by Megan Crane
And they ran.
They ran together until Templeton’s muscles actually protested and Kate looked about frozen through. When they got back to the house, she went upstairs to shower, and Templeton thought he’d prove to himself how in control he was of everything by leaving her to it.
But the idea of Kate up there, naked and warm, was too much for him to bear.
He was halfway up the stairs before he meant to move. He found her with the hot water beating down on her, turning her skin that rosy pink that he’d acquainted himself with so thoroughly all day yesterday.
He pulled her into his arms, gazing down at her as she melted against him. She tipped her chin up to look at him as the spray from the showerhead kicked up steam all around them. And she didn’t smile. She looked almost solemn, and it made his ribs hurt.
He didn’t grin down at her. No big laugh, lazy performance, or whatever the hell else Isaac had said.
And it was the easiest thing in the world to pick her up, tilt her back against the tiles, and find his way between her legs. She was already slick and ready for him. And he felt himself shudder, deep. He told himself it was simple need. And that was all it was.
“I don’t have a condom,” he managed to grit out, vaguely surprised he could speak when his chest ached like this and she was slick and naked. “Here in the shower with me, to clarify.”
And for the first time in his entire life, Templeton wasn’t sure if he had the strength to pull himself away to go do what needed to be done. But he started to.
Instead, Kate rocked her hips up to him and didn’t let go from where she hung around his neck.
“I’m on the pill,” she told him. “I get tested regularly. I believe in preparation, Templeton.”
And he knew that was a bright red flag. A screeching, deafening alarm. He didn’t have to ask whether or not his practical, rule-following trooper had ever let another man touch her without a condom. It had certainly never occurred to him to have sex with anyone without being properly protected before, for both their sakes.
She trusts you, a voice in him pronounced, like a death knell.
Just like Isaac had said.
He needed to step away. He could carry her out of the shower and toss her down on the bed. They could roll around out there, condoms in reach and both of them wet and slippery. It would be fun. He could see it.
But here in the shower he was hard where she was soft. She wiggled against him, lifting and then lowering herself. And rubbing her heat up and down the length of him.
Everything was jumbled up inside of him. Sex and trust. Guilt and need.
And in the middle of everything there was just Kate.
He shifted his hips that little bit, then thrust himself home.
And it was the cold light of day now, or the Fairbanks version, which meant a hint of dawn outside. Either way, he’d had her what felt like a thousand times yesterday. The itch was scratched, surely.
He should have been done with this.
But deep inside her, with nothing between them and her strong, supple body wrapped around his, Templeton felt as if this were the first time all over again.
“Merry Christmas, Trooper,” he said softly against her mouth. “You are definitely on the naughty list.”
And by the time he was finished, naughty and nice were tangled around each other, Kate was sobbing out his name like the prettiest carol he’d ever heard, and he wasn’t sure he had it in him to survive the Trooper Holiday effect.
He had the sneaking suspicion he’d already sustained a mortal blow.
Luckily, Templeton had a long flight to get himself back under control. Or under control in the first place, if he was being brutally honest with himself. He was a highly trained military operative, for God’s sake. He had handled himself and kept his cool in situations that would turn most people, most normal people, to shrapnel. And he was still standing.
His past was not his future. Kate was a colleague with benefits, that was all. Isaac should spend more time sorting out his own complicated romantic life and less time making dire predictions about other people’s business, especially when Templeton was fine.
By the time they got to Spring Creek Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison smack down in one of the prettiest places in the world, Templeton thought he’d handled it. Any stray emotions had been packed away. And Oz had called in with confirmation of the things they’d already assumed to be true the night before.
“Liberty Holiday is married to one Charles Scott McGarity,” Oz told them on speaker as Templeton drove from the airport in Seward across the water to the prison. “Native of Wyoming. Some political activism before he was kicked out of the University of Montana. Radical libertarian, but not one to really put his money where his mouth is. About what you’d expect.”
“I didn’t really see Liberty with a mild-mannered, average accountant,” Kate said in that quietly sharp way.
“I can’t guarantee that they didn’t find a way to get under our radar and slide over to Grizzly Harbor and back. Or whatever else they would have had to do to be the people responsible for everything that’s been happening over the past few months.” Oz blew out a breath. “But I really don’t think it’s likely. I don’t think they do much besides a supply run into town every few weeks. I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before.”
“When he says that, he means maybe once,” Templeton told Kate.
“I don’t like them for it, either,” Kate said, crossing her arms as she sat in the passenger seat. “It would be convenient if it was them, certainly, but as far as I can tell, they’re just out there living my father’s dream to the best of their abilities. Which I can tell you from experience is a whole lot of unpleasant daily labor that leaves precious little time for pleasure flights all over the state.”
They sat in silence when the call with Oz was done, and Templeton cursed himself when he reached over and rested his hand on her thigh. Especially when she gazed down as if she hardly knew what to make of it. As if no one had ever touched her without wanting sex.
