by Megan Crane
“Great,” he bit out. “That’s not you. Crisis averted.”
She made a meal out of shrugging carelessly. “Again, Jonas. You’re going to great lengths to convince me that you don’t feel anything, but you also were quick to tell me that this could never, ever happen again, because . . . reasons. You’ll understand if I’m not convinced that you’re the most reliable narrator.”
What exactly are you trying to do here? she asked herself. Do you really want to throw yourself into a physical relationship with a coworker? Even if it’s Jonas.
Her heart was beating so hard in her neck that it took everything she had not to press her fingers against it, which would show him far too much about what she was hiding.
Especially if it’s Jonas, that voice continued, darkly. Do you really think you can handle him?
Maybe that was why she was pushing. Because she knew she couldn’t, but she also knew she was in no danger of finding out.
And meanwhile, she was so busy compartmentalizing everything that had happened this afternoon that if she thought about it, she was sure she would be unable to contain her reaction. That strange flashback. Sex with Jonas. And then the story he’d told her, that would’ve broken her heart into pieces if she let it. That would, she knew, the moment she was alone.
All of this and she was standing in her parents’ house in Santa Barbara, with more family shenanigans looming ahead of her, no matter how she assured herself that what mattered was the mission. That might be true, but it was still Ellen’s wedding.
She shoved each part into its own cordoned-off area inside her, made sure the walls were standing high, and locked the doors up tight.
And when Jonas did nothing but stare back at her, still, steel, and as approachable as a wicked knife, she inclined her head toward the door.
“After you,” she said, taking pride in how calm she sounded. “Unless you’d rather stay here and continue to pretend you’re not the one having a breakdown.”
The look he gave her was scathing. It took all she had not to glance down and check to see if he’d actually flayed all the flesh from her body that easily.
A victory, she told herself stoutly, as he stalked from the room.
It was a victory, all right, but the kind that claimed far too high a cost.
Because Bethan was good at what she did. She prided herself on that. That meant that she didn’t display any kind of reaction when he casually took her hand as they walked into the main part of the house and were confronted with Ellen and all of her bridesmaids. Bethan smiled and leaned closer into him. Even when he slid his arm around her shoulders as they talked to the various groups of people who were gathering in the foyer to set off for different dinners down in Santa Barbara. Or for the more adventurous, over the mountains to Solvang or even down the coast to Los Angeles.
He touched her as if they’d just had sex. That they really had was something for her to carry inside her until there was a safe place to examine it.
She wasn’t sure such a place existed, so she snuggled in close and smiled dreamily.
But when they finally drove away from the house full of wedding guests, she shifted seamlessly into her usual persona. Because even that was a series of masks, she was well aware. She could no longer separate herself from what the army had made her, but there was a version of her no one else ever saw. Her cabin in Fool’s Cove was a monument to that Bethan.
And it was only here, driving through another gold and deep blue Southern California evening, keeping so many armored little pieces of herself walled off inside, that it occurred to her to wonder how long she could keep all that up.
How long could one person splinter themselves into so many pieces and expect to ever be whole again?
But she had no choice but to shove that away when they met up with the rest of the team in the motel where they’d set up camp in the neighboring town.
“I had no idea you cleaned up pretty, Bethan,” Rory said with a laugh as they all crowded into the motel room.
“Not something you need to worry about, Lockwood,” she shot back, so everyone would laugh at him and stop looking at her legs.
Everyone did. Except Jonas.
After several hours of throwing possibilities around and outlining potential scenarios, all they’d really succeeded in doing was annoying themselves. Because Dominic Carter was in town, supposedly, but caught in meetings until the rehearsal dinner. Until then, everything was waiting around and conjecture.
“We’re sitting in a motel room in Goleta, and who knows if the scientist is even in North America any longer?” Jack Herriot muttered as Jonas and Bethan got ready to leave.
“I told Iyara Sowande to trust me,” Bethan shot back, one of her walls toppling inside, leaving nothing but the anguish she usually knew better than to show. “I intend to make sure she can.”
She kicked herself all the way back toward the house, through a night gone thick and ripe with jasmine and rosemary. Somehow that seemed to match the man beside her, so silent he ached with it.
He reached for her hand when they left the car out front. And once again, Bethan had to have full-scale intervention with herself as they walked through the house, because it didn’t matter how it felt with their fingers laced together like that. It didn’t matter what her body was telling her, because she couldn’t act on it. She already had, and she was therefore looking forward to a nice, long night alone, locked away in the master bedroom of their suite, where she could process her emotions.
And maybe scream into her pillow while she was at it.
Inside their room, Jonas flicked the lights on, then paused.
No one who didn’t know him would have thought anything of that pause. They probably wouldn’t have noticed it.
