THE NOISE CHEWED into his dreamless sleep like a rodent nibbling away at a cardboard box. Garrett’s eyes flew open.
Alert, he lay there in the dark and waited to hear if the sound was real, or just part of some peripheral brain activity.
He heard the sound again.
Whimpering.
For a second, still somewhat disoriented, Garrett couldn’t hone in on where the whimpering came from.
Was it from an animal?
Was some poor creature being dragged off by a hungry coyote?
Getting up, he crossed to the window in wide strides and scanned the area as far as he could see. But from what he could discern, nothing outside was moving. Even the wind, which at times could make a really mournful sound, was still tonight. None of the leaves on the trees were rustling.
About to go back to bed, he heard it again.
Cocking his head, Garrett listened more intently. Wait, that wasn’t whimpering. It sounded more like someone was crying.
Who?
And then he remembered. He wasn’t alone in the house, as he had been for so many years. Ellie was here. Lani had made up the sofa for her in the den, which was two doors down the hall from his bedroom.
Was that his niece crying?
Why?
Wearing a T-shirt and the worn jeans that served as his pajama bottoms, Garrett quickly padded barefoot into the hallway. Once there, he stood still and listened again for the sound that had roused him.
In the back of his mind, he debated what to do if he did hear his niece crying. He sincerely hoped it wasn’t her. She’d been here for three days, but he was no closer to having a clue how to talk to her than he had been that first night.
And then he heard the noise again, even more clearly. The sobs were so heart-wrenching he knew he couldn’t just ignore them—and her distress—and go back to bed. No one should sound so terribly unhappy, Garrett thought. If he heard such a mournful sound coming from an animal, he would take the creature into his house, to at least feed it and try to alleviate some of its distress. He couldn’t do any less for his own flesh and blood.
Moving slowly toward the crowded den, which his deputy, by working a little magic, had managed to transform into a semibedroom, he kept hoping that the crying sound would stop.
But it didn’t.
Bracing himself, Garrett slowly eased the door to the den open. There was some illumination in the room, thanks to the night-light that Lani had brought with her and plugged in. A night-light… How had she even thought of that? She seemed to be always a couple steps ahead of anything his niece might need or want. That alone proved to him that his annoying deputy was much better at this than he was.
The woman really did have her uses, he admitted grudgingly.
The last time he had even thought of a night-light, he had needed one himself. Not that his stepfather would have allowed him to have any sort of light to keep the “monsters” at bay. The man had snarled at him, ordering him to “grow up and be a man, you worthless waste of flesh.”
Garrett had been six when he’d asked for a night-light.
The same age his niece was now.
“Ellie?” he called softly as he slowly approached the sofa. He was aware how his deep voice rumbled, sounding like distant thunder in the bedroom.
The crying grew louder. At the same time the little girl seemed to grow smaller, as if trying to disappear into the sofa.
Her eyes were shut tight.
She was asleep, he realized. Asleep and in the throes of a really bad nightmare.
“Ellie, wake up,” Garrett urged her gently. “It’s all right, you’re just having a nightmare.”
But his niece didn’t waken, and her crying intensified. She seemed absolutely terrified of what she was dreaming about.
Trying to rouse her, Garrett put his hand on her shoulder—the way Chisholm had the other day, he realized abruptly.
Startled, Ellie jumped and jackknifed into a sitting position on the sofa. At the same time, she shrank away from his hand, as if she expected to be hit at any second.
That bastard had done that to her, Garrett thought angrily. Her father had taken his frustrations out on his daughter. Had he beaten her? Badly? There was no other reason for the little girl to act so terrified at feeling a hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay, Ellie,” Garrett assured her. “You’re safe. You’re here with me and you’re safe,” he repeated, doing his best to calm her.
Dazed, his niece opened her eyes and stared at him, as if trying to make sense of the words he had just said. Her tears continued to flow, much to Garrett’s frustration.
She was shaking, he realized belatedly. And despite the barriers he normally kept around him, despite all the effort he put into keeping those same walls up, and even despite the sheer awkwardness he felt trying to comfort the little girl, Garrett forced himself to sit down on the sofa beside her.
Telling her it was going to be all right didn’t seem to convince her. Or get her to stop sobbing. If Chisholm were here, she would have said that the girl needed to talk things out.
Damn it, now Garrett was channeling his deputy. Still, the notion that had popped into his head did make sense.
He gave it his best shot. “That must have been some nightmare,” he observed.
Hiccupping and still unable to talk, Ellie nodded her head.
He couldn’t take it. She was just too unhappy. Before he knew what he was doing, Garrett gathered his niece into his arms and held her against him, rocking gently.
“It’s going to be all right,” he promised. “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
She clung to him wordlessly, her tears still falling, making the front of his T-shirt damp.
“Mama’s gone,” she sobbed at last.
He could feel the words twisting like a knife in his own gut, not to mention bringing a lump to his throat.
“I know, honey,” he told her. “I know.”
Garrett held the little girl for as long as she needed him to.
Chapter Six
Over the next few weeks Garrett made an unnerving discovery.