Because that was another thing he knew without having to ask her. He’d already discovered his trooper knew her self-defense. He could tell that she’d trained, which meant she’d endured physical contact. He bet she knew how to tolerate it on the mat and in a training exercise. And she certainly knew what to do when she was naked.
But Kate—the emancipated fifteen-year-old who’d made her own way in this life, entirely on the force of her own will, who had grown into a very good cop—wasn’t much for physical affection. Thinking about why made him want to break things. Even while Isaac’s voice was ping-ponging around in his head, throwing out accusations Templeton wanted to refute but couldn’t.
Still, he left his hand where it was.
“You okay?” he asked her, gruffly.
He felt her shift slightly beneath his palm. But she didn’t push him away.
“I’m fine,” she said after a moment, and it wasn’t a throwaway, automatic response. He could hear all the feeling in it. All the things he should have cut off already. “Really.”
“I wish it was your cousins, too.”
“Even if it was, all roads would lead here eventually.” Kate sounded almost rueful. Maybe wary. “One way or another.”
He drove on, letting the complicated quiet rest between them.
And Templeton didn’t take his hand off her leg until they made it to the prison.
Where everything got bureaucratic and institutional in a hurry.
“Nothing says Christmas like jail,” Kate said when they’d made it through the series of doors and gates and locks and guards, her voice dry.
Dry and almost amused.
But Templeton didn’t buy it the way he might have only a few days before. Because he knew things about Kate now.
A
nd in any case, he was having a little trouble getting his own game face on. Because even visiting a prison, in Templeton’s experience, made a man feel like less of a human. He couldn’t imagine having to come here and stay here.
Sometimes he thought his father had given him a gift by insisting that he never, ever visit.
“I’m not sure it being Christmas makes being in prison any worse.” Templeton kept his voice low as they followed the guard who led them down a corridor that smelled of industrial-strength cleaners and human misery. “I think prison is the problem no matter what day it is.”
“My mistake. Here I was under the impression that Christmas was the season of miracle and wonder. For everyone. Isn’t there a song about that? Resting merry gentlemen or whatever?”
“Hey.”
She turned to look at him, and her brown eyes looked troubled no matter how she tried to keep her expression blank.
“You don’t actually have to do this,” he told her.
She looked as though she was about to fire off a reply, but she blinked. Then swallowed, as if she were trying to settle herself down. “I think I have to do it.”
“Because your cousins got in your head?”
“Because I don’t know if they’re in my head or not. Whether he is or not. And I think it’s time to find out.”
Templeton couldn’t argue with that. Far be it from him to keep a person from confronting their demons head-on. He knew his demons. He knew each of them by name, he knew where they lived, and the fact that he didn’t want to go and get all up in their faces didn’t mean he didn’t handle his stuff. It was the fact that he didn’t have issues with his stuff that meant it was handled.
Stop having arguments with yourself, dumbass, he growled at himself. Especially when you’re losing.
Then the guard led them into the private visitor space that some combination of Kate’s connections and Alaska Force’s persuasion had gotten them. A table with two chairs on one side and one chair on the other. Windows for the guards to keep watch through and a panic button. Standard.
“Ready?” Templeton asked.
“Oh, sure,” Kate drawled, just like him. “You know me.”
“I do,” he said. More seriously than he should have. “But remember, he doesn’t.”
Kate smiled at him. And any hint of trouble he’d seen on her face, in her eyes, was gone now. She was fully a cop. The cop he’d first met, in fact, back at the Water’s Edge Café.
And it was that cop—Trooper Kate Holiday, investigator for the Alaska Bureau of Investigation and all around badass—who smiled at the man who shuffled in the door a moment later, flanked by two guards. They settled him in his seat, nodded to Kate and Templeton, and then left them to it.
Kate didn’t say a word. She kept on smiling, flinty and fearless, and Templeton wanted to eat her up like dessert.
Instead, he took the opportunity to get an eyeful of one of Alaska’s most notorious criminals.
Like most men, he looked diminished in jail. But in Samuel Lee Holiday’s case, it was because he’d gone gray over the past fifteen years. He didn’t sit like a man who’d been beaten down. And Templeton could see the family resemblance that Will had been talking about, no matter how much he wanted to dismiss everything Kate’s cousin had said as so much whining. Where Will had looked wild, his uncle’s hair and beard were trimmed. And the old man sat ramrod straight, as if he felt he needed to announce his meticulousness. As if it gave him power, despite the fact he was in chains.
Samuel Lee Holiday did not smile at his only child.
“Hello, Katie,” he said, his gaze alight with malice and his voice a rich sort of rasp. “I knew you’d come crawling back to me. Sooner or later, I knew you’d come.”
Nineteen
The last time Kate had seen her father, he’d hissed the word traitor across the courtroom as they’d led him away, his face twisted and mottled with hatred. Today, by contrast, he looked very nearly sedate. She would have thought he really was sedated if she didn’t know his thoughts on the dangers of numbing his own genius.
