Sergeant's Christmas Siege

by Megan Crane

  “It’s just Christmas,” Kate muttered out loud to herself. To the fog. To whatever was happening inside her. “All you have to do is get through it.”

  She forced herself to stop gaping at the pretty village posed there before her like her very own Christmas carol, complete with the musical accompaniment from the rising tide at the water’s edge. She started walking up the hill, wishing there were some way she could stop feeling that terrible hollowness that always marked this time of year for her.

  She would have been perfectly happy to stay numb. To feel nothing at all, the way she did the rest of the year.

  People loved to talk about the power of family. And they never seemed to talk about it more than when Christmas approached, as if the presence of an Advent calendar made them forget what world they lived in. As if hokey songs and a fat man in a red suit erased all the terrible things that went on all around them, all the time.

  Kate hadn’t grown up with Christmas. Not the way people talked about it, anyway. There had been no tree, decorated or otherwise. Certainly no gifts. Her father—­a term Kate only used because it was biologically correct—­had never trucked with any notion of holidays. Christmas was a workday like any other out there in the family compound, where their version of off-­the-­grid subsistence living in the frigid bush came with a whole lot of daily hard labor, regardless of the lack of daylight. And on Christmas, that workload came with an extra helping of unhinged ranting.

  What Kate knew about Christmas she’d learned from her father’s bitter rants against capitalism, materialism, commercialization, and the sick and bloated masses who were too stupid to see the truth that had led him and his brothers away from all that corruption to make their own world as they liked it.

  When she’d finally escaped that tangled mess, it had been under cover of the darkness that characterized this time of year. On a subzero Christmas Day up north. Before that day fifteen years ago, Christmas had always been the horror of what her father would do and how long he would make them all sit there, cold and hungry, while he screamed and yelled and carried on about a world none of the kids growing up in the compound could remember. Then it had been the longest day of her life, when she’d escaped all of that. And then, later, it had been the difference between what Kate knew Christmas was and what everyone out there in the so-­called real world claimed it was while manic and overtly cheerful.

  It all led to that hollowness inside her, which made her suspect that her childhood had broken something crucial within her. And that she would always be an alien, unable to feel the things normal humans did. Especially where family was concerned.

  Her solution had always been to work. Everyone else wanted the holidays off, but not Kate. Never Kate. It was one of the reasons, she was sure, that she’d advanced as quickly as she had through the ranks.

  And so she had no idea why, despite all of that, she still found herself susceptible to colored lights strung up on an evergreen tree. Candles and lanterns lighting up windows. And houses lit up against the smothering Alaskan night.

  She headed up the hill, making it to the wooden pathway that led toward the inn. She heard the sound of a door slamming in the distance. A dog barking. The hum of generators. The sea in the distance, surging against the rocks.

  And the sudden, bright splash of music and laughter when the door to the local bar swung open, spilling noise out into the street.

  Kate stopped where she was, several doors down, because she recognized the man who shouldered his way out into the night.

  Templeton.

  She watched her own breath against the night, escaping in a gust like she’d been socked in the stomach.

  He finished zipping up his coat, then jerked his gloves on. He lifted his head and stood there a moment, as if he were listening to all the same sounds of the town she was. He tugged his hat down on his head, turned, and headed off around the back of the bar. Then up the steep little hill that led to the next so-­called street.

  Kate didn’t question her instincts. She followed him.

  There wasn’t much to the village, but it was dark and the fog was only thickening, providing Kate with all the cover she could possibly need. Templeton moved silently for such a big man, and there was nothing loud or gregarious about him as he slipped through the night. The way he moved reminded her of the look she’d seen on his face when he’d first pushed his way into the café today. That leashed power that made him the man she’d read about in the files, not the performer she’d met at their interview.

  The contrast made her shiver.

  Kate followed him up the hill, then waited as he made his way to a house set back in the trees, away from the main clump of the village. She stayed where she was, some ways behind him and covered by the shroud of fog. She watched him as he knocked twice on the front door, then let himself in.

  One breath. Another. Then a third, and only then did Kate ease herself out from behind the tree she’d been waiting behind. She picked her way toward the house.

  She didn’t know what she expected to find. Or maybe she did know, she thought, when she peeked through the window and saw what was inside. She’d expected something out of her own childhood. Bare walls and hard floors, because possessions were a distraction, the mission was everything, and the more it hurt, the better.

  She blinked at her father’s voice wedged deep inside her, then focused on what was actually happening in the house before her.

  It looked comfortable. Cozy, even. She was looking into a living room that opened up into a cheerful kitchen behind it. The walls were filled with bookshelves, not machine guns, swastikas, or any of the other weird and creepy things she’d have expected. And in the kitchen, Templeton was kicked back against one of the counters, a bottle of beer in his hands, looking relaxed and at ease.

  Not that lazy watchfulness he’d put on for her benefit in the café earlier, but actually relaxed. She was shocked at what a difference it was even though she’d known he was performing.

