Just as he knew he couldn’t.
“Andie—” he began.
She swallowed quickly and gazed up at him out of those huge green eyes, color soaking her cheeks in the delectable blush that seemed to come so easily with her coloring.
“Well, good night,” she said in a deceptively casual voice. “I hope you get some rest.”
Before he realized what she was up to, she took a step forward. He was about a good six or seven inches taller than her under normal circumstances, but he was leaning down a little on the crutches while he balanced on one leg and she only had to stand on tiptoe to reach him.
He felt the tantalizing touch of her breath against his skin and waited for a kiss that didn’t come. Instead, she stepped back again, a mischievous smile in her eyes that reminded him very much of her son.
“That’s what you call a fake kiss. You know. To add to the illusion.”
He wasn’t sure what had brought it out of her, but he loved seeing this lighthearted side of her that he sensed had been dormant too long since her husband’s death. He decided to play along, only for a moment. This had been one of the toughest weeks of his life. Didn’t he deserve a little sweetness as a counterpoint?
“Is that what you were doing? I missed it. Better try again. I’ll be ready this time.”
Her eyes gleamed at the challenge and she leaned forward to torment him again with an almost-kiss. This time he was ready and moved his own mouth so he could kiss her firmly, decisively.
Any thought he had of only teasing her for a moment disappeared the moment his mouth tasted her again. She was sweet, salty, addicting, just like that kettle corn, and he couldn’t get enough.
She gave a little sigh, as if she’d been waiting for just this moment. He leaned back against the kitchen counter and she stepped closer, her curves pressed against him, and he forgot all about the ache in his leg.
They kissed far longer than they should have—and not nearly long enough. He wanted desperately to pull her into the other room, to sink down onto the sofa with her and hold her on his lap and explore every delicious inch of her.
She was aroused. He tasted it in her kiss and felt it in the trembling hands resting at his hips.
That strange tenderness he had experienced at the parade seemed to curl and dance around them, stronger than ever, and he wanted to tuck her against him and keep her safe forever.
She seemed to come to her senses much earlier than he did. He knew the instant she returned to reality. She hitched in a ragged little breath and then eased her mouth away from his, leaving him cold.
“This is a dangerous game, Marshall,” she said, her expression serious, intent. “One I’m not sure I’m strong enough to play with you.”
He wanted to argue with her. He’d like to tell her no harm could come from sharing more of those delicious sugar-salt kisses, but both of them would know it was a lie.
“For the record, you’re one of the strongest women I’ve ever met,” he murmured.
Without answering, she took another step back and shoved her hands in the pockets of her parka. “I’d better go find my children. Are you sure you’re all right?”
No. Something had changed during that intense, emotional kiss, something he didn’t want to examine closely right now.
“Fine,” he lied.
“I’ll see you later,” she said.
She gazed at him for a long moment, then turned around and headed into the night.
* * *
OUTSIDE, THE FIRST fragile snowflakes of the coming storm had begun to spiral down, catching the moonlight as they spun to earth. She lifted her face and they fell on her cheeks like that first whisper of a kiss between them, the one that never should have happened.
She shivered—but knew it wasn’t from the temperature, which had plummeted precipitously. Despite all the precautions she had taken, the entirely prudent and necessary defenses she had tried to build around her heart, she was coming to care for Marshall Bailey entirely too much.
She was halfway to being in love with him. Maybe even a little further than that, if she were perfectly honest with herself.
She wouldn’t allow it. End of story. She had fought too hard, climbed too far to reach this desperately needed state of peace and calm. For the first time in two years, she was in a good place, a healthy place. Her children were happy and content here in Haven Point, she had friends, her work was interesting and fulfilling.
At long last, her dreams were no longer haunted by grief, shame, fear.
Marshall called her strong. She wasn’t, not at all. But she was tenacious and she wanted to think she was resilient. She would draw on every ounce of strength she could muster—from anywhere she could find it—to protect her heart.
He didn’t need her help now. Not really. He was getting around better on the crutches and could probably fend for himself, for the most part. She had done as Wyn asked and helped him through the first difficult days after he was released from the hospital.
While he couldn’t yet drive, his mother and new stepfather were back in town. Charlene or Mike could step up if he needed a ride somewhere and Wynona and Katrina would both be coming home the following week for the holidays. He didn’t need Andrea anymore and she couldn’t risk further breaches in the defenses around her heart.
From now on, she would do her best to stay away from the man. It shouldn’t be that difficult—until Wynona asked Andie to help him, their worlds had hardly intersected. She had no reason to think that would change, moving forward.
She would leave it to Marshall to explain to his family that he and Andie were nothing to each other but neighbors.
With hands that trembled only a little, she opened the door, climbed into her vehicle and started the engine. Once she wasn’t in his company so often, she thought, these fledgling feelings would die a natural death.
She was almost sure of it.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
FOR THREE DAYS, Andrea managed to keep her resolution to stay away from that lovely stone house by the river.
