by Megan Crane
Bethan thought of the other woman in that battered old structure. Her bruised, determined face. “It’s always a possibility. But that has to be how they did it. And from a distance, because otherwise we would have made the tail.”
Isaac considered her for a moment, then turned his gaze to Oz. “You think you can narrow down these identities anytime soon?”
“It might take me a little while,” Oz admitted, as if it hurt him.
“Consider it a number one priority,” Isaac said.
Then the three of them left Oz to it, walking back out into the hall that led to the command center, Isaac’s office, and down around the corner to the kitchen and mess hall.
“I have a developing situation.” Isaac inclined his head in the direction of the command center. “Is there any reason we can’t postpone our debrief until tomorrow?”
“That depends on how quickly Oz finds something,” Jonas said.
“But in the meantime, there’s no reason we can’t take a closer look at Carter’s legitimate enterprises,” Bethan added. “I think it’s pretty unlikely that he mixes streams, but you never know.”
“I’ll call you all in when my situation resolves itself,” Isaac said. “But I have a feeling we’re looking at tomorrow.”
Jonas only nodded.
And Isaac slid a look his way then. That was all he did. He didn’t throw Jonas back against the wall. Jonas didn’t take a swing.
Still, Bethan tensed as if she were suddenly in the middle of a bar brawl.
“You enjoy that wedding?” Isaac asked him.
“I always enjoy observing rituals,” Jonas replied. “From my usual distance.”
Bethan laughed as if that could dispel the tension. “Except you weren’t distant. You were my date. My parents approved of you.”
Jonas merely shifted that dark glare of his from Isaac to her. But all she did was rock back a bit on her heels and smile wider.
“They approved of him?” Isaac asked. “Ouch.”
“I executed the mission parameters,” Jonas said. Fiercely, for him, when he was in stone-cold mode. “Appropriately.”
“It’s true,” Bethan told Isaac. “He was so charming that my brother-in-law considers him a bro.”
Isaac laughed at that, reaching over to wallop Jonas on the arm, something Bethan was fairly certain would get anyone else killed. “Good thing we’re debriefing tomorrow, then. You can run back into the woods, freeze that leftover charm right out, and beat all the humanity right out of you.”
He was still laughing as he wandered off down the hall, his too-smart border collie, Horatio, emerging from his office as he passed, eyeing Bethan and Jonas suspiciously, then following him.
Bethan stayed where she was, there in yet another hallway with Jonas glaring fire at her.
“Well,” she said.
“Well,” he replied.
It was tempting to read a whole lot into that. But all she saw was that wall coming down, as if there’d never been anything else.
But she couldn’t help herself. “I know that if I say anything at all you’ll fall all over yourself to tell me that you were in character. That none of it meant anything more than aiming at your mission parameters, like you said.” She held up a hand when it looked like he was going to speak. “I want to thank you, that’s all.”
That muscle in his lean cheek flexed. “You have nothing to thank me for.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” She wanted to reach out to him. To take his hands in hers the way she would have this morning. The way she had yesterday.
The way she had again last night when they got back to their suite and made sure there were no cameras on them, when she’d led him into that big wide bed.
And she could tell that he was remembering the same thing.
But this was Alaska. They were back at work, back to being themselves, and there were no blurred lines in Fool’s Cove.
No matter how blurry she, herself, might feel.
“I expected my sister’s wedding to be an inconvenience,” Bethan told him. “But it turned out to be a complicated sort of wonder, all its own, and a large part of that was having you with me.”
“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 back to 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 of girls’ night people 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 watch Bridesmaids, claiming that I could view it as the definitive text on female friendships.”
“Really?”
“My people skills might be remedial,” Kate said dryly. “But somehow, I have a hard time imagin
ing Mariah McKenna succumbing to food poisoning in the middle of the street.”
There was nothing to do but laugh at that, because their friend was polished and elegant no matter where she was. Even if it was here, in the dark of winter.
