Miranda took the pizza box, leaving the Christmas tree for him to carry. When he picked it up, they began to walk to the front door.
“Disciplining is something that I think I’ll delegate to my husband,” she told him, adding, “He’ll probably be the strong and masterful type.”
Colin’s laugh was dry as he thought over her comment. “He would have to be.”
Miranda cocked her head, trying to decide how he meant that. “Was that a compliment or a criticism?” she asked, curious.
He was talking too much, Colin decided. That had never been a problem for him before he’d met this woman.
“Take it any way you want,” he answered, thinking that being vague was the safest way to go right now.
Miranda felt Lola trying to crowd her, attempting to push her way outside.
“No, girl, you have to stay in. I’ll be right back,” she promised.
Tucking the pizza box under her arm, she cringed slightly as she both heard and felt the remaining slices sliding together.
With her free hand, she gently steered the dog back into the house. Then, trying not to drop the box, she pulled the door closed behind her.
Looking on, Colin said with approval, