“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 tore his heart out. He had learned to do his job without emotion, and yet it was his last mission that threatened to destroy his soul.
His full-time military life was behind him now, but he would never get the scenes of that day out of his head. In the hospital he’d had a lot of time to think about his future, and he decided that the FBI was a good fit for him.
Theo pulled him out of his dark thoughts. “Leave him alone,” he ordered the other brothers. “He’ll tell us he’s going to work in my office when he’s ready. He’s not gonna waste his law degree.”
“I do have an announcement, a serious announcement,” Michael said.
“Yeah? What’s that?” Alec asked.
“Under no circumstances are any of you to give Isabel your car keys.”
Everyone, including Dylan, laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Michael asked.
“Dylan told us about your drive here,” Noah explained.
“She wants to rent a car in Scotland,” Dylan announced.
“God help the Scots,” Nick said. “Maybe someone should warn them.”
“She should be all right,” Michael said. “They drive on the left side of the road over there, don’t they? Isabel already does that, so there won’t be any learning curve.”
After they stopped laughing, Noah said, “She can’t be that bad.”