“Does Templeton know that you pretend to be less capable of human interaction than you really are?” Bethan asked as they approached the new version of the Water’s Edge Café, after the old version had been burned down last summer. Bethan had personally helped rebuild it with the rest of the community.
“Only when it suits him,” Kate said, biting back a grin. But that cop’s cool gaze landed on Bethan then. “But I’m not the only one around here who pretends to be a little bit less than human. It’s not the act that matters half so much as why.”
Bethan stared back at her, willing her face blank. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t,” Kate agreed. “But I bet it was a really fun dance all the same.”
Inside Caradine’s new café, which was brighter than before and far more open and welcoming—and she would include the owner in that, despite the fact she still clattered her pans around, threatened tourists, and issued lifetime bans for minor infractions at least three times a week. Bethan found Mariah and Everly hunched over their laptops at their preferred table, as usual. As if Grizzly Harbor were a big city with coffeehouses people liked to use as their offices.
And she told herself it was because she found herself missing her sister and all her sister’s manic, alien, and somehow endearing friends, but Bethan didn’t feel truly back home until she sank down at a table and tried to place an order with Caradine that was ignored with a rude gesture, because Caradine served what she wanted.
Later, as the light began to change outside, she and Everly walked through town, up the hill, then followed the trail out to the hot springs. The town had long ago built a few cabins around the naturally occurring springs so that they could keep some lockers there—cubbies, more like— so no one had to carry wet bathing suits or soaked towels around in the worst of the winter weather. Tonight it was the women-only hour when they arrived, so they nodded around at the familiar faces there and sank down into their corner of the large, hot pool.
“How does she know she’s pregnant again?” Nellie Oberlin, who worked in the Fairweather, Grizzly Harbor’s dive bar and greasy grill, was asking.
“She claims she knew upon conception,” Madeleine Yazzie, who could usually be found at the front desk of the Blue Bear Inn, confided, her red beehive rising from above the water like a shark’s fin. “Don’t get caught up on that. Get caught up on this: once again, no one knows who the father is.”
Bethan and Everly exchanged a look.
“The continuing adventures of Maria and her hipster boyfriend plus Luz with her fisherman husband,” Everly murmured almost reverently, her eyes sparkling. “Why can’t I get enough of it?”
Bethan shook her head as the hot water bubbled around her. “At a certain point, isn’t it time to accept that everyone is sleeping with everyone and stop pretending that there are two separate couples?”
“But then you can’t stand around in the middle of a public festival, intensely discussing your sex lives.” Everly grinned. “Where’s the fun in that?”
Maria and Luz, who had both been pregnant at the same time once already—and apparently unable to determine paternity—were the closest thing Grizzly Harbor had to a soap opera. Especially because the two of them and their apparently interchangeable men seemed determined not to drift off into quiet obscurity or part from one another. They lived off the grid halfway up the mountain and were apparently still swapping partners, and more babies were on the way.
Bethan had no idea why that made her feel so cheery.
Afterward, soaked so warm that she half thought she was back in California, she and Everly walked back down to the docks to catch a ride back to Fool’s Cove. Because someone was always heading one way or the other.
“I’m glad you enjoyed the wedding,” Everly said as they waited for Benedict and Blue to load up the boat. “I know this might not be a popular opinion these days, while everybody’s wandering around canceling everybody else, but I think family can be a good thing. That it’s worth building bridges if you can. I don’t think we’re supposed to go through life with people who agree with everything we say and do and are always easy to get along with.”
“It was nice to be pleasantly surprised,” Bethan agreed.
When they landed back at Fool’s Cove, she headed back to her cabin.
Once inside, she stripped out of her utilitarian clothes a lot more quickly than she normally did. She’d gotten too used to dresses and sandals, clearly. She’d become far too accustomed to her hair down.
It was April, and certainly not as cold as it could be, but after a week in California she felt chilled anyway. She stoked the fire, so the cabin would be extra toasty. She started the fire out on her private deck to heat up her hot tub, thinking she might enjoy another long soak, this time with only the stars as company. Then she padded around, changing into her coziest, most luxurious pair of pajamas. They had been a Christmas present from Ellen one year, in a creamy cashmere. The bottoms rode low on her hips and the sweet little top tended to droop over one shoulder. But they felt like a hug, and Bethan opted not to think too much about why she might need one.
