by Megan Crane
He had been getting to the truth of what was happening when their convoy had been attacked. Everyone had died. Except Jonas and Bethan, and that was because Bethan had bodily dragged him from the burning vehicle, pausing only to take out the circling enemy with a few well-placed shots.
Then she’d held their position throughout a long, lonely night in a dangerously exposed area while they waited for help to come in the form of an air extraction.
It had taken Jonas a solid six months to recover from what had happened to him there. That night, he’d been certain that his number was up at last. That he’d beaten the odds too many times and fate had stepped in at last.
He’d been ready for that night since he was a kid.
And now he had to live with the fact that all this time, he’d thought that he’d face death like a warrior. Silent. Stoic.
When instead, he’d treated it like an opportunity for a deathbed confessional.
And Bethan Wilcox had heard every single word.
More than that, she’d soothed him. He had a perfect, viciously clear recollection of his head in her lap, her fingers in his hair, while his voice rang out as if it would never stop telling her his secrets.
Though he didn’t know if he actually remembered that or if that was what they’d told him in the hospital. The story of how they found him. The story of Bethan with her weapon in her hand, keeping watch over him.
All those things he’d locked away inside seemed to shift then. Alarmingly.
Jonas made himself breathe, because history couldn’t help them here. And she should know better, anyway.
He’d chosen a job—a life, a calling—where it never mattered what he felt, only what he did.
God willing, it never would.
Jonas sacked up, shoved his unpleasant memories aside, and walked back in to carry out his mission.
The way he always did.
* * *
* * *
The next morning, he wasn’t at all surprised when Bethan came out of the bedroom in their suite on the dot of 0500 hours.
“Was the couch comfortable?” she asked in that even, impenetrable way of hers. Was she being sardonic? Was it a real question? It was impossible to tell.
“I slept on the floor,” Jonas told her, because if it was a competition about who was more unreadable, he knew he would win. “Like a baby.”
Her lips twitched, and he shouldn’t have liked that. But there were so many things he shouldn’t like. Including his own attempts to be entertaining when that was definitely not in his wheelhouse.
But then he stopped thinking about anything else because he finally noticed what she was wearing.
In some distant, rational part of his brain, he recognized that there was nothing particularly noteworthy about a pair of spandex running shorts and a tank top. This is unremarkable running gear, that distant, rational voice inside him informed him.
But this was Bethan. Whom he had never, ever seen out of uniform or tactical gear when she was engaging in physical activity.
And whom he had certainly never seen in formfitting spandex, God help him.
Jonas had prided himself for years on his ability to turn off all remnants of the kinds of things that made most people falter. But here, now, he was forced to acknowledge that despite all the work he’d put into locking himself down and turning into ice, he was only a man, after all.
Just a man looking at a woman.
That simple. That prosaic.
That much of a freaking problem.
Bethan didn’t quite smirk at him. Not quite.
“I’m going to get some miles in,” she told him as if she didn’t notice the way he was looking at her, when the gleam in her cool green eyes told him she most certainly did. “Are you interested? Boyfriend?”
And that was how Jonas found himself wrestling physical reactions he hadn’t allowed himself to have in a very long time, out on a run with Bethan Wilcox dressed in almost nothing, as the California dawn began to break.
They spent the first ten miles running at an easy pace. Then pushing each other to increase their speed, which forced Jonas to admit, once again, that Bethan was ridiculously fast.
She pulled ahead of him at one point, and he told himself he was admiring her form in a purely academic sense.
Though every part of his body protested that.
She was a pageant of lean, honed muscle. That she not only trained but took excellent care of herself was obvious in every single movement she made. She was fast. She was sleek and capable. She was a deadly weapon in clingy—
He ordered himself to settle down.
The final part of their run was a big loop around her parents’ property, allowing them to truly case the place. Without discussing it, they maintained the same steady, leisurely sort of pace, running side by side around the edge of the vineyards and then looping back around so they could see the property spread out before them from above.
It was turning into a pretty morning—which he supposed was the entire point of California—when they saw another couple out running.
“My sister and her fiancé at three o’clock,” Bethan said.
“I see them.”
But Jonas saw more than that. His own body was a highly trained weapon, and the kind of training he’d had made him an expert on movement. Sometimes he wondered if civilians had any idea there were people on this earth who could simply look at them and see their choices, their hopes, and their fears, stamped all over them as if they were walking billboards. Because they were.
He knew that Ellen Wilcox was riddled with anxiety. That she starved herself and that she took pride in that, too. Just like he knew her bridegroom wasn’t half the athlete he thought he was, which made Jonas wonder what other things he was overconfident about.
And Jonas wasn’t exactly the reigning expert on the human heart. By choice, he liked to tell himself. But whether he liked it or not, he was surrounded by people in actual, objectively good relationships these days. Alaska Force was cursed with happy couples, and there was a certain body language to intimacy. To happiness.
Ellen and her man had none of it.
