by Megan Crane
“What was the situation with the feed?” Jonas asked. He knew that if any of Matthew’s friends were watching, as he was sure they were because they were all obsessed with making sure Matthew was appropriately and constantly celebrated, all they would see was friendly, happy Jonas making a new friend at the bar.
“We’re interrupting it at random intervals,” Rory said, settling in like he was half watching the game on the television and half paying attention to the stranger beside him. “The one in the living room we’re keeping steady, but we’re making the bedroom one temperamental. It should be impossible to tell if it’s a software issue, something about its placement, or even if you’re messing with it.”
“Perfect.”
“Oz did say that he’s finding the source of the feed mobile. You know what that means.”
“It’s on someone’s phone.” Jonas laughed like Rory had told him a great joke. “Okay. Keep tracking it.”
“Will do,” Rory replied, signaling the bartender for a beer. “But first I’m going to sit here and watch the game for a minute.”
His bland smile made it clear that the game he planned to watch was Jonas pretending a bunch of drunken frat brothers could take him at pool. Or anything else.
Jonas laughed, because all he did in character was laugh, and made his way back to the group of groomsmen to lose in style.
* * *
* * *
“How was your day as a run-of-the-mill groomsman?” Bethan asked him later that evening, smirking.
The smirk was a gift. It was grounding. Because Jonas was still recovering from the shock of the sight of Bethan dressed in a skimpy little thing that hugged her body and sparkled. Little boots that made him remember, in excruciating detail, all the things she was capable of doing with those legs of hers. And her hair a deliberate sort of tousle that he knew perfectly well would have any man who looked at her thinking about what it would be like to get his hands in there.
It was certainly all he could think about.
As if he’d actually gone and turned into a regular man today, despite himself—but Jonas knew it wasn’t the frat boys or the beer. It was her.
Always and again, it was her.
His chest felt uncomfortably hollow, which was the last thing he needed at this rehearsal dinner for a wedding that had already required more attendance at various events—not to mention war plotting the night before—than entire years of missions he’d executed.
“I’m apparently an honorary member of Pi Kappa whatever,” he said. “Be amazed.”
But he couldn’t seem to keep himself from smiling at that, and it wasn’t as fake as it should have been.
Bethan threaded her arm through his as they walked with everyone else into the grand courtyard of the space Matthew’s parents had rented for tonight’s dinner. “I really didn’t expect there to be quite so much family stuff. Here at this family wedding. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I was under the impression that my family had all agreed on a hands-off policy. Years ago.”
Jonas didn’t point out that all the hands-off policies he’d ever known about had failed. Spectacularly. All around him.
“This is the part I don’t get,” he said, even while inside him there was something far more worrying than the usual ice and stone. Or even that hollowness. It was as if something had melted, or the stone had crumbled, but he didn’t know what to do about any of that. He’d been playing a part all day, and playing it well, but now she was here. And the way she looked at him, her green eyes too bright and every last inch of her delectable and lethal at once, made him . . . feel.
And left him disarmed.
Not a state he enjoyed. Or had experienced very often.
In fact, he’d experienced that sensation more often with her than with anyone else alive, because he usually got the better of individuals who actually disarmed him. And made certain they didn’t repeat that favor with anyone else.
“The rehearsal dinner?” Bethan leaned in closer to him, so he could note that she smelled of sunshine and flowers. Not helpful, idiot. “Some people only invite out-of-town guests to rehearsal dinners, which is supposedly all that’s required. Others don’t do anything at all, depending. Matthew’s family has obviously taken the opposite approach.”
“I don’t mean that.”
Inside the white-walled courtyard there were flowers bursting everywhere, cheerful lanterns strewn about overhead, and a Spanish-style fountain in the center. It was all very festive and brightly lit, with deferential waitstaff circulating among the guests, bearing platters filled with delicious finger foods and drinks at the ready.
Jonas was used to feeling out of place. Usually he used whatever role he was playing to ease his way, but that felt harder when it was only the two of them. Much harder than it should have been. “You’ve always made it seem like you don’t get along with your family at all.”
Bethan wrinkled up her nose. “I don’t, really.”
And maybe it was something about how intimate all this already was. She was standing so close to him, hugging his arm the way she might have if they really were a couple. And he’d succumbed to that ache inside of him and given in to his darkest yearnings after years of containing those things within him—and the world hadn’t ended as he’d expected it would. If anything, all that longing and yearning was worse.
A small taste had only made him want to drown himself in her.
But where he normally might have said something cold or cutting to put them back on footing he understood, tonight he studied her face instead.
“Maybe you don’t want to live with them again, but you all seem to get along just fine,” he said. The way a boyfriend might because he was concerned about his girlfriend and invested in her feelings. About anything and everything. It should have felt as foreign to him as all the rest of the parts he played on demand, but it didn’t. Because it was Bethan. “Even your father.”
“Did you see it when the general actually acknowledged me like I was a fellow soldier?” She laughed. “He must have been drunk.”
