“But she’d have to sleep with you,” Yale pointed out. “See, that has to be a deal breaker for her right there.”

Arthur choked. “Don’t you boys ever have a sense of limits?”

“It’s totally all right, Arthur,” Cate assured him, as she thumped him on the back. “I’ve trained puppies before.”

That set the whole group laughing yet again. Harm leaned back, as stuffed as everyone else, confounded by the teasing and jovial atmosphere around the table. It seemed impossible that one of them was a thief, had sabotaged millions of dollars-and lives.

Cate was the one who’d initiated the easy dinner conversation, enabled it, played to each of the guys as if they were keys on her favorite piano. She wasn’t a manipulator, he mused. It wasn’t like that. She didn’t remotely come across as having any agenda-beyond wanting them all to enjoy her cooking. But she had some people skills that put Harm in downright awe. She’d brought down the tension level in his guys by about 900 percent.

“Where are you from, Cate?” he asked, when he could finally get a word in.

“Actually…nowhere.” Just as she had through the whole meal, she spotted Arthur’s empty cup and poured him a cup of coffee, then pushed the wine toward Ivan. “I came from a family of five. Mom, Dad, three sisters. All of us closer than peas in a pod. But there was a fire-we lost my mom and dad. I was the middle sister, around eight when it happened.”

“Hey. That’s seriously awful.” Yale dropped his flirtatious tone, at least for that second.

“Yeah, it was,” Cate agreed, in that clear-bell voice of hers. “We had no family who could take us in, so the court took over, split us up. We were fostered three different places. It was bad enough to lose both parents, but then we were ripped from each other, as well. At least we all had decent caregivers, and we wrote each other-but we had to be grown-up before we found a way to actually see each other again. Still, we e-mail each other a couple times a week.”