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“It was the job.”

She tried to swallow the lump in her throat. “You did it very well. I won’t forget that.”

Bethan turned then, not happy to find that her vision was blurry, too, but she blinked that back. She headed for the door to the main lobby, so she could go back to her cabin, hide away, and do something about how thin her skin had become while she was wearing a different version of it.

“Bethan.”

She stopped, but she didn’t turn back. She didn’t want him to see her face and whatever it was doing. Whatever it showed.

“I wish you would,” Jonas said, his voice dark. Bitter.

She kept going, because the other option was to turn around and fight this man for his own soul. Right here in the hallway in the beating heart of Alaska Force’s operation, something she doubted he would forgive.

Truth was, she felt later—after she’d taken her gear backto her cabin, unpacked all the frilly, flirty clothes she had no idea when she’d have occasion to wear again, and then headed back down to the lodge to see if anyone was headed over to Grizzly Harbor—while Jonas would hate her for it, everyone else might applaud the effort.

Templeton and his trooper provided her with her ride, out in a little trawler that hugged the coastline as Templeton navigated the moody swells, the sea not quite ready to let go of winter.

They all huddled there in the little bit of inside space the boat had to offer.

“Rumor is you got Jonas to dance,” Templeton boomed, and then laughed as if that were a joke in and of itself.

Next to him, Kate rolled her eyes. Though with affection.

“It was a wedding,” Bethan said judiciously. “Not like he spontaneously started dancing in the middle of a regular op. That would be far more interesting.”

Templeton shot her a look, then returned his attention to the water. “I’ve been on a lot of ops with Jonas Crow, and the only dancing I’ve ever seen him do involved making like a ghost and taking the enemy out inside their own camps. Not, you know, a waltz.”

“There was no waltzing,” Bethan assured him.

It wasn’t a lie. Not precisely.

Once they docked in Grizzly Harbor, Templeton stopped to take a call, leaving Kate and Bethan to hike into town on their own.

“Are you headed somewhere particular?” the trooper asked.

“You know.” Bethan shrugged. “Caradine’s.”

“Is there... a meeting?” Kate asked, with a sudden, aggressively neutral expression on her face that made Bethan laugh.

“You mean like...” Bethan started.

“Don’t say it.”

“...intimate friend time?”

Kate grinned. “I don’t know. You just got back from a mission. Maybe you require an infusion of... whatever you would call that.”

“Girls’ night?” Bethan teased her, given that neither one of them was a likely candidate for the sort ofgirls’ nightpeople tended to mean when they used that term.

Bethan would rather die than drink a cosmopolitan in a world where whiskey existed.

Kate made a face. “I still don’t know how these things work. There are always mysterious calculations, but I never know the math.”

“The Alaska Force math is pretty simple. There are a lot of dudes. Therefore, both of us who aren’t dudes hang out.”

“I get that part.” Her eyes gleamed. “Templeton made me watchBridesmaids, claiming that I could view it as the definitive text on female friendships.”

“Really?”