Noah turned to Dylan. “Did you teach her how to shoot?”
Dylan nodded. “She liked going with me to the shooting range. It was the only time it was just the two of us and she could talk things out.” Shrugging, he added, “I’ve become her big brother, I guess, and Kate tends to lecture her instead of listening. When Isabel went off to college, we were all she had. Their mother had just died. Kiera, the oldest, wasn’t available. Getting through a grueling residency had to be her focus.”
“Isabel didn’t take a gun to college with her, did she?” Nick asked.
“Of course not,” Dylan said. “But every time she came home on break she wanted to go to the shooting range, and since I’ve got to keep my skills up as chief of police, I took her. That’s when I would find out what was going on in her life,” he added. “Funny thing is, she hates guns, but she knows how to take them apart, clean them, put them back together, and shoot. Man, can she shoot,” he praised. “I also taught her how to defend herself, and I encouraged her to take a couple of self-defense classes. I kind of pushed her. I mean, come on,” he continued. “Look at her. Men are gonna hit on her. She needed to know how to protect herself.”
“All girls should know how to protect themselves,” Nick said. “I dread the day Samantha wants to date.”
“When will that be? When she’s forty?” Noah asked.
“That’s right,” Nick agreed.
“That gives you thirty-five years to worry about it,” Noah remarked.
Everyone laughed. Then Theo said, “I’m glad I don’t have to think about that. My biggest worry is how to get the twins to sleep at the same time.”
“I’m gonna tell you something, but you’ve got to keep it down. No cheering.” Nick made the statement. “Noah knows, but I haven’t told anyone else.”
“Okay, what is it?” Michael asked.
“Laurant’s pregnant.”
Everyone took turns congratulating him. Then Michael said, “That’s great . . . isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Nick said, smiling. “She had a hard time with the last pregnancy, and she knows I’ll worry, so she hasn’t told me yet.” He laughed then and said, “I’m not sure she’s ever going to tell me.”
“How did you find out?” Dylan asked.
“I’m an FBI agent. I’m trained to find the truth.”
“So, who told you?” Theo asked.
“I heard her on the phone. She was telling her brother, Father Tom. She thinks I’ll overreact and try to coddle her.”
“Will you?” Dylan asked.
He smiled. “Yes.”
“I thought you were gonna say something like, ‘FBI agents don’t overreact,’？” Michael said.
“What about you, Michael?” Theo asked.
“What? Overreact?”
“You know what I’m asking. Are you going into the FBI? I could use you in my office. You’d make a great federal attorney,” Theo said.
“Screw the attorneys,” Alec said. “FBI. Great benefits.”
“Such as?”
“Sometimes you don’t have to wear a suit, and they give you those cool jackets with big FBI letters on the back.” Nick grinned as though he had just sealed the deal.
“That’ll clinch it, all right,” Noah drawled.
“I took the exam,” Michael announced.
“And?” Nick pressed.
“Did all the interviews.”
“So? Are you or aren’t you?”
Michael smiled but didn’t answer. Although he had made his decision, he wasn’t ready to talk about it. His brothers understood what it meant to fight evil. They all fought it in their own way, but there were experiences he would never be able to share with them. Only his brothers in combat would ever know about those.
All his life he had followed a set path. His focus was razor-sharp. First college, then law school.
After taking the bar exam he had several offers. Any of them would have set him up for life, and yet his sense of duty led him in a different direction. Others might have thought he was being idealistic, but he couldn’t shake the notion that he had an obligation to contribute to a country that had given him so many blessings, and so he enlisted in the Navy and applied to become a SEAL.
The training was brutal, but it was exactly what he needed for what awaited him: villages turned to rubble, families torn apart with no hope of being reunited, death and destruction everywhere. The missions he was sent on showed him a side of humanity that enraged him and at the same time almost