  It looked like the beginnings of the making of dinner. A cozy, domestic scene. Another man was chopping up spices and vegetables and adding them to a pot, the way he held himself and his body language—­like the very precise way he wielded his knife—­suggesting that he was another elite, special forces kind of guy like Templeton.

  The other person in the room was a stunningly gorgeous, elegant blond woman, who wore a black turtleneck sweater that even from this side of the window Kate could tell was made of the finest cashmere. There was a hint of gold at her wrist where the sleeve fell back as she held a glass of wine. Her hair was tossed up into the kind of hairstyle that likely came with a fancy French word to describe it. She looked entirely too elegant for a remote fishing village clinging to the side of an Alaskan mountain.

  It took Kate a moment, but she knew who the woman was. Mariah McKenna, a former Alaska Force client turned main prosecution witness in a highly publicized upcoming trial against her rich and powerful former father-­in-­law. As Kate watched, Mariah leaned in to kiss the man at the stove’s jaw with all the possessive certainty of an established lover. And Kate wasn’t sure how she’d missed the fact that Mariah had very obviously started shacking up with the man who had to be Griffin Cisneros, former marine sniper, who’d been involved in foiling the kidnap and murder plot against Mariah this past spring.

  Just as Kate wasn’t sure why the sight of them as a couple made her heart kick at her a little, since Kate would certainly never start dating someone she was investigating. The very idea was absurd.

  Or the idea had seemed more absurd before today, anyway.

  The thing was, if Kate hadn’t known how deadly the two men in the kitchen were, she might have imagined she was looking in at a perfectly normal, unobjectionable evening among normal everyday friends. A glass of wine, a beer. A shared meal.

  Like regular people.

  Something in her fl
ipped over, and she backed away from the window, feeling flushed again. And disconcerted, somehow. As if something inside her had shifted out of place.

  Without Templeton’s big, confident form to follow, it took Kate a lot longer to make it back to the main stretch of town. But she did, and then she finally made her way to the Blue Bear Inn, which, except for a light on out front, looked dark and unwelcoming. When she got to the door, she found an envelope pinned to the wood with TROOPER scrawled across the front.

  Inside the envelope she found a note inviting her to make herself at home in whatever room she liked.

  Kate wasn’t surprised to find the front door to the inn unlocked, because this was about the worst place in the world she could think to rob. There was nowhere to go. Everybody knew everybody, and at this time of year, there was no getting away with any stolen goods. There was only huddling somewhere and waiting to be discovered.

  But that didn’t mean she was particularly thrilled to walk into a dark, unfamiliar building. She was relieved to find, when she pushed the door open, that there were a few solitary lights on inside, showing her a small reception area and a quintessentially Alaskan lounge area, complete with a cute little grizzly to one side of the fireplace. Kate took her time finding her way to a room, making sure to check all over the inn first, in case there were any lurking surprises. But everything was as it should have been, which meant that she could breathe easy when she found a room she liked. She took the key out of the lock to shut herself inside and made sure to pull the curtains tight so there was no possibility anyone could watch her the way she’d just watched Templeton and his friends.

  Only then did Kate allow herself to relax.

  She took off her uniform, carefully hanging it in the closet so it would look as crisp as possible in the morning. Though she might have to use the ancient-­looking iron she found there. She pulled her hair out of its tight, serviceable bun and rubbed her fingertips over her scalp, releasing the tension. She always packed a merino wool base layer in her go bag, because she never knew where she might have to spend the night or under what conditions, and she pulled it on now as pajamas. Her room had a hot plate and a couple of packages of Top Ramen, so she made herself a little bowl of noodles instead of eating one of the energy bars she kept stashed in her bag.

  She settled in on the four-­poster bed, slurping up ramen and writing down her impressions and thoughts on everything she’d discovered today. She charged her phone. She checked her messages and responded to her colleagues and her captain, making sure to note her location and schedule as much as humanly possible. Just to make sure she left a very clear trail while she was off investigating.

  When she opened the curtains and looked out the window later, the fog was so intense she couldn’t see more than a few inches, and she blew out a breath, happy she hadn’t found it necessary to attempt flight under these conditions. Just because she could fly—­and knew many other local pilots who would fly under any circumstances at all, as long as they had the fuel—­didn’t mean it was a good idea.

  Kate hadn’t escaped her childhood to go around unnecessarily risking her life now.

  The Blue Bear Inn was hushed. The town outside her windows was quiet. The dark and the fog muffled everything, so it almost felt as if Kate were suspended in space or lost in some kind of sensory deprivation tank, and she chose to find that relaxing. Not creepy.

  The old television propped up on the dresser in the corner had an ancient VHS player attached to it, so she picked one of the tapes sitting in a tidy stack beside it, stuck it in, and then climbed into her bed to watch a remarkably bad movie starring people she’d never heard of before.

  And as she drifted off, she congratulated herself, sleepily, for not thinking about Templeton.