As she predicted, it hadn’t been easy. A dozen times a day, she fought the urge to call him or walk up the street to check on him, just to make sure he was all right.
At every mealtime, she worried that he wasn’t eating, though she knew that was an unwarranted concern as she had seen Charlene stop by twice in those three days, loaded with bags of groceries each time.
Whether he liked it or not, his family would take care of him, she assured herself. He didn’t need her anymore. That didn’t stop her dreams from tormenting her or her thoughts from constantly wanting to travel down Riverbend Road to his house.
Her children had made it more difficult by asking constantly if they could go visit “Sheriff Marshall”—if they could see his Christmas tree from their house, if his broken leg was all better now, if he might want to play with Sadie.
The weather didn’t help her restless mood, with three days of uncertain, on-and-off-again storms. Though no significant precipitation fell, it was cold and bleak, with a steady, moaning wind and a low pressure system that made her bones ache.
Finally the long-anticipated major storm started in earnest late Tuesday afternoon, five days before Christmas. The snows started just before dark—lightly at first, with huge flakes that seemed to hover in the air and spin in place before plummeting to the ground.
When she looked out the window twenty moments later, all she could see was a curtain of white.
“Look at all that snow!” Will breathed, his eyes wide.
“Maybe we’ll have a snow day tomorrow,” Chloe exclaimed, looking more excited about that than the prospect of Christmas in a few days.
By their bedtime, that was looking more and more likely. Everything was covered in white and the wind blew hard, rattling th
e windows of her house, moaning under the eaves, whipping branches against the glass.
She stayed up later than usual, sitting by the fire and wrapping the last of the children’s presents while she listened to the wind and watched a sweetly romantic Christmas movie on TV. The happy ending made her sigh through her sniffles, though it did nothing to help her restlessness.
When she looked out the window after hiding the gifts and then brushing her teeth, she saw five inches of new snow crowning the fence posts. The forecasters had said another eight to twelve inches could be on its way before morning.
It took her a long time to fall asleep. When she did, her dreams were once more haunted by a certain county sheriff with a slow smile and serious blue eyes.
She dreamed someone she couldn’t see was chasing them through the booths at the Haven Point Lights on the Lake festival, waving a crutch at them.
Marshall carried Will and Chloe on his back, though he had the thick black boot on one leg, but she still had to run hard to keep up with him as they ducked in and out of tents and people and the Christmas village.
And then they were cornered just on the other side of the biggest Christmas tree at Lakeside Park, with nowhere left to run, and the crutch wielded by a menacing form in a parka and balaclava turned into the same cold and deadly Sig Sauer that Rob Warren had used to pistol-whip her and had pressed to her chin that horrible summer evening mere months ago.
Just as terrified as she had been that night, she screamed and tried to push Marsh and her children out of harm’s way, but she was too late. She heard a fierce crack and the huge town Christmas tree exploded and she awoke abruptly with her heart pounding fiercely and every muscle tense and alert.
She lay in her bed, her breathing sawing in and out. That crack had sounded so real!
Had the dream awakened her or had something else? She heard a small, whining sound and realized after a beat that it was Sadie outside her door.
She reached for the lamp beside her bed and flipped the switch, but nothing happened. The wind must have blown out the power. Grateful for cell phones and the ever-present flashlight app, she reached for hers, turned on the light and slid out of bed.
Her room was freezing. The furnace was powered by natural gas, but the blower couldn’t turn on without electricity, which she had always thought was poor engineering.
Sadie rushed inside the moment Andie opened the door. She plopped at her feet and whined again.
“What’s going on, girl? We don’t have a well, so I know nobody could have fallen in.”
The dog gave her a quizzical look, which led Andie to conclude her lame humor wasn’t particularly well received at 2:00 a.m.
“Don’t worry. The power has gone out, no big deal. We’ll figure out what’s going on.”
She shoved her feet into her fuzzy slippers with multicolored owls on them and pulled her robe off the chair by the bed. When she peered out her second-floor bedroom to the ground below, she saw the snow had eased somewhat. It wasn’t blowing as hard, anyway, and the intensity of the flakes had diminished.
Across the street, she saw the porch lights on Cade Emmett’s log home were on and a few more inside. As she watched, more lights came on. Apparently the chief of police wasn’t sleeping, either.
“The power outage must be only this side of the street,” she told Sadie. She couldn’t see any other houses but Cade’s from her bedroom window at the front of the house, but when she walked out of her bedroom to the landing, she could see toward Marshall’s house and the Jacobses’ at the end of the street, where Christmas lights gleamed in muted colors beneath a layer of thick snow.
She tried the hall switch, but again, no welcoming lights burst on.
Maybe it was only her house. She stood for just a moment, aware of a vague feeling of misgiving. She was trying to remember where the fuse box was when she suddenly heard a soft knock at the front door.
The lingering tendrils of her nightmare and that entirely too-real memory of Rob Warren’s handgun pressed to her chin raced through her head and panic spurted through her.
