“My sister’s wedding,” she repeated.
Bethan blinked but didn’t otherwise betray any kind of reaction, and still Jonas had the ridiculous urge to dive in front of her as if he were saving her from a bullet. As if she would let him save her from anything.
Isaac’s gaze turned considering, which didn’t bode well. “Your sister, Ellen, is getting married on your family’s estate in the middle of April. You’re looking at me like you didn’t know that.”
“Oh, I know it.” Bethan’s voice was smooth then. Easy. “You don’t know my sister. There has been no topic of conversation other than her wedding since she met the lucky groom six years ago. I’ve kind of been hoping that I’ll be unavailable, on some mission far, far away, tragically unable to attend.”
“Alaska Force is always here to stand as a buffer between you and your civilian life,” Isaac said with a laugh.
And not for the first time, it hit Jonas that Isaac was . . . different now. Truly a different man now that he and Caradine had stopped sneaking around and could have whatever relationship they wanted to have right out in the open. It had made Isaac more open, too.
Jonas personally couldn’t understand that kind of thing. Not the appeal, and certainly not the execution.
“My sister’s great, don’t get me wrong,” Bethan said judiciously. “I’m delighted that she and Matthew found each other. Really. It’s just that if you pictured the most over-the-top, fussy, dramatic wedding of all time, you would have to multiply that by approximately twelve million to even approach the level of the monster my sister and mother have planned. And that’s not even getting into the fact my father is using the entire enterprise as an opportunity to impress his buddies from work. Who are, as noted, a Who’s Who of some of the most powerful men in the nation.”
She smiled then, a little bit wickedly, in Jonas’s estimation, as the roomful of men gazed back at her in varying degrees of horror.
“I had to pretend to be a regular person at my sister’s wedding,” Griffin offered. “It wasn’t the worst thing in the world.”
“Not everybody has to pretend to be human,” Templeton retorted.
“If you did, you all would have failed at my wedding,” Blue shot back.
But Jonas was looking at Bethan. He could see the faint hint of color on her cheeks and remembered, against his will, the few self-deprecating things she’d said about her family over the years. Stitched together, none of them painted the picture of particularly healthy family dynamics.
Then again, who was he to judge such a thing? He’d cut his teeth on dysfunction.
And those were his happy memories.
“This provides us with an opportunity,” Isaac said. “We could potentially walk right in the front door for a change.”
“And by we, you mean me,” Bethan said. “The front door in question being my parents’ house. The one I’ve succeeded in not entering since I was eighteen.”
“We can always come up with different strategies if this is a no-go for you,” Isaac said, still studying her a little too closely. Looking for weaknesses, as always.
There was no reason Jonas should hate that.
“Not at all.” Bethan sounded the way she always did, Jonas thought. Steady, sure of herself, and committed. It had never occurred to him before that it was as much a mask as anything else. “I’m trying to adjust my thinking on this, from it being the one event I most wanted to avoid this year to something that will be significantly more enjoyable if I have a job to do. Other than, you know.” She looked around the room and smirked. “My primary job, which is maid of honor.”
“You were going to not attend your sister’s wedding, where you’re the maid of honor?” Templeton asked. “That’s cold-blooded.”
He sounded impressed.
Beth was gazing back at Isaac. Serenely. “The issues we have to consider are that my parents’ house has excellent security that will no doubt be on high alert. My sister’s fiancé’s family isn’t military, but they are wealthy. Between the two of them, there’s no way they’re not going to have the place locked down. And that’s not even getting into which guests will come with Secret Service details.”
“We’ve handled a lot worse,” Griffin protested.
“I have no doubt that we can handle it,” Bethan agreed. “But if we go ahead and handle it our way, there’s no need to go to the front door. If we want to go through the front door, we need to come up with a softer, gentler footprint than usual.”
Oz pulled up pictures of the kind of house that as a kid Jonas had assumed was simply a made-up Hollywood thing. A gorgeous, sprawling, gleaming white affair, with a tiled red roof that screamed Southern California. So many graceful arches and different wings that he found it hard to imagine that anyone had been a kid there. It sat at the top of a hill, surrounded on all sides by rolling fields, cypress trees, and vineyards. And in the distance, the Pacific Ocean.
Paradise, in other words. He didn’t know why that bothered him. Why it mattered to him one way or the other how Bethan had grown up.
As if it mattered at all what different worlds they came from.
“Home sweet home,” Bethan said, irony in her voice. She crossed her arms over her chest and looked like she was perfectly at her ease. But he remembered that raw expression on her face earlier. And he could see the difference. Maybe he’d always seen the difference. Maybe that was the trouble. “There will be too many guests for all of them to stay on the property, but if I had to guess, I would suspect that the highest-profile guests will probably take over that far left wing and the guesthouses. If you’re looking for all five to be in the same place while not in the middle of the wedding ceremony, that’s probably where they’ll be.”
“Do you rate a guesthouse?” Jonas heard himself ask.
When she looked at him, there was no trace of the woman he’d seen on the beach. She was pure soldier, completely contained, and it was his problem that he liked both versions of her, whether or not he wanted to admit it.
“I doubt very much that the black sheep of the family is considered high-profile enough to rate the stellar guest accommodations,” she said.
“You’re the black sheep of your family?” Isaac asked, with a laugh. “How is that possible?”
“My father’s an air force man,” Bethan said with a grin. “He would forgive me anything . . . except the army.”
The briefing quickly devolved into the usual ribbing about which branch of the military was the best—a pointless conversation as far as Jonas was concerned, because it was obviously the navy—and when it died down, Bethan was grinning.