She was thinking about making herself a cup of tea when there was a knock on her cabin door.
For moment, she stared at the door, because no one came here. She had never encouraged visitors once, not as long as she’d been here.
She glanced at her phone, because surely the only reason someone would actually come and physically seek her out was if she’d missed an important call. But there was nothing on the screen. She was tempted to grab one of her weapons, but she knew better. No one turned up in Fool’s Cove unannounced, so whoever was on the other side of the door had to be friendly.
But that didn’t mean she had to be.
She went over and cracked open the door, already scowling.
Something that didn’t change when she saw who was standing there. Jonas.
And something in her . . . cracked. Shattered, maybe.
But she couldn’t seem to make herself stop and worry about that. She stepped back, opening the door wider, but she didn’t invite him in. But she didn’t tell him to stay out, either.
He paused, there on the threshold, as if he wasn’t sure what he was doing there, either.
Then he came inside, his movements almost jerky, which made her stomach flip.
Because this was Jonas, who moved like silk. Like a whisper. Like a ghost.
He brushed past her, and she closed the door behind him, because that was what people did. Then her head was spinning and her knees felt strange, so she leaned back against the door she’d closed and stared at him.
Her heart started to clang, hard, against her ribs.
Because he was so male. He was a wicked blade of a man, thrust into the middle of the one place she was soft.
He was in all black, as ever, and her cabin was a festival of pastels. She couldn’t imagine anyone alive would be more out of place here than he was. He seemed to look around him for a very long while. And only when she thought her heart might actually have made a dent on the inside of her chest did he turn back around and face her.
Unreadable as always.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, and she couldn’t do anything with her voice. It was too soft, too thready.
Too obvious.
But Jonas was staring at her like it hurt. Like she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t quite handle this. Whatever this was. And while she watched, his expression changed.
She thought that he looked tortured. Wrecked.
And even as something in her reveled in that, because it so closely matc
hed how she felt, the rest of her despaired.
“Jonas,” she said again. More urgently. “Why are you here?”
And when he spoke, his voice was as ravaged as his gaze. “Damn you,” he said, a dark lash that swelled in her like a kiss. “I don’t know.”
Eighteen
Jonas should not have been so surprised by Bethan’s cabin.
He’d had enough clues in California. She might have put on a good show about dresses and hair care being unlike her, but she’d taken to it all easily enough.
Maybe he should have expected that the woman who had once held him through the night would make her soft heart an actual, physical place. That she couldn’t possibly keep all of that inside her. That she might have gone through Ranger School, but she was still the same person she’d been throughout the longest night of his life.
He hadn’t meant to come here. Jonas had spent the hours since he’d last seen her in the lodge, trying to do exactly what Isaac had suggested he would. He’d alternated running laps up the most punishing trail he knew with cold plunges to reset his nervous system, but he couldn’t seem to find his equilibrium. No matter how many rounds he did.
He’d headed down to the gym to throw some weight around, but all it had done was make the gnawing, aching thing in him worse.
After he’d accepted that he couldn’t conquer it with iron, he’d eaten dinner in the mess hall in the hope carbs and sugar could settle what sweat couldn’t. But he hadn’t had it in him to listen to the usual off-color jokes and typical banter that passed for conversation with the Alaska Force crew.
Clearly he needed to be alone.
But sitting in the dark of his cabin only made it all worse.
When he’d decided he needed to go for a walk, he’d pretended he didn’t know where he was heading.
And then he’d hoped she wouldn’t let him in.
But she looked like dessert.
She was wearing something that looked too soft, too much like a cloud, to be sleepwear. Her hair was down again, and the buttery light that filled her cabin brought out all the shades of red that he’d spent a significant amount of time pretending he didn’t notice down there in the California sun.