He found that the very quality that had annoyed him the most about his blonde powder keg deputy was exactly the one he was now grateful she possessed.
Her irritating habit of taking things on and, ultimately, taking them over, turned out to be a good thing—at least in this case. Because when it came to matters that involved Ellie, he let Chisholm have free rein.
It had been three weeks since the shattering bombshell had hit, blowing up what had been his world. Three weeks since he had gone to fetch his niece and bring her back to live with him. Three weeks since he had buried his sister—here, in the cemetery right outside of the town, the way his annoying deputy had convinced him to do.
And he’d done it for exactly the reason she had specified. He’d done it for Ellie’s sake.
Chisholm seemed to know instinctively what was best for the girl, maybe, he reasoned, because she’d been one herself once. He didn’t really know. But whatever the case, the woman had an inherent knack of knowing just how to treat Ellie and how to get along with her. His niece seemed to be doing better each day, except for the unnerving habit she had of referring to Chisholm as “Aunt Lani” despite numerous corrections.
But in the sum total of things, that was a minor price to pay. So he bit his tongue and stayed out of his energetic deputy’s way, which was, he thought, tantamount to attempting to stay out of the way of a runaway steamroller.
It wasn’t exactly a matter of choice so much as one of survival. And at times, when he was around the woman, it felt as if he were barely hanging on by his fingertips.
Moreover, he was dealing with a strange sensation: he found himself not being as put off by the things his deputy did as he had been when she’d first shown up in his office.
More to the point, he was attracted to her. It had crept up on him out of nowhere, nestling amid other, totally unrelated thoughts.
He found it unnerving. Not to mention out of character for him.
Except for the four years when he’d gone off to college, he had been a lifelong resident of Booth. Yet somehow it was Chisholm who had known what steps were necessary to get Ellie registered for school here, now that this was her new, permanent home. And Chisholm was the one who had taken his niece shopping for new, warmer clothes, because the ones she’d worn in Southern California weren’t sufficient for winters in Texas, not at this latitude.
Chisholm, he’d noted, had paid for those clothes herself, and hadn’t asked to be reimbursed. Feeling that if he allowed her to do so, he would be even more in her debt, he’d informed her that he could take care of his own. Garrett had asked to see the sales receipts, had calculated the grand total in his head and then handed her a number of bills that more than covered the sum.
She’d made change, giving him back the difference despite his growled protest that the extra money was his way of paying her for her time.
“No need to reimburse me for that. I like hanging around with your niece. By the way, it’s nice to hear you actually claiming her,” she’d said, flashing that smile he found so irritating, and at the same time unsettling.
For the sake of having Chisholm continue being there for his niece, Garrett swallowed his retort.
Discretion was always the better part of valor, he tried to convince himself. But he hadn’t believed it when he’d first heard the saying, and he didn’t believe it now.
Each time he silently congratulated himself on getting better at holding his tongue, something else would crop up, knocking him back to square one. Such as when Chisholm had informed him that not only was he now the “proud owner of a top-of-the-line computer,” but she had seen to it that he was hooked up to the internet, too.
He did not receive the news well.
He’d grudgingly given in and gone along with using a computer at work, because the need for efficiency had outweighed his desire to keep things the way they had always been. But he had been adamant about avoiding computers, and everything they entailed, when it came to his personal space.
Which wasn’t his anymore, he reminded himself with a sharp pang.
Still, he wasn’t going to give up without at least some kind of a fight. “And if I said I didn’t want it?” he’d challenged.
She’d flashed that dazzling smile of hers, which was increasingly getting under his skin, and declared, “Too late.”
He’d narrowed his eyes into slits, pinning her to the wall. Then realized he had definitely lost his edge, because Lani wasn’t even pretending to be affected anymore.
“What do you mean, ‘too late’?” he asked.
“Well, that computer you bought?” she began, referring to the purchase she’d obviously had made in his name sometime in the last twenty-four hours. “I had Wally, the computer tech, hook it up to the internet for you at lunchtime.”
Earlier today, around noon, Garrett remembered, she’d darted out, mumbling something about having Ellie-related errands to run. He had just assumed they had something to do with buying more clothes or schoolbooks. And, to be honest, he had reveled in the fact that for one glorious hour the office was quiet and his again, so he hadn’t really questioned her very closely about the nature of this “Ellie-related” undertakings.
Garrett suppressed a weary sigh. He should have known better.
“In my house?” he asked his deputy now. Actually, it was more of an accusation.
Lani pretended to regard the rhetorical question seriously. “Well, having the hookup and the computer up on the roof would be a little inconvenient, what with it being slippery and all, so yes, in your house.”
There really seemed to be no boundaries to this woman’s pushiness. And it was his fault, he knew, because he’d given her free rein.
He simply had to put the fear of God into her, so that she wouldn’t continue to get carried away like this. Otherwise, she might decide that, now that he had a niece to take care of, he needed a bigger house—and one morning he’d wake up to discover that the place had been sold out from under him.
He’d put nothing past her.