  But her subconscious got the last laugh, because she dreamed about him.

  And not about the interview or all the things he’d adroitly, deliberately, failed to tell her.

  Oh no. Her subconscious treated her to an erotic tour of the man’s powerful body that felt so real that she woke up, her heart pounding, sweating all over, and with a slick heat between her legs.

  It was so real that she sat up straight, staring around the room in a panic, convinced that she’d somehow slipped, maybe gone off and gotten drunk somewhere and had actually brought suspected domestic terrorist Templeton Cross back to her room to do all the wild, acrobatic, deliriously wicked things she dreamed—­

  But no.

  Thank God, no.

  She was still alone. The inn was still as quiet all around her as it had been. Her watch told her it was four thirty, which meant she’d slept through much of the night.

  She kicked off her covers and lay there, ordering herself to stop the madness storming through her. To get her pulse under control. To go back to sleep. But the dream was so real she could feel his big, hard hands, streaking down her body to cup her butt, then pull her flush against his—­

  “Enough,” she ordered herself, her voice sounding scratchy there in the darkness of her room.

  But she couldn’t get back to sleep.

  When it finally got to around six—­long after Kate had given up and read through her notes again, then found herself scrolling through her phone, idly looking up the names of various members of Alaska Force online, to no avail—­she decided she’d had enough.

  Feeling jittery and over-­caffeinated when all she’d had was some of the weak, watery coffee she’d made there in the room, she pulled on what she needed to face the chilly Alaska morning hours before the sun was due to make an appearance. A few thin, technical layers, complete with a light strapped to her head. She laced herself into her hardy trail shoes and headed outside. If the maps she’d studied online were correct, there was a staircase that led up the hill to a lookout over the town. That seemed like a much safer option in the dark than trying her luck on a trail that could be actively treacherous. If not, she could always run up and down the main street until she worked off some of her excess energy.

  Because that dream still clung to her.

  She found the stairs and set off at a brisk jog, enjoying the slap of the cold morning against her face. The sound of her breath against the dark. The fog had thinned in some places, though the higher she climbed, thicker patches came in like clouds.

  The altitude and the incline made a nice challenge, and Kate picked up her speed, enjoying the physical exer­tion.

  And for a moment, in motion, in tune with her breath and the sound of her feet against the cold earth, Kate didn’t feel hollow at all. She didn’t feel alien.

  She felt very nearly whole.

  Kate was grinning with the sharp, sweet joy of that when she sensed someone coming toward her, hurtling down from the top in a liquid streak—­

  But he stopped. So precisely it was clear he hadn’t been hurtling at all but had been completely under control. And though she could see his breath dance against the light from her headlamp and his, he didn’t look winded.

  On the contrary, he looked beautiful. As if she’d conjured him up, straight out of those tangled, dirty dreams she’d had.

  For the first time in a very long while, Kate found herself incapable of speech.

  But Templeton had no such problem. His mouth moved into that endlessly wicked curve that she’d dreamed she’d tasted. That she’d dreamed had moved all over her body with lazy certainty and no apparent goal.

  “Good morning, Officer,” he drawled, lazy and lethal and much too smug, as if he knew.

  When he couldn’t possibly know. He couldn’t possibly see what her dream had done to both of them. He couldn’t possibly know how she felt. Or how completely her body was betraying her, even now. She hoped he chalked up all the heat she was putting out as the exertion, nothing more.

  But the way Templeton smiled, she doubted it.

  “Nice morning for a run,” he said.
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  That was all he said.

  It was her problem that all she heard was a sinful invitation.

  Four

  “Are you following me, Mr. Cross?”

  His trooper asked the question in her usual matter-­of-­fact, direct way, but Templeton could have sworn that there’d been something intriguingly molten and hot in her gaze just a moment before.

  Then again, it was possible he only wanted there to have been.

  Or liked that it existed, he corrected himself. Sternly. Because he didn’t want things he wasn’t going to let himself touch.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing,” he said mildly. “You should have come in last night. Griffin makes a mean chili. No need to lurk around at the windows, staring in like a lost puppy.”

  But if Kate was disconcerted that he knew she’d been following him around last night, she gave no sign. She charged up one step, then another. Then one more.

  Until she was at his eye level.

  And she made no move to switch off her headlamp, so he didn’t do a thing about his, either.

  “I’ll ask again,” she said, as if he were a naughty school­boy. Something else he probably shouldn’t have found hot. “Why did you choose to come out here this morning?”

  “Two things,” he drawled. He lifted one gloved finger. “First, everybody who runs around here runs these steps. This time of year it’s safer than the trail, unless there’s ice. But if there’s ice, nothing’s safe, so we all make choices. And second? If I was following you, Trooper Holiday, I’d be following you. And you wouldn’t know it unless I wanted you to.”

  “That sounds like a threat.”

  “I don’t make threats. I don’t really have to, if I’m honest.”

  “And why is that? Is it because your organization is in itself threatening?”