He didn’t seem to expect her to answer. He stepped down onto the grass, browned from the long summer, and it struck her that he looked taller than she remembered. He had on khakis, a dark polo shirt and running shoes, but there was nothing casual about him. He had that straight spine of a military man and the power demeanor of a U.S. senator, even if he wasn’t one yet. He wasn’t a man who took a lot of b.s. From anyone. Ever. And he had to know, she thought, that that was exactly what he was getting from her. She was skirting the truth, hedging, dodging, lying. And she didn’t much like herself for it, no matter her excuses and rationalizations.

His vivid blue eyes could be so kind and tender—she’d seen them that way. But they weren’t that way now. They were calculating, questioning, alert, making her wonder again what all Carine had told him.

“My sister said I was here?”

“Not in as many words. I had to get Ty to fill in the gaps.”

Antonia almost choked. “He’s not in Cambridge with her—”

“He’s in Florida. He says Gus’ll kill him the minute he sets foot back in New England.”

It was only a slight exaggeration. Antonia sighed. “I don’t get it. Gus wanted to kill him for asking Carine to marry him—now he wants to kill him for not marrying her.”

Hank managed a half smile, without letting up on his intensity. “Don’t try to make sense of it.”

She waved a hand and picked the last of the cobweb off her arm. “I stopped trying to make sense of anything to do with Tyler North a long time ago. Why were you whistling ‘Heigh Ho’?”

“I didn’t want to sneak up on a woman alone on an island.”

“Good thinking.” She resisted an urge to glance back at her knife stabbed into the sand behind the rosebush. “I suppose a bad guy could whistle a cheerful tune to put me off guard—”

“I’m not a bad guy.”

His words were so direct, so unexpected, Antonia had to catch her breath. Despite her efforts not to, she thought of the instant messages, the whispers in the garage, the curtains billowing in the breeze. Maybe no one was stalking her. Maybe she was overreacting to a few odd coincidences because of Hank. Because she was falling for a retired air force officer, a national hero, a Massachusetts Callahan, a likely United States senator—a man who’d lost a wife and a child, who’d lived a lifetime before she’d even met him. Hank Callahan could easily overwhelm the life she’d carefully built for herself day by day, year by year.

And none of that even took into account his longstanding friendship with the man who’d broken her sister’s heart.