“I don’t remember you asking my permission,” he said, his voice low, cold.
The look she gave him—half sexy, half amused—hit him right in the solar plexus, a sucker punch he hadn’t been expecting and definitely didn’t want. He could feel it spreading out like a pool of sunshine, taking hold and coloring everything it touched.
“Gunny taught me that it’s always better to ask for forgiveness than for permission,” she told him, as if that took care of everything.
“Gunny?” Garrett echoed.
Was that a relative? He knew it couldn’t be a boyfriend, because of all the time she put in with Ellie. No relationship could have been sustained with that amount of absence. Besides, Lani was so talkative, she would have given him far more details about the man than he would have wanted to hear.
She nodded. “That’s what I call my dad. I think it secretly makes him feel as if he’s still in the marines. He loved being in the service, but he gave it up for me because he didn’t have anyone to leave me with when he found out he was going to be deployed overseas.” She smiled fondly, and Garrett could see just how much she loved her father. Garrett thought of his own dad for the first time in years, and admitted to himself that he truly missed the man. “So to me,” she was saying, “he’ll always be Gunny.”
As usual, she’d told Garrett more than he’d actually asked for. It seemed to him that she was always talking, always filling the air with details. She was crowding not only his space, but his mind as well.
“I suppose that makes more sense than you having some computer tech wire my house for the internet,” he commented.
“You’ll get used to it. Pretty soon, you won’t know how you ever did without it,” she promised cheerfully.
He sincerely doubted it. He had no use for being up-to-date just for the sake of being that way. As far as he was concerned, technology made things far too complicated.
“Besides, you can’t fight the twenty-first century forever, Sheriff,” she pointed out.
“Apparently not with you around,” he grumbled.
She tried again. “And more to the point, Ellie needs the internet so that she’ll be able to do her research.”
This was a new angle, he thought. Lani hadn’t mentioned anything about this before. “What research?” he asked.
She would have thought that would be obvious. After all, the little girl was in school. “Ellie needs to be able to do research for her homework.”
School had become pretty much a blur. Garrett couldn’t remember what had gone on during his elementary school years, other than the time he’d spent trying to avoid his stepfather’s swinging hand and bad temper.
But even so, he couldn’t fathom the idea of in-depth homework at his niece’s tender age. “She’s six.”
For such a young man, he certainly didn’t make an effort to keep up on things that didn’t interest him, Lani realized. She would have thought that being sheriff would have forced him to stay abreast.
She picked up the thread that he had left her. “Beside the fact that school’s gotten more progressive since you went, before you know it Ellie’ll be seven, then eight, then nine. Then ten, and then—”
“Stop,” he begged, holding up his hands as if to physically ward off her words. “I get it. I get it.” Deciding that he needed air, he pushed his chair back from his desk and rose to his feet. “I’m going out on patrol.”
“Okay.” As he crossed the room, she suddenly looked up from what she was about to write. “Oh, by the way, I wanted to ask you if you’re going to need any help with the decorating?”
Slowly, Garrett turned away from the door, an uneasy feeling growing in the pit of his stomach, telling him that this wasn’t going to be good.
“Decorating what?” he asked warily.
She gestured around
the area. It was almost two weeks before Christmas and there wasn’t so much as a single decoration in the room. “You know, your house, the office.”
He looked around, not following her train of thought. Did she intend to overhaul every inch of his life now that he’d allowed her to have a toehold? “What’s wrong with the way they are now?”
“Nothing,” she answered, her tone clearly saying that she felt otherwise. “But this isn’t Christmassy looking.”
“And…?” he asked, still waiting for an explanation that made sense to him.
“And?” Lani echoed in disbelief. Was he serious? Of course he was. She was dealing with a man who obviously needed a visit from three Christmas ghosts to set him straight—and maybe even that wouldn’t help. “Well, it’s Christmas, or at least it’s going to be.” She looked at him, knowing the answer even as she asked the question. “You don’t own any Christmas decorations, do you?”
Garrett made no attempt to answer. Instead, he glared at her.
Lani shut her eyes and groaned. “Oh, my God, I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me.”
“No,” he said firmly, “you don’t.”
Lani opened her eyes again. “Yes, I do,” she contradicted. Then, before he could protest or make an objection, she quickly presented her argument. “Ellie needs Christmas. All kids need Christmas, but Ellie needs it more than most.”
As usual, her line of reasoning eluded him. “And why is that?”
Lani suppressed a sigh. For a sharp man, Garrett could be so very dense sometimes.
“Because this is her first Christmas without her mother. And, just as important, this is her first Christmas with you.” How could he not see something so obvious? “She needs to build up good memories. Now, are you going to have her looking back on her childhood, remembering that things went downhill after she turned six, or are you going to make it so that she’s going to be able to look back and smile because she has some very good memories of the years she spent with you?”
Chisholm did have a way of phrasing her arguments; he’d give her that. But not out loud. He knew that even hinting at that would allow her to think she had carte blanche.
Holiday in a Stetson: The Sheriff Who Found ChristmasA Rancho Diablo Christmas Page 4