“Why is your sister marrying this guy?” he asked.
Next to him, Bethan shot him a look. She’d put her hair in a ponytail, but not the kind she wore when they were working. This one was high and bouncy and somehow lodged itself inside him like a fist. Like the California sunshine.
Like need, something in him retorted. Darkly.
“Ellen and Matthew have a great number of similar interests,” Bethan said evenly. “She’s very ambitious. He’s very wealthy.”
“Sounds great.”
“The reality is that we moved around a lot when we were kids,” Bethan said after a moment. “I think both Ellen and I made ourselves safe as best we could.”
Jonas thought that was pretty charitable. He smiled brightly as the other couple waved to them but didn’t stop.
“I thought we were going to have a family moment,” Jonas said after they’d passed. “Isn’t that what some families do? Get together and bang out 5Ks?”
Bethan snorted. “Ellen is very serious about running. There’s no socialization.”
Then, with another glance at him, she took off at top speed—so Jonas had absolutely no choice but to follow. And they raced each other all the way back to their suite.
Where Jonas absolutely did not watch as Bethan got some water from the kitchenette and stood there in the doorway, her head tilted back and that body of hers clad in so very little as she chugged it.
He was actually grateful when they broke apart for the day. Bethan was off to indulge in some kind of spa-and-beauty day with her sister and all the bridesmaids. Jonas, meanwhile, had been invited to golf with the military men.
Golf.
He knew it was not a
n invitation so much as a summons, so he presented himself at the front of the house at the appointed time. He smiled and he laughed, so a collection of three- and four-star generals who would never have given him the time of day before could all greet him and one another heartily, then trudge around a golf course together. Without any pesky civilian irritants.
And he didn’t know why he couldn’t quite disappear into the character he was supposed to be playing, the way he normally did. Not that his jovial, easy performance wasn’t on point, but he couldn’t quite get his head around it. Jonas Crow, who’d been given up on so many times in his youth, by so many different authority figures, family members, and his own bitter self, golfing.
At a country club he knew would never have admitted him had he been in less exalted company.
“Maybe you can give me some clarity,” General Wilcox said when he and Jonas sat in a golf cart while a caddie drove them across the rolling green, which looked like it might topple off into the ocean if it had its way. “I understand that Bethan has something to prove. Seems to me she’s proved it a hundred times over by now. It breaks her mother’s heart to think of her up there in Alaska, of all places, running around like she does.”
Jonas chuckled. Actually chuckled, because surely that was the kind of thing golfers in country clubs did with their chummy buddies in their funny, preppy clothes. “Well, she’s good at it. Who doesn’t like to do what they’re good at?”
“We keep waiting for this obsession of hers to end,” the general said. “First it was the army. Fair enough. In this family we’re happy to support military service. But she kept reupping. And instead of moving out of the field when she could have, she doubled down.”
“She did indeed.” And it was harder than it should have been to keep that fake smile on his face.
But the general was clearly on a roll here. “Even Ranger School. Impressive, certainly. But surely the point has been made. When she left the army, we thought for sure she would finally settle down into real life. This Alaska Force nonsense is delaying the inevitable.”
“The inevitable, sir?” Jonas asked.
General Wilcox gave him a shrewd look. “She can’t do this forever.”
Jonas shook his head like he didn’t understand. “Sir?”
“It’s not realistic, is it?” the general asked. “You’re a sensible man. You understood that special ops comes with a sell-by date and got out before you were forced out. There are physical limitations to consider.”
“I’m pretty sure she knows that,” Jonas said, and it occurred to him that one of the reasons he was finding this so difficult was because he wasn’t really acting. Not at the moment, when he was facing down a man who, in his view, should have been far more supportive.
Jonas had never had anything approaching a supportive parent himself. Just like he hadn’t had fancy houses, staff, or the collection of advantages that Bethan might imagine she’d walked away from but were still right here, ready and waiting for her. He’d had none of that. Nothing was waiting for him, anywhere.
That was how he knew that this wasn’t how it was supposed to go down. If she was going to have all the trappings of a Hollywood movie as a life, surely a little support from a father who was basically in the same industry should be part of the deal.
“I don’t want to see my daughter chasing her ego until it’s too late,” Henry Wilcox told the man he thought was his daughter’s lover. Jonas knew without asking he didn’t discuss these things with Bethan herself. “Her mother worries about her staying safe, but not me. Every report I’ve ever read makes it clear she can handle herself. But I hate to see her miss out on life while she’s out there trying to prove something no one needs proved.”
Jonas had to remind himself that he wasn’t, in fact, himself. He was the mercenary version of Jonas Crow. A version of himself who’d bailed on his friends, who’d sought glory and money instead of what was right, and most important, who was at heart the kind of man who would be at his ease playing golf with blowhards.
And more than that, at ease in this conversation about a woman he was with.
