Sergeant's Christmas Siege

by Megan Crane

  “Unless, of course, the people coming after you have the exact same history.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Cross,” she said, biting off his surname like it was a weapon, because she wished it were. And that she could aim it at him because she wanted to take him out, and not because her body wanted things she had no intention of giving it. “I really do appreciate you coming so far on this, the first day of my unasked-­for and unwanted leave. Not only to goad me into completely forgetting who I am and acting in a manner both deeply unprofessional and personally horrifying but also, clearly, to go out of your way to make me feel insecure in my own home. You’re about as helpful as a December night in Juneau, aren’t you?” She nodded toward the example right there before them, on the other side of her windshield. “Dark early, dark late, dark all the time.”

  “You can look at it that way if you like,” Templeton drawled. “Or you could take your leave in Grizzly Harbor.”

  “What?” She blinked at him, because that didn’t make any sense. Like everything else this afternoon. “Why would I want to spend more time in Grizzly Harbor?”

  “Trooper. I know I spun your head around there, but you need to focus.” And Templeton laughed when she glared daggers at him. “You and I both know that you’re the best possible person to investigate the situation. And you can’t do it if you stay here. Where you’re also very likely at risk of actual, physical bodily harm. Whether you believe it or not. So come to Grizzly Harbor. Work with us.”

  “Work with you?” she repeated, as if he hadn’t been speaking English.

  “Unofficially, of course. We could use your help.” Kate had always been under the impression that men, as a whole, were bad at admitting they needed help with anything. Ever. But Templeton looked relaxed and unbothered. “And it turns out I feel pretty personally invested in keeping you alive. Why not kill two birds with one stone?”

  “I don’t kill birds, with or without stones. And I don’t work with questionable private military operators.”

  “Also,” Templeton continued conversationally, as if she hadn’t spoken, “I have every intention of kissing you again. A lot. Which is going to be hard to do if you’re all the way over here in Juneau. Or dead.”

  Kate’s head really was spinning, which was probably what he wanted.

  But she didn’t have time to do something about her spinning head. Or contemplate his astonishing offer. Because he was touching her again.

  She told herself it was panic that seized her then, ripping through her like another brush fire and dousing all those flames she’d thought she’d put out—­with kerosene. She pulled in a ragged breath, but then, belatedly, her brain asserted itself.

  Yes, he was touching her. Templeton’s big, callused hand was over hers on the gearshift between them. And he wasn’t taking liberties. He was carefully easing the car out of reverse and back into park.

  And later she would no doubt wish she hadn’t given herself away so easily, but right now all she could do was whip her hand out from under his like he was a hot burner on a stove.

  “Give me a list of pros and cons,” Templeton said, still sitting there like he planned to lounge around in the front seat of her car forever.

  So unhurried. So confident. So deeply sure that whatever it was he was doing, it was worth doing simply because he was doing it.

  Why was she thinking about how he was sitting? Again?

  “The pros and cons to what?” she clipped out at him. “If you mean your intention to kiss me a lot, there are no pros.”

  The look he gave her made that flush flare up all over again, and she had to force herself to unclench her hand when she realized how hard she was gripping the steering wheel.

  “Now, Kate,” he drawled. “Liars never prosper. Or so I heard one time while ambling past a church one Sunday afternoon on my way to engage in far more pleasurable activities.”

  She sighed. He grinned.

  “But in this case, I wasn’t asking you to tell us both lies about how much you liked kissing me. I already know. I was talking about you coming to work with Alaska Force for a little while. Which is less fun than kissing me, I’ll admit.”

  “It’s out of the question. Obviously.”

  “Why?”

  She didn’t understand why Templeton got to her like this, when no other man ever had. It had been bad enough out in Grizzly Harbor, when she couldn’t help feeling that Templeton had gotten the best of every situation she’d found herself in with him. But at least then she’d had a better understanding of what she was supposed to be accomplishing.

  Today she was off-­balance. There was no other way to put it. The ground was shaky beneath her feet, and she was letting him take advantage of that. Or anyway, she wasn’t doing a whole lot to stop him. Especially not when she’d leaned in and kissed him back.

  Kate fought to repress her shudder. And told herself it was from revulsion.

  But she knew better. Just like she knew—­because she’d taught herself, step by precarious step when she’d still been a kid—­that she was the only person who could get her balance back. That if she centered herself, nothing and no one could shake her.

  She looked away from the temptation lounging there beside her. Out over her lit-­up dashboard, down the hill, and across the lights of downtown Juneau, then off to the west, where the mountain blocked any view of the water and islands beyond.

  Kate reminded herself how it was she’d come to be sitting in this vehicle in the first place, here in Juneau, an Alaska State Trooper and an investigator, whether she was on leave or not. Why it was she wasn’t still marooned in that compound out in the snowy interior, knowing only the tiny little sliver of the frigid, isolated world that her father had wanted her to see. Or, more likely, long gone as another one of his victims. It was funny, because now and again she would meet tourists from the Lower 48, and they almost universally shuddered when they talked of Alaskan winters they’d never experienced and told her that they’d feel too trapped by the dark. Too claustrophobic. Or something along those lines.