“I don’t think he knows what to do,” Jonas heard himself saying, still acting like he was this alternate version of himself, who not only cared about things but cared about them to such an extent that he was conducting an entire conversation about feelings. Other people’s feelings that didn’t affect him in any way. “He knows how to treat soldiers and underlings, but you’re his daughter. I don’t think he knows how to feel about it.”
Bethan gazed at him in wonder. “Are you, Jonas Crow, talking about . . . feelings? Of your own accord?”
He regretted it. Deeply. But now he was in it, so he kept going. “He told me—”
“He told you? You had conversations about your feelings? With my father?”
His jaw ached from gritting his teeth so hard. “He said he would hire you himself if you were anyone else. But instead, he worries about you, because you’re his . . .” But he was doing the thing, wasn’t he? There was no point avoiding the meat of it. He cleared his throat. “You’re his baby girl. That’s a direct quote. And if you keep looking at me like that—”
“He really said that?”
Jonas didn’t know what to do with all of this . . . stuff. Like the way Bethan, the toughest and most dangerous woman he’d ever known, was suddenly staring at him with her eyes wide and soft when he knew she was showing him the deepest, farthest reaches of her heart.
He didn’t want that. Surely he didn’t want any part of that. Because he didn’t know what to do with any of these things, and he certainly didn’t know what to do with his own heart, stomping wildly and uncomfortably in his chest.
“Jonas,” Bethan said then, her voice soft, too.
He was terribly afraid that she was the thing that was melting him and changing him. That she was the thing that was turning him inside out, and if he didn’t do something ab
out it, what would become of him? Where would it end? He needed to shove her away from him. Physically, mentally, and certainly emotionally. He never should have volunteered for this role in the first place.
The list of things he never should have done was getting far too long. And she was the only item on that list that made him want to repeat the same mistake. Jonas had never had regrets before. Not until her.
But he couldn’t seem to do anything but gaze down at her, soft and sparkly tonight, and wait to see how she would ruin him next.
“I’m going to have to steal her away,” came a singsong voice with a giggle.
Jonas watched—as if he were underwater, the way he’d spent a significant portion of his military career—as one of Ellen’s friends took Bethan by the hand, her high ponytail bobbing but not quite matching the high-pitched elevation of her voice.
He saw the same bemused sort of amusement in Bethan’s gaze, very similar to the expression he was pretty sure he’d been wearing all day.
“Oh, right,” Bethan said. Her lips curved. “Important bridesmaid stuff.”
“Don’t worry,” the other girl said brightly. “We’ll make sure you know the whole song.”
Bethan looked back at him as she let the other girl drag her away, her eyes wide. The whole song, she mouthed.
And he supposed it told him everything he needed to know about his current untenable emotional state that he stood there a moment gazing after her.
He shook himself, hopefully not visibly. When he was a man widely praised for his stillness. Get yourself right, he ordered himself darkly. Now. Because it didn’t matter what Bethan was doing. Jonas was now left to his own devices in the middle of a fancy cocktail party, and he wasn’t here to enjoy the appetizers.
What galled him was how long it took him to decide to stop standing around, thinking about his feelings, God help him, and get back to work.
He made his way around the courtyard, happily slipping back into his loud, carefree character, because that was a hell of a lot easier than navigating whatever was happening inside him tonight. He reassessed every general and high-ranking military officer there, including General Wilcox. He paid closer attention to all of Matthew’s buddies now that they were dressed and composed after their long day of frat boy shenanigans. He found himself engaged in a long conversation with self-proclaimed head drug dealer Lewis Stapleton, because despite himself, he liked the man’s Texan bluster.
He had a long conversation with Birdie about the alchemy of roses and a particular rosebush she’d grown from a cutting taken from her grandfather’s garden.
“I had no idea roses were their own histories,” he said.
“Roses are whatever we allow them to be,” Birdie replied with a smile he found particularly enigmatic, especially when he followed her gaze across the party to where her daughters were standing next to each other, laughing, looking like two unique renditions of the same theme. “Thorns and all.”
Jonas told himself he didn’t want to know what that meant.
The friendly staff was just rounding up the guests, asking them all to proceed from this courtyard to the next in this particularly Southern California space, when he came face-to-face with Dominic Carter.
At last.
Jonas didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t what he got. The other man grinned broadly, reached out his hand, and looked absolutely delighted to see Jonas.
As if they were long-lost friends.
“I hear we’re in the same business,” Dominic said. Jovially.
He looked exactly like every picture Jonas had studied of him, which was rarely true. He was neither overly jacked with muscle nor soft and paunchy. He had the sort of face that could belong to either a middle-manager accountant from a pleasant suburb somewhere or a CIA agent. He was perfectly friendly—so friendly, in fact, that it took Jonas a moment to process that they were roughly the same size.
An interesting tidbit, because if asked, Jonas would have docked the man a few inches and some width based on the khakis he wore and one of those strange collared T-shirts that made Jonas automatically consider a man soft and useless. But it also had to have something to do with the way the other man held himself.