“I hear you, sir,” he said with a wide grin that made all kinds of announcements. That he thought Bethan’s life choices were cute. That he wasn’t going to tolerate the cuteness forever. That he was in charge of her choices. Announcements he knew the general read, loud and clear. “And don’t worry. I don’t intend to let Bethan miss out on anything.”
Next to him, the older man seemed to relax. He nodded, and even reached over and clapped Jonas on the arm.
Which was about as stellar a review of Jonas’s performance as he could possibly have received, because the general might be a blowhard, but he wasn’t a fool. And if Jonas had been presenting as dangerous as he actually was, no way would Wilcox have dared touch him.
“Birdie and I couldn’t be happier that Bethan has found someone with a good head on his shoulders,” the general said. “Couldn’t be happier.”
Jonas wanted to point out that Bethan was one of the most powerful and lethal individuals on the planet. That she did not stumble. That she did not need someone else’s good head because hers was stellar. That he could not recall, in fact, any scenario in which she had been anything but fully on her game and performing at the highest level.
He wanted to knock the general back a few steps, or in this case, straight off the side of the golf cart. He wanted to protest, at the very least.
And really, he should have let it go. He should have stayed in character. But he couldn’t hit the older man, so he took what he could. “She has a pretty good head on her own shoulders, sir.”
The golf cart was stopping near yet another hole, but the general didn’t get out. He gazed at Jonas instead.
“I understand that, son,” he said, and there was a different note in his voice. Jonas couldn’t quite place it. Wilcox looked almost . . . resigned. “If she was any other woman, I’d try to recruit her. But she’s my baby girl. And it doesn’t matter how many combat zones she’s capable of infiltrating, in my head she’ll always be my baby girl. I can’t help imagining that sooner or later she’ll meet someone that makes her want to stay safe. Is that you?”
Jonas did not feel anything. He was incapable. His throat wasn’t tight. There wasn’t any steel band wrapped around his chest, making it impossible for him to breathe.
He felt nothing at all.
But he had to clear his throat as he met the general’s suddenly too-canny gaze. “I believe so, sir.”
The general nodded decisively, as if they’d settled something. Then he swung himself out of the golf cart, already calling out to his friends.
Jonas followed behind him, because he was playing the part of a man head over heels in love with Bethan Wilcox.
So it was lucky he didn’t feel a thing. That he never had and he never would.
He told himself that over and over again as the afternoon wore on. As he assured himself that he was nobody’s safe space, that he didn’t have that capacity. That love was for people who knew what to do with the good things they found.
When all Jonas had ever been good for was war.
He was lucky straight on through.
Nine
Two days before the wedding, Bethan found herself sitting at a table of women at a ladies’ luncheon hosted by one of her mother’s oldest friends in the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. It was a bright afternoon, a clear blue sky above, a faint breeze scented with salt and flowers, and beautiful in every way.
The sunshine was like a caress all over her face, but Bethan missed Alaska.
She smiled brightly and made small talk, because that was the job, but she was finding herself . . . homesick.
When she’d never been homesick. Not when they’d left their various homes over the years to follow her father’s postings. Not when they’d left the semipermanence of Virginia t
o move here. Not when she’d gone into the army. Bethan liked to look ahead, not behind.
But she would have given anything to be in Grizzly Harbor right now, keeping a straight face in the Water’s Edge Café while Caradine cooked and made snarky remarks, and outside everything was wreathed in grays, deep greens, and blues. She would exchange the California sun for a foggy winter morning in a heartbeat, and she suspected that said things about her she wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge. Or even admit.
“It is so beautiful here,” said the woman to her right. Lauren, she thought. Or Lori. Something along those lines. “I swear, if it weren’t for the kids, Brent and I would leave Chicago tomorrow.”
Bethan already knew more about Brent, Laurel, and their three kids than she wanted to know. Among the things she knew was that they would never leave Chicago. There had been entirely too many supposedly casual comments about Lara’s mother’s house on the lakeshore.
“I know,” Bethan murmured over her salad. The eighty-fifth salad she’d had as a full meal in the last four days, by her count. She expected that at any moment, she might start sprouting kale out of her ears. And she liked greens as much as the next person, but unlike most of the guests at this wedding, she wasn’t a stick figure. She liked her food. “Ellen and I are so lucky that we got to grow up here.”
And her sister, sitting across the table from her and pretending to listen to one of their aunts, caught her gaze and smirked.
Reminding Bethan that nothing was ever as simple as she liked to think it was when she was locked away in her pink-and-fluffy refuge in Fool’s Cove, with the better part of an Alaskan winter ahead of her.
She might find herself missing the slap of an Alaska morning, the particularly addictive grossness of Isaac’s morning workouts, and the friendships she’d built around tables that were far stickier than the Botanic Garden’s, in places like the Fairweather. But that didn’t change the fact that Ellen still knew her in a way only a sister could. And therefore knew that she had lit out of Santa Barbara like she was on fire and had never had any intention of returning, no matter what she said to Laura from Chicago.