  But for Kate, endless dark or midnight sun, as long as she wasn’t in that compound, she was free.

  She was alive. She was away from her family. She was making her own life, her own choices, her own way. Sometimes that meant working through the holidays. Sometimes that meant accepting a leave she didn’t want. Either way, she was living a life she couldn’t have imagined when she was growing up. There had been very clearly defined roles for everyone her father controlled, and nothing in Kate’s life now fit that bill.

  That was the part she couldn’t lose sight of, no matter what else happened.

  This holiday leave might have been thrust upon her, but it was hardly the worst of the things Kate had survived in her time.

  And the more she allowed herself to remember that, the more prepared she felt to try to look at Templeton’s proposition—­the one about working with him and his friends, that was—­with a little more clarity.

  “What exactly do you mean when you say work with you?” she asked.

  “You’ve seen what we do. Or how and where we do it, anyway. Pretty certain you can figure it out from there, but if not, I could probably draw you a map.”

  How did he make that sound so . . . dirty? More worry­ingly, why did her own body react as if he were painting that map directly onto her bare skin?

  “I’m not military. I don’t . . .” Her throat was much too dry, and she blamed him for that, too. “Go out on missions or whatever it is you do.”

  “Kate. Please. You flew yourself to Grizzly Harbor to interview the members of a group you were sure had nefarious intentions and were moreover responsible for a series of explosions throughout Southeast Alaska. How is that not a mission?”

  She drummed her fingers against the steering wheel, turning his offer over and over in her head. Because she should refuse, of
course. She should already have refused. It was the responsible, reasonable thing to do.

  “I’m not supposed to have anything to do with the investigation.”

  “And you won’t.” Templeton shrugged. “The official investigation. But as you already know, Alaska Force likes to do things our own way.”

  “I will not be a party to breaking the law.” She turned toward him, making sure to look him straight in the eye. “That’s a hard line I will not cross.”

  “No one’s asking you to break the law.”

  “No breaking the law. No bending it. No gray areas.”

  “Life is gray areas, Kate. That’s a fact. You like facts, don’t you?”

  “We already had this debate. I believe in choices.”

  “I realize this might come as a surprise to you,” Templeton drawled, sounding deeply entertained. Though there was something about the gleam in his dark eyes that made her think he was possibly less entertained than he was acting. “But I don’t actually run around encouraging people to break the law.”

  Kate frowned at him, still drumming the steering wheel with her fingers. She realized she was betraying her nerves, but she didn’t make herself stop.

  “I shouldn’t be considering this. Not for a moment.”

  She didn’t mean to say that out loud. And she didn’t really understand why she hadn’t dismissed the idea out of hand. The time of year was a factor, sure. Maybe she was afraid that if she didn’t work, all those things she was usually so arrogantly sure she’d left in her past would bloom in her all over again. And not as a sharp little stab of shame, like when a new person pointed out her father’s sins, but something bigger. More dangerous. Something that might lead her to end up like one of her cousins, living bitter and grim and, most of the time, blind drunk.

  A fate worse than death, as far as Kate was concerned.

  “The only reason I’m entertaining this notion is because if that body had been found in anyone else’s seaplane, I’d be running the investigation. This sort of thing is what I do.”

  “I know.”

  “And I have to think taking my expertise off the field entirely in a situation like this has the potential to make it worse.”

  “Yeah. Kind of like when you’re one of the most highly trained and competent soldiers in the world, capable of doing things that make regular men think you’re superhuman. And when you’re done with the service you look around and think . . . maybe there are other ways I can use these skills for good.”

  “Are you comparing me to a band of—­”

  His dangerous mouth crooked. “Let’s not call each other names, Trooper. It won’t end well.”

  Kate looked at him. Just looked at him.

  This impossible man, too big and too much in every conceivable way. And she understood that it was entirely possible that for the first time in her adult life, so far as she could recall, she wasn’t actually doing something because it was right. That even though it was true that she had more expertise in this area than most of her colleagues, there was a Templeton factor as well. Her lips still tingled from his kiss. There were . . . things happening in her body because of him, when she’d been perfectly comfortable believing herself numb straight through.

  There was no way to be sure that she wasn’t acting on that same impulse that led to the kinds of stupidity she’d spent the early part of her career helping clean up, in one way or another. People did foolish things for sex. Kate had never been one of them, because she’d always had a clear head where such things were concerned.

  Mostly because she’d had no idea it could feel like that. Until now.

  Until him.

  It’s almost a 100 percent certainty that you’re being an idiot, she informed herself.

  But outside this overwarm, overly close car, it was as dark as if it were two in the morning, when it hadn’t yet hit five p.m. Christmas was just over a week away and closing in fast.

