.

And he made Bethan’s heart ache. She suspected he really was baffled. By everything that was happening here.

“A reasonable question,” the general said, getting a sharp look from his wife in return.

“I think it’s a lovely custom,” Birdie said, as if that settled it. “Bethan, just throw a few things in a bag.”

“You don’t need anything in a bag,” Ellen protested, clearly not seeing the way Bethan blinked at that. “You can just come back to the vineyard house with me. You can share my bed. And don’t worry, I’m no longer the cover hog I was when I was a kid.”