Page 16 of Special Ops Seduction

“What’s the mission here?” Griffin asked coolly. “Are we trying to locate the scientist again? And if we do, where do we take him this time that he can’t be reached?”

“It’s also possible that the client made a deal with one of these guys,” Templeton said. “And we were just a delivery service.”

Jonas eyed him. “Then why would the client call us to report them missing?”

Templeton shrugged. “Because people suck?”

Isaac frowned at the screen. “Any of this is possible. That’s the problem. The ideal scenario would be if we could round up all five of them, get them in a room together, and ask a few questions.”

“Good luck with that,” Rory said, laughing.

But Oz and Isaac exchanged a look, and Jonas stood a little straighter.

“About that,” Oz said, a strange note in his voice. “As it happens, we’re about two weeks out from an event with all five of them on the same guest list.”

Isaac nodded, not really looking at anyone, which was weird. “Ordinarily we would figure out the appropriate parameters and send in a team without a second thought. But this is different. It’s... delicate.”

Jonas realized Isaac was looking at Bethan. Both he andOz were watching her closely. And the longer they did it, so did the rest of the room.

“I can already tell I’m not going to like this,” she said.

“It’s your sister’s wedding,” Isaac said in a gentle sort of way that still felt like a bomb.

Jonas tried to evaluate why that was. Maybe it was the fact that Bethan looked so surprised, as if she’d forgotten she had a sister. Or hadn’t planned on attending the wedding either way. Maybe it was that he’d forgotten she had a whole life outside Alaska Force that he’d gone out of his way not to know too much about. Then again, maybe he was the only one reading anything in her, because a quick glance around the room made it clear that everyone else was gazing at her expectantly.

“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, aWho’s Whoof 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 bywe, 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.”

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