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She slipped an arm around her mother’s trim waist, smiling when Birdie looked startled. “You don’t have to worry about me, Mom. I figured out a long time ago how to make myself happy, so I do.”

And if she ignored all the Jonas-shaped things in her life, that was true.

“You’ve always been like that,” Birdie said with what actually looked like a fond smile. “So determined and individual since the day you arrived. It was always Ellen who fell apart when things didn’t go her way. Never you.”

They both looked toward Ellen then. Bethan blinked abit, because she thought of her sister as unflappable. A rock. Then again, there was all that anxiety and the obsession with her own eternal skinniness—a hallmark of control issues. Maybe the real lesson here was that no one was the same as Bethan had thought they were when she was a teenager, herself included.

“I don’t like to think about what you do for work because it’s hard to imagine you out there, involved in the kinds of things you must be involved in.” Birdie shook her head. “But it’s thinking of you all alone afterward that truly worries me.”

“But I’m not alone,” Bethan protested.

Her mother patted her hand. “Not now. Your father and I are quite impressed with your Jonas. The general says that he might walk a line or two, but never crosses it.”

Bethan wanted terribly to tell her mother that it was all an act. That the real Jonas Crow went nowhere near any kind of line and never would. But she didn’t. She couldn’t.

Just like she couldn’t tell her mother that it wasn’t just Jonas—who wasn’t hers, not that way—who kept her from feeling alone. It was all of Alaska Force. Because of them she’d found a home, at last, where she could be everything that she was without apology.

But she knew if she said that, it would sound far too much like an accusation, so instead, she smiled at her mother and didn’t correct her. And knew full well that the Bethan who had arrived here a week ago would not have made the same choice.

Then, finally, Ellen was getting married.

Bethan stood beside her, there on the altar they’d created, with a perfect rolling view of the lovely Santa Barbara vineyards, hills, and sea, and for that short little slice of time, she took pleasure in being nothing at all but Ellen Wilcox’s sister.

But she was happier to see Jonas than she probably should have been as the reception began.

For purely operational purposes, she assured herself.

But it wasn’t operational oversight that had her throat going dry as she wound her way through the crowd that was already gathered under the big tent the staff had set up on the far end of the grass, up above the vineyard house, with spectacular views in every direction as the sun sank toward the sea.

Jonas was dressed in a dark suit that made the most of his stupendous form. It had obviously been made to his precise specifications, and she tried to take that on board. But it was too much. The idea of Jonas Crow submitting himself to a tailor’s ministrations, much less acknowledging that such things asbespoke attireexisted in the first place, refused to come together in her head.

But however it had happened, there was no denying the fact that he eclipsed every other man there.

That dark hair of his gleamed, his brown skin making his black eyes and high cheekbones almost too beautiful to bear. And he was playing his role to the hilt, so that the sensual mouth she knew the feeling of now was curved into all kinds of improbable, smiling shapes.

Jonas and yet not Jonas, with every last inch of him shown off to perfection.

It really wasn’t fair.

Bethan was a healthy woman. She had healthy desires. And yet the only object of those desires was the one man in all the world who wanted nothing to do with her, and had still turned her inside out with a single kiss. Good thing she’d been trained, because no matter what turmoil might be going on inside her, she knew there was a smile plastered across her face, as befit the maid of honor at this wedding.

When she arrived at Jonas’s side, that black gaze of his was hot in a way that made everything inside her seize, then shiver. He handed her a glass of wine with a certain proprietary air that played up more of that intimacy that he was entirely too good at faking.

Not so good atdoing, though, she thought. Then ordered herself to stop thinking.

“What’s the report?” she asked as she lifted the glass to her lips.

“Oz is deep-diving into Carter’s past. But obviously the smart take is that no way did he stash Sowande anywhere near his base of operations in Annapolis. That would be a rookie move, and no one who can disguise his real identity like this is a rookie.”

“Agreed.” She tipped her head back, like Jonas was whispering sweet nothings her way, and smiled. “Do you think we’re going to flush him out this weekend? Seems unlikely.”

“I don’t like him,” Jonas said flatly. “Everything about him was off. If he was threatened enough to bug our rooms, I have to think that means he’s on edge.”

“On edgeis something we can use,” Bethan agreed.

But in the meantime, there was the wedding reception to survive. There were all her parents’ friends who found their way to Bethan’s side to exclaim over her—and get an eyeful of Jonas while they were at it. There were her sister’s friends, from childhood and beyond, whom Bethan felt compelled to charm as best she could, as if she were a hostess alongside her parents.

She wondered how the Bethan she’d been a week ago would have handled this—without Fake Jonas as a date tonight and without her mission identity to protect her—and suspected that she would not have been nearly so gracious. She would have found it necessary to assert herself with her sister’s friends on the off chance they didn’t already know what it was she did for a living. She would have done the same with her parents’ friends, even more pointedly, and really, it wasn’t pleasant to see herselfquiteso clearly.