Meaning it had to be deliberate.
Then he took Dominic’s hand to shake it, and he knew instantly that everything about the way this man presented himself was a lie.
Because there was something about the way he shook Jonas’s hand. There was a certain tension, maybe, or understanding that flared there between them. The kind of knowledge that could be transmitted only physically—and that couldn’t be concealed. Dominic Carter was going out of his way to appear soft and meek, but he’d seen some action.
More than some, Jonas would bet.
“Were you in the service?” Jonas asked.
The other man grinned self-deprecatingly. “Not me. I work with a lot of military folks, but never had the honor of serving myself.”
But Jonas didn’t believe him.
“I’m based in Annapolis,” Carter continued conversationally. “I don’t get out to Seattle much, but I’d love to get a good foothold on the West Coast. We should sit down sometime, throw a few ideas around.”
“You looking to expand?” Jonas asked, grinning widely, the way he would if he were running a security company.
Dominic Carter laughed. “Always looking to be better, friend. Isn’t that the meaning of life?”
Jonas did not say that as far as he knew, life had meaning only if it was lived honestly, because that seemed a little hypocritical under the circumstances.
They both laughed heartily, then shook hands again, which was the universally preferred method of communication among a certain set of wealthy, connected men. But when Carter got caught up in another group of far more important people making their way to the next stage of the party, Jonas held himself back.
He waited until most of the crowd had vacated the first courtyard, took out his phone, and went out into the street.
Where he did a quick head-to-toe check to make sure no one had planted any listening devices on him with all that shoulder-slapping and handshaking, and then he called in.
“Report,” Isaac said when he answered.
“This is a gut feeling,” Jonas replied, looking back toward the courtyard he’d just left as if there were eyes on him, even now. “But I think we found our guy.”
Fifteen
Bethan woke up early on the day of the wedding and crept out of the vineyard house before dawn. Her sister was still sleeping off the rehearsal dinner’s slight overindulgence in the vast king bed they were sharing, and Bethan thought Ellen might wake up when she moved—but Ellen only flopped over, then began to snore.
Bethan slipped out into what was left of the night, taking another moment to breathe in what could only be California, smelling sunbaked even in the dark. The last of the night-blooming jasmine, the hint of sage and rosemary, and the rich earth all around. Maybe not the place she wanted to call home, but part of her nonetheless.
Jonas met her by the pool house, as arranged. And if anyone saw them, they would look like lovers who couldn’t bear to spend a night apart. Bethan told herself that attempting to get into that character role was her hardest challenge yet.
“I think he’s hiding something,” Jonas said after he gave her a breakdown of his interactions with Dominic Carter the night before, and what he and the rest of the team had concluded while Bethan had been off singing ridiculous sorority songs and generally making a fool of herself.
That she’d laughed a whole lot and actually valued getting the opportunity to spend time with her sister—more than she’d thought she would—was neither here nor there. Bethan wasn’t supposed to feel these things while she was on a job. She did her best to shove it all aside.
And while she was at it, also not ogle J
onas in his running gear.
“Like, hopefully, our scientist and his sister?” she asked instead, the way an operative who was focused on the mission might.
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Jonas moved closer to her and took her hand, which Bethan knew perfectly well was about optics, not inclination. She knew that. And still his touch jolted straight through her. “He’s lying about his background, and I don’t understand why. Not in this group, anyway. He must have known that pretending he didn’t have any kind of serious action in his background is unbelievable.”
“Wouldn’t we know if he had military service in his background? Even if he tried to downplay it?”
“Not if he didn’t have military service,” Jonas said flatly. “There are a lot of would-be washouts who take it upon themselves to sell their guns and wannabe Delta Force egos to the highest bidder.”
Bethan didn’t waste her breath condemning that course of action. Her views on mercenaries should have been perfectly clear. Because she wasn’t one, when she could have been. They all could have been.
“Okay,” she said instead. “Ellen grew up with a military dad. I don’t think it’s going to be too surprising to her if I have stuff to do that isn’t about her wedding day. Kind of par for the course around here.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” Jonas replied. Gruffly, Bethan thought, but she was ignoring that. She was ignoring anything and everything that wasn’t the job, because if she didn’t, she thought the fact that they’d actually, finally, kissed and had sex might kill her. “You’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing.”
“What I’m doing is killing time being a part of the bridal party, Jonas.” She was not remembering what it had felt like when he’d driven himself inside her. She was not. “That’s not exactly following the operational handbook.”
“It’s your sister’s wedding.” And Jonas looked unduly fierce when she frowned at him. “We already have a team on the ground here. It would be unnecessarily risky to infiltrate the house during the wedding—but even if they went ahead and risked it, I find it hard to believe they could find anything we didn’t. If Carter is our guy, I have to think that the cameras in the room were only a part of it. He went out of his way to let me know he knew who I was. I expect he’ll do the same to you.”