  And Kate felt, starkly, that she had to choose between the demon she knew too well—­and the one she had only learned to fear today.

  She knew how Christmas felt when she was working around the clock, focusing on the job to the exclusion of everything else. And she was so terrified of the prospect of not working that she’d not only allowed Templeton to climb into her vehicle, she’d made out with him like the kind of teenager she’d certainly never been.

  She had to think that it was better to do what she could to handle the devil she knew before it took her down. And worry about this new demon if and when she had to, hoping all the while that what had happened here was an aberration brought on by her unexpected leave of absence from her job.

  This was certainly not how Kate was used to doing things. But then again, nothing that had happened since she’d gone to Grizzly Harbor was how she was used to doing things. Maybe it was time to lean into it.

  And maybe, if she went out there and worked with Alaska Force to figure out what on earth was really going on, she could settle all of this on her terms. Prove this had nothing to do with her past and make sure that she never had to take a break from the Troopers again, no matter what blew up in the middle of a dark December.

  “You okay there?” Templeton asked, his voice a low rumble in the dark, and yes, she could feel every syllable inside her own body. Making her melt and shift a little in her seat.

  But she could handle it.

  Because if she had to handle something, she did. That was the story of her life.

  She turned and looked Templeton full in the face, as much to prove to herself that she could handle anything as to prove something to him. More, maybe.

  “Okay,” she said briskly. Before she could second-­guess her decision. Or think better of it. “I’ll do it. I’ll work with you. Just as long as I’m on leave.”

  And she told herself she didn’t feel a thing when Temple­ton unfurled that long, slow, dangerous smile that made her think she should have laid out a list of demands before she’d agreed.

  Then made him sign it, no matter what that list might have told him about the things clamoring around inside of her.

  As long as she kept them hidden, where he might guess at their existence but never know for sure, she’d be fine.

  Perfectly fine, she told herself sternly.

  And when all he did was nod in reply, slow and much too sexy, she pulled herself together and drove them both down the hill and back into what light there was in Juneau on this side of the December solstice.

  Before she did something she couldn’t blame on her least favorite time of year.

  Nine

  It didn’t surprise Templeton that his trooper’s response to what had happened between them in her cozy little SUV was to pretend it hadn’t happened at all. He knew all about compartmentalization.

  Once she decided to go back to Fool’s Cove with him, she snapped back into her ultra cop mode. She drove down the hill and asked him only one thing as she navigated the streets through the evening snow: where she could drop him off.

  Because she obviously didn’t plan to spend one more moment of that evening with him than necessary.

  “I was thinking dinner and a show,” Templeton drawled. “Now that we’re dating.”

  “Your options are to give me an address of a place I can drop you off or I’ll leave you on the street right now,” she replied, all clipped and cool and not there for his nonsense.

  It was his own personal curse that he found her standoffishness refreshing. Especially when he still had the taste of her in his mouth.

  Templeton laughed, then gave her the address of one of the places Alaska Force considered a safe house in Juneau. Which was to say, a house belonging to one of their network of helpers and friends, who could be depended on to come up with an extra bed when needed.

  And in the morning, Kate picked him up at the precise dot of
0900 and drove them both to the airport north of Juneau, where Templeton had a buddy waiting to fly them out to Fool’s Cove.

  It was another gloomy, gray day, but that didn’t change the beauty of the landscape they flew through. All these years later and Templeton still couldn’t seem to get enough of it. The clouds clinging to the mountainsides. The brooding sea.

  And best of all, that stretch of cove that was the best and only home Templeton had ever had as an adult.

  He waved off his buddy. Then he turned to Kate, who was standing on the end of the dock, looking up at the lodge and the assorted cabins with an expression he couldn’t read on her face. It was windy today, making it feel much colder than it was, but Templeton enjoyed it. He liked the way the weather slapped him in the face, prickling him into life. He liked to be reminded that whatever else he was, whatever he might do in the course of his day, first and foremost he was alive.

  He reached down and snagged her bag, hoisting it up and starting down the dock.

  “I don’t need you to carry my bag,” she said in what sounded like a combination of surprise and outrage.

  “Noted.”

  “I can carry it myself.”

  “Yes,” he said patiently, without adjusting his stride. He could hear her feet hit the dock behind him. “I understand you’re able-­bodied. Good talk.”

  And he let her fume as he kept going, doing absolutely nothing to shorten his stride this time as he led her up the stairs and into the lodge itself.

  The team was finishing up the morning briefing, which was an extralong one today, with the dead transient and arson to puzzle over on top of their other current missions. Templeton marched inside, tossing Kate’s bag into an empty chair, then claiming one for himself. And he settled in to watch with maybe too much amusement as Kate looked around at the assembled collection of Alaska Force members, fixed that cool smile to her face, and stood where she could keep her back to the wall. At attention.

  With them, but certainly not one of them.