And if she overlooked that familiar, burning hatred in his gaze when he looked at her.
“Cat got your tongue?” her father asked in that same voice she remembered. Dark and deceptively flat when she’d learned young that he was always this close to raising it. “You had no trouble shooting your mouth off in court, as I recollect.”
Kate eyed him for a moment, then let out a light laugh that made his eyes narrow.
“This is so funny,” she said, shaking her head and even smiling like she expected him to join in. “It’s so hard to remember why you were intimidating. I mean, look at you. Gray, old, locked away. And pretty much forgotten entirely out in the real world, unless someone’s writing a book report on easily caught local criminals.”
His furious gaze got more intense. And Kate couldn’t pretend it didn’t get to her. It did. She remembered what had always come next. How he liked to administer his form of judgment and retribution. But the difference was, now she knew how to hide her reactions. And, better still, she wasn’t a dependent child that he could hurt on a whim.
She was a grown woman. One he didn’t know at all.
That thought made her smile a little wider.
“Forgotten by everyone except you,” he said after a moment.
Kate nodded at Templeton. “I wouldn’t have thought of you at all, if I’m honest. It was this guy.”
And it wasn’t as if they’d planned out what they would say. But Templeton grinned wide, the way he always did.
“Funny thing,” he said. “But in the state of Alaska, if you start talking about whackadoo groups who tried to get all culty, your name comes up every time.”
Samuel Lee—because Kate really didn’t think of him as her father—glowered.
Kate made herself take a breath. She remembered that bitterly cold snowmobile ride in the dark, fifteen years ago this very day. How scared she’d been. That she would die out there. That she wouldn’t. That she would make it all the way to the police only for them to take her back. That what her father had told her more than once, sometimes with his hand around her throat, was true—she would never escape him. Her life was his, to elevate or extinguish as he pleased.
The fifteen-year-old she’d been had held on tight to the feeling—little more than a fantasy—that whatever was out there in the big, wide world, it had to be better than the life she knew. It just had to be.
That terrified, determined, defiantly hopeful teenager would never have believed that this was the way it would all end up. Samuel Lee locked away forever. And Kate left to live her life exactly as she pleased.
Is that how you live your life? something inside her asked. Or have you been reeling around in fear since that night—locking yourself away as surely as if you were the one who ended up behind bars?
But this wasn’t the time for a chat with her inner turmoil. Not after the day she’d spent with Templeton, which had lit her up in so many different ways she was more or less scorched straight through. And certainly not when the boogeyman she’d feared all her life was sitting right there in front of her at last.
“I shouldn’t have to tell you this, Dad,” Kate said then, with an emphasis on the word because she knew he hated the familiarity and preferred to be called Father Samuel, even by her. I am everyone’s father, Katie, he’d told her during a spanking she’d earned because she’d cried when told she couldn’t call him Daddy. Only a selfish, wicked girl would want to claim me as her own. She’d been six. “But if you’re found to be up to your old tricks in any way, it’s going to make your time here a lot harder.”
Her father didn’t respond the way she thought he would. He stared at her for another long while. His eyes burned with a malice that seemed to hook into her and pull at her flesh.
And she
’d forgotten this part. When she thought about her father, it was always the lectures. The rants and the punishments. His thunderous volume and all the words he used. Or the cruelty of his hard hands.
She’d forgotten about his silences. How he could sit and stare until you would do anything at all, anything he asked and all the things he didn’t ask, to get him to snap out of his furious silence. To shift that gaze somewhere else.
Kate stared back at him, ready to sit across from him and hold his gaze forever, if only to prove she could.
But she realized she wasn’t prepared. She’d forgotten his deliberate, deadly silences, but she could handle that. Because while he’d been sitting in jail, she’d been trained in all manner of interrogation techniques.
That wasn’t what got to her. It was the family resemblance.
She’d forgotten that they had the same nose, though hers was daintier. She’d forgotten the similarity in the shape of their hands. And, more disorienting, the similar gestures she hadn’t realized she’d picked up from him. Her father sat with his hands folded in front of him and his back straight, and it was like looking in a mirror. She could see all the times she’d sat exactly like that, staring down one of the subjects of her investigations.
She had gotten so used to thinking of him as a monster and nothing else, nothing more. She’d forgotten all the ways that he was human. And she’d completely blocked out the fact that he’d contributed half of her DNA.
Maybe she’d never really thought about that, back when she was a kid. She certainly didn’t enjoy thinking about it now.
“I know why you’re here,” her father said, and Kate allowed herself the faintest smile, because she’d won. He’d been forced to break the silence. And the faint red flush on his face told her he knew he’d lost. “Deep down, Katie, you must know that you’re well overdue a reckoning for the things you’ve done.”
She heard Templeton shift behind her, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t jump in. And even though he’d been oddly quiet and contemplative this morning, she knew that he was fully prepared to let her take this wherever she needed to go.