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She was quiet for a moment as she digested this. “So tell me about them, about your brothers and sister. What are they like?”
Liam considered this. “Shane—he’s the oldest. He was the first to enter the Marine Corps, and stayed the longest. He rose through the ranks the hard way, starting out as a buck private and rising to the rank of colonel. He’d still be in the Corps if not for a domestic terrorist incident that happened a few years back. Shane was home for Christmas on leave—pretty rare for him. He was at the shopping mall with my sister the day after Christmas when a pipe bomb went off in a bookstore. Shane threw himself between the explosion and a woman who was seven months pregnant at the time. He suffered a brain injury—not debilitating, but bad enough for the Marine Corps to give him a medical discharge. Pretty devastating for him—the Corps was his home.”
Cate blinked rapidly, and Liam suspected she was moved by the story but didn’t want him to know it. He continued. “Shane knocked around for a couple of months afterward, unsure what he wanted to do with himself. Then he went into politics, heart and soul.” He couldn’t repress the pride he felt in his oldest brother when he said, “He’s Senator Shane Jones now.”
If Cate was the type to say “wow,” Liam knew she would have said it. Instead she said softly, “You must be as proud of him as I am of Angelina.”
“Yeah.”
“What about the next brother after Shane? Niall, yes?”
“Niall,” he confirmed. “I can’t really tell you what he does because none of us know. He spent four years in the Corps—same as Alec, me and then Keira. After he left the Corps he went into... I guess you could call it black ops, although that’s not really the name for it, and you didn’t hear it from me.”
“Black ops?”
“Covert operations on behalf of your government. But not something the government wants the world to know about. Deniable. Governments do it all the time. In fact, Zakhar carried out several covert operations in Colorado a few years back, when I was one of Princess Mara’s bodyguards.” Cate turned startled eyes on Liam. “Oh yeah,” he told her. “I can’t tell you the details, but trust me, they happened. All in the name of protecting Princess Mara.”
Including a fake kidnapping attempt on the princess led by none other than King Andre Alexei IV in order to test Trace McKinnon, he thought to himself. Including really kidnapping McKinnon and taking him by force to Zakhar.
But that was all water under the bridge. Only a very few people in the government knew what had happened. Officially deniable across the board.
Cate was silent for a minute, then said, “So what about Alec and Keira? I’ve met your sister—she was very sweet to me. And I’ve known your brother for almost a year—not to mention everything Angelina has told me about him. But she’s in love with him, so of course...”
Liam wanted to ask Cate—really wanted to ask Cate—about her own feelings for Alec. But he couldn’t figure out a way to ask that wouldn’t come across wrong. Instead he examined his conscience and said honestly, “Alec is...special. You probably already know that. I grew up both admiring him and competing with him. Sounds kind of strange, I know, but...anyway, I followed him into the Diplomatic Security Service not because I wanted to outdo him, but because I knew if it was right for him, it was right for me. Does that make sense?”
He glanced at Cate and caught her nod. “Working with Alec for six months guarding Princess Mara—that was a real privilege. I learned a lot from him—from McKinnon too, of course, but—”
“I’ve met Mr. McKinnon.”
“Yes, you said that this morning.”
“He was once your sister’s partner, isn’t that what Mr. D’Arcy said?”
“Yeah, funny how these things work out sometimes. McKinnon got tapped to guard Princess Mara because he’d once been a US marshal and because he spoke Zakharan like a native.”
“So tell me about Keira. I only met her the one time, but...as I said, she was very sweet to me. And I met her husband, too. He came to the safe house with Alec and Angelina last year.”
“Keira’s special, too. I didn’t realize just how much she meant to me until we almost lost her a few years back. That Edward Everett Hale quotation—the ‘I am one’ quote you said Alec told you? It applies to all of us, but in slightly different ways. Keira’s interpretation of what it means led her to take a bullet meant for another man, and she almost died as a result. As a matter of fact, the man whose life she saved was Ryan Callahan—the man D’Arcy is sending you to.”