But to Bethan, it was like he’d suddenly gone electric. She was in the process of slinging the fussy little clutch she’d been ordered to carry around, because that was what civilian women did, onto the coffee table. When she straightened, she had no notice. She saw only that look on his face, fierce and delicious, enough to make her heart seem to catapult from her chest to her feet and back—
In the next second, he was on her.
He hauled her against him, taking her mouth with a sheer ferocity that made her entire body feel weak and wild at once.
Jonas kissed her with so much passion she wasn’t sure her body could contain it, but God, she wanted to—
It took her a moment to realize that he was saying something, there against her mouth.
Her heart was too loud in her ears. She thought she might combust.
Jonas moved his mouth from hers and made his way along her cheek, her jaw. He lay a trail of explosive fire that made every part of her go tight and soft, as she could do nothing but helplessly arch into him.
All her walls were in rubble around her. All her compartments were wide open.
All he had to do was kiss her and she betrayed herself completely.
Then his mouth was at her ear.
“Camera,” he said, a low growl that she could feel work its way through her, like pure need. “On the painting.”
Jonas didn’t give her a chance to look, or respond.
He took her mouth again, long and drugging and demanding. “We’re being watched.”
Twelve
It was hard to keep his mind where it should have been, something that had never happened to Jonas before. Ever. Yet even as he recognized that he was being pulled out of his usual level of focus on the operation, he could feel a different kind of intensity click into place between Bethan and him.
She smiled at him as if he’d just handed her the California sun in the middle of an Alaskan winter, then arched her body into his. And he was sure that to anyone filming this, she looked abandoned and seductive. All about pure sensation.
But he could feel every bit of tension
in her body.
And somehow, that made it all that much hotter. More dangerous, something in him insisted, because he couldn’t seem to help himself from responding. But this wasn’t the time to worry about these things that shouldn’t be happening between them. The things he certainly shouldn’t be feeling. Or wanting. Or needing when God knew, he’d learned long ago never to need anything, because that led straight to the kind of addictions that had laid waste to his entire—
Bethan leaned in and bit his ear.
Hard.
And when he stared at her in amazement—and the kind of temper he could feel pulse in him, everywhere—she only grinned.
“I want to go get in the hot tub,” she said.
Jonas was horrified to realize he was having trouble keeping track of all the things that should have been like second nature to him, because there was that sting in his ear and her body against his, and he was . . . short-circuiting.
Because, of course, utilizing the hot tub out on their patio was an excellent idea. Such an excellent idea that he wasn’t sure why it hadn’t occurred to him already. If their rooms had cameras in them, that was one thing. People who bugged rooms, in Jonas’s experience, rarely bugged outside areas as well, because the quality of received sound was so inconsistent.
That all flashed through him, the way it should. But what he was really thinking about was the fact that Bethan was . . . playing with him.
As if that were what was important here.
And he couldn’t seem to think about anything else as she spun around, executing a delightfully girlie sort of spin that belonged in the kind of romantic movies he didn’t watch. It brought home how lithe and pretty she was. How perfectly shaped—and not just to run missions or carry heavy things or decisively end attempts to assault her.
She was graceful, as tough as she was lovely, and Jonas should never, ever have touched her. Because now that he had, he couldn’t seem to shove her back where she belonged. He couldn’t seem to access that space in his head where he could gloss right over how beautiful she was every day, and focus only on what she could do as part of the Alaska Force team.
Bethan grabbed his hand, tugging him with her, and it took him a moment to process the sound she was making while she did it.
Giggling.
Bethan Wilcox was giggling, which in any other circumstance he would have taken as clear evidence that the world was ending. He had to remind himself that she was in character. She was playing this flirty, giggly role to the hilt, and he knew that meant that he should be doing the same.
His job was all he had. All he was. So why wasn’t he doing it?
This was the trouble with all those feelings he’d told her with such confidence he didn’t have. He didn’t want any part of them. This confusion. These signals canceling each other out, so he couldn’t entirely tell if he was playing her lover, or if he only wanted to be her lover when he shouldn’t, or why it seemed he had to choose between that and the capacity to do his freaking job the way he should.
It was that last part that got through to him, finally. He didn’t actually slap himself across the face, because that would hardly play well on camera for whoever was watching. But he followed her willingly enough as she tugged him into the master bedroom, flicking on lights as she went, then led him out onto the patio and the hot tub that waited there.
Jonas waited until she turned on the jets, then pulled her close, getting his face near enough to hers.
Near enough that it made him think that kissing her again was a great idea, when he knew better. Handle yourself. “There’s another camera in the bedroom.”
“The patio looks clear,” she responded, apparently not hearing the growl in his voice.
And they both grinned widely at each other, as if they were whispering words of sex and devotion.
She ran back inside, still giggling madly, calling out something about towels. Merrily.