It was 2:00 a.m. in the middle of a snowstorm. Who would be knocking at her door?
She hesitated, wildly tempted to gather her children and lock them all in the bathroom.
No. Rob Warren was in prison. She no longer had reason to be afraid.
That didn’t mean she was stupid, either. She didn’t feel right about having firearms in the house with young children, but she did have a Taser and pepper spray. She hurried to the hallway and dug through her purse until she found the small child-resistant bag she kept both in.
Another trio of knocks sounded through the quiet house while she was trying to open the bag with fingers that trembled. She pulled both out and hurried to the door, wishing she had installed a security peephole.
“Who is it?” she called through the door.
“Andie?” She heard a male voice. “It’s Cade Emmett, from across the street. Is everybody okay in there?”
She frowned at the odd question and opened the door. In the glow from her phone flashlight, she saw the Haven Point police chief standing on her porch wearing boots and a parka.
“Yes. Everyone’s fine. Why wouldn’t we be? It’s just a power outage.”
“It’s not just a power outage, I’m afraid. That big elm on the south side of your property just blew over, onto your garage. It must have taken the power line with it. It made a horrible crash. You didn’t hear it?”
She remembered that crack in her dream that had sounded so real and terrifying. “Are you sure?”
“Positive. Marsh just called me and ordered me to get my ass over here. Apparently he was looking out the window and saw the whole thing blow over. He tried to call you first, but you didn’t answer, so he called me next.”
She had put her phone on “do not disturb” before she went to bed, which in retrospect seemed like a stupid idea. She switched it on now and the phone immediately rang.
“Andie! What’s going on?” Marshall’s urgent voice came over the line. “Are you okay? Are the kids okay?”
“I don’t know. I...I haven’t checked, but their rooms are on the opposite side of the house from the garage. I’ll call you back.”
She raced to their rooms just as Chloe cried out. “Mama? Where are you? Mama! My light won’t turn on!”
Andie opened the door. “I’m here, darling. Right here. The power’s gone out, but we’re okay.”
Chloe jumped into her arms and flung her arms around her neck so abruptly that Andie staggered backward a little. Her daughter burst into tears and buried her head against her.
“What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Why are you crying?
“No.” Chloe sobbed. “I thought I heard a man.”
“Oh, honey.” Her arms tightened as she felt her heart break a little more. Chloe had witnessed too much for a six-year-old girl. She had stumbled out of her room that terrible June night when Rob Warren had found them, had seen her mother bleeding, bruised, had seen Rob shove the gun to her chin and Wyn and Cade pull their own weapons.
Chloe had watched a man she had trusted and liked—her father’s friend and former partner—fire on Wynona when the officer had tried to protect them all from him.
“It’s only Chief Emmett from across the street,” she said now. “You know Cade. He came to check on us because Marshall saw a tree fall on our garage.”
“A tree?” In the dim light from her phone, Andie saw her daughter’s eyes go wide. “Was that the big noise that woke me up?”
“I imagine so.”
Chloe hitched in a breath, but her sobs slowed a little. Though she was growing bigger, Andie still held her in her arms as if she were a toddler, sensing both of them needed it. “Come on. Let’s go check on Will.”
She had often found her
daughter handled her fears and insecurities much better when she felt useful. Much like Andie did herself.
“I’ve got a flashlight. The Frozen one. Should I use that?”
“That would be great, if you know where it is.”
“Under my pillow.” Her mouth twisted with guilt. “I might have been reading my book a little past my bedtime.”
It was difficult to get too mad at her for that when Andie frequently did the same. Judging that her daughter had her emotions under better control now, she set her down, then used her phone for light while Chloe found her own flashlight.
When they opened the door to Will’s room, Sadie immediately trotted to his bed and jumped up, where the dog proceeded to lick his salty little-boy cheek.
Will opened his eyes blearily. “Sadie,” he mumbled, still mostly asleep. “Get down. You’re not supposed to be on the bed.”
The light caught his attention and he squinted at it and his eyes opened more. “Chloe! Why did you put Sadie on my bed?”
He always had such a croaky little voice when he first woke up. Normally it made her smile, but not in the middle of a crisis.
“I didn’t. She put herself there.”
“Why is it so dark? Where’s my night-light?”
“The power is out. A tree fell on the garage,” Chloe announced. Now that the initial crisis had passed and her worst fears allayed, she seemed to be relishing the dramatic events.
“Did it smash my bike?” Will asked.
Oh. She had been so worried about the children she hadn’t given a thought to possible consequences. Her new SUV was in that garage. Had it been damaged? Wouldn’t that be just her luck?
Cars could be replaced, she reminded herself. That was the entire reason for insurance. Her children were safe and that was the only thing that mattered.
“I’m sorry I had to wake you. We only needed to make sure you’re all right. You can stay here under your blankets where it’s warm for now, since the furnace can’t come on without electricity.”
“Are we going to freeze to death?” Chloe asked, some of her anxiety returning.
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