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“I want everyone to get to know you,” Alessandra told her groom.
“Sounds great,” he said.
What he said to Chay was, “Five brothers? Four sisters? Their husbands and wives and kids? I’ll be lucky if I come through it alive.”
Tanner not only came through it alive, he came through it with a new family.
Weeks before, when he and Alessandra were still in San Escobal, he’d figured the Wildes were high profile.
He’d nailed that for sure.
They were high profile.
They were also amazingly nice, interesting people.
Caleb was an attorney, but he had once led a very different life as an operative in a top- secret government outfit called The Agency. So had Jaimie’s husband, Zach, who also owned a rather specialized security outfit. Tanner had known both men by reputation and it was great to know them now as family. Matteo, who was also a lawyer like Caleb, had been drawn into Zach’s world some months ago. Now, he was a legal eagle in partnership with Zach.
The four of them—Tanner, Zach, Matteo and Caleb—settled into the study one evening with a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue, talked tradecraft, and ended up exchanging stories that made them laugh in a way only men who’d endured the things they had endured would find funny.
Luca was a builder. An architect. When Tanner mentioned he had a house he was thinking of expanding, Luca’s eyes lit.
“Tell me about this house,” he said, and hours later, he and Tanner were still huddling over sketches and plans.
Travis, the financial guru, ended up sputtering over something he read about interest rates in the Financial Times one morning at breakfast. He looked up, found them all rolling their eyes.
Everybody but Tanner.
“If you have a minute,” Tanner said, after the others had all wandered off, “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.” Travis’s expression was blank. “Hey,” Tanner said quickly, “forget that. I’m sure you don’t want to talk numbers when you’re on vacation—”
Travis grinned and put his arm around Tanner’s shoulders. “I always want to talk numbers, dude, but the rowdy bunch here is tired of listening to me. What would you like to know?”
And then there was Jake, who had left the air force not because he’d wanted to, but because he’d lost an eye on a mission and you couldn’t fly with only one eye. He had returned home wounded in spirit as well as in body. He and Tanner had gotten into a quiet conversation that had gone on for a couple of hours when actor Nick Gentry, Lissa’s husband, knocked at the partly closed door and asked if their pity party was open to newcomers.
Tanner looked up, eyes gone cold, only to hear Jake burst into laughter.
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Jake said, “old Nicholas here has a leg so bad it would probably make yours look good.”
Tanner scowled. Now that he thought about it, maybe he’d noticed Nick favoring one leg over the other, especially at the end of the day.
Nick grinned, put his foot up on the edge of a chair and reached for his cuff.
“Bet you ten bucks my scar’s nastier than yours.”
There was a brief hesitation. Then Tanner grinned back at him bent down and grabbed the cuff of his jeans.
“You’re on.”
Several bottles of beer later, they were still laughing and debating which of them had the sorriest story to tell.
“Men,” Lissa said, when she heard the howls drifting out of the library.
But her smile was filled with love, as were the answering smiles of Jaimie and Lissa and Alessandra.
It had taken Tanner all of five minutes for him to love all the Wildes.
Bianca…Bianca was a little different.
Beautiful. Well, all the sisters were beautiful. Smart. Again, nothing unusual for a Wilde woman.
