He parked in front of the tenement building off Inman Square where Carine Winter had rented an apartment in late spring, a move that had caught her family and friends by surprise. She didn’t belong in Cambridge. She belonged up in Cold Ridge, New Hampshire. She should be taking pictures of birds and mountain scenes, living in her little log cabin in the shadows of the ridge that gave her hometown its name. She was a nature photographer, a good one. But she’d had her life turned upside down in February when her fiancé walked out on her, and she’d made up her mind that she needed to live in the city.

Once a Winter made up her mind, that was usually it.

Tyler North—her ex-fiancé and one of Hank’s closest friends—had tried to warn him about the Winter siblings, not that Ty had heeded his own advice. He’d fallen for Carine after some smugglers had shot at her last November, and then he’d asked her to marry him. They’d known each other all their lives, but the prospect of Tyler North and Carine Winter actually marrying had taken everyone by surprise.

No one need to have worried. Ty pulled the plug a week before the wedding. He still insisted it wasn’t cold feet—he said he’d come to his senses in the nick of time. He couldn’t marry Carine. She’d lost her parents when she was three and wanted to lead a peaceful life, and Tyler North wasn’t a peaceful man.

But now Hank had to suffer for his friend’s bad behavior, too. It had put Antonia at arm’s length from him for months. Only recently had Hank managed to get her not to think about her broken-hearted sister when she looked at him. It didn’t matter that Antonia had known Tyler even longer than he had—they’d shared a military career. They’d performed missions together.

“The Winters are thick as thieves,” Ty had once tried to explain. “Don’t let their bickering fool you. Hurt one, you’ve hurt them all. They’re about as hard-bitten and stubborn as anyone you’ll ever meet.”

It was true. When it came to being hard-bitten and stubborn, the only one who rivaled the Winter sisters, their brother, Nate, and Gus, the uncle who’d raised them, was Tyler North. He’d grown up in Cold Ridge and still called it home, although he was a master sergeant in the air force, a nearly twenty-year pararescue veteran. Ty had seen it all, and he’d done it all.

Except marry Carine Winter.