While she did, Jonas stood on the edge of the patio with the room at his back, looking over the lights of Santa Barbara far below. He shot off a text to command center in Alaska, looping in the rest of their local team.
Our suite suddenly has eyes on it, he texted. Two rooms so far. Can someone hack that feed?
There was a pause, and then Oz texted back. On it.
Behind him, Jonas heard Bethan come back outside. He had to admire the way she tripped a little bit over her own two feet as if she were tipsy, when he knew she was no such thing. But he braced himself when she came closer, tipping herself against his back and sneaking her arms around his waist.
And he absolutely did not reflect, for even one second, on how good and right it felt to have her there, where she also fit entirely too well.
He held his phone where she could see the screen and kept typing.
Tell me where the feed originates, but don’t cut it yet, he wrote. I want to know what angles they have on this suite.
He let Bethan do her thing, telling himself it was like a trial by fire and he’d passed every one of those yet. With flying colors, thank you. She rocked a little bit with her arms around him, as if she were making him dance with her. As if she were coaxing her always busy, always on the phone lover to set it aside for a second to pay attention to her. Jonas could envision the scene she was setting all clearly in his head.
But feeling it was something else.
And he wanted to rage. He wanted to shove her away from him. Every second she touched him it was worse, and he’d known that for years now, hadn’t he? He’d woken up in Germany wishing he hadn’t. The body he relied on was a mess, and the heart he’d given up on when he was still a kid was a disaster in his chest, and while he needed the former to do the only thing he was any good at, he wanted no part of the latter. Ever.
He’d thought, No. None of that.
He’d ordered her sent away, having no idea that she would take what had happened to him—with him—as some kind of calling. He’d forbidden himself to look her up in the intervening years. He’d never so much as asked after her.
No one was more surprised than Jonas when Isaac had flashed her face up on the screen in the lodge for the usual Alaska Force new-member vote.
He’d thought that was as bad as it could get.
He should have known better.
Because he was waiting for Oz to hack into the video feed, aware that the very existence of those cameras indicated that there was a distinct threat. More, it showed that all this pretending at a family wedding had been the right thing to do, no matter how odd and disconnected it had felt these past few days. He was keenly aware of those things, the way he should have been.
But all he could really think about was the soft weight of her breasts against his back. The scent of her that already haunted him, that he couldn’t imagine getting any worse until she made his head spin. But then there was the heat of her. The shape of the impression she made against his back, like he was changing his form to fit hers.
She made him feel like he was drunk, a state he had never experienced and never would. Still, he’d watched enough drunk people to get the idea. He felt the way they’d always looked. As if his head were fuzzy. As if his legs didn’t quite work beneath him.
As if she were leaving her mark on him, so hot and right that it would be visible from space.
The screen of his mobile lit up, and Jonas felt like breaking out into a chorus of hallelujahs.
He did not.
Two feeds, Oz texted. One takes in your living room. The other is focused on the bedroom.
What’s the sight line out the sliding doors in the bedroom? Jonas texted back.
Zero, was the reply. It’s all bed and bathroom and what looks like a walk-in closet.
Jonas could feel Bethan’s body tighten at that, as if she were processing how best they could use it. But another text came in then.
Key point, Oz texted. It’s a local feed. I traced it to the house you’re in.
Jonas’s body shifted, the way it always did, into combat readiness. He felt Bethan do the same. And if he was pathetically grateful that he wasn’t ruined forever by feelings, he kept that to himself.
En route to perimeter, Rory texted. Backup will be on hand in approximately twenty minutes if needed.
Roger that, Jonas texted back.
He shoved his phone into his pocket and waited for Bethan to let go of him. But she didn’t.
“We don’t know if there are physical eyes on us,” she murmured, and it was like torture. Her lips moving against his back. He could feel them. What was he supposed to do with that?
Especially because she was right. It was dark. All kinds of things could be lurking in the dark.
He turned to face her, though that wasn’t better. All it did was create a new host of problems, especially when she slid her arms around his neck.
“I want to find where these feeds are originating,” he muttered. His hands found her hips a little too easily, too naturally. But if anyone was looking at them, they would look like lovers in an intimate, private dance. That was the point, he reminded himself.
“I want to know what changed,” Bethan replied.
He lifted his head enough so he could see her expression.
“There weren’t cameras this morning,” she said, though she looked dreamy. Nothing like the highly trained operative she was, and he should have had absolutely no reaction to it. She was doing her job. The way he should have been doing his. “What happened today that we became a threat?”
“Good question.”
Jonas smoothed his hand over her hair. Standing like this, not kissing her and not rushing to get inside her, felt a little too much like battering himself with information he really didn’t want. Like the way she fit him. He couldn’t get past it. It was too easy to hold her. His hands liked being right where they ended up, wrapped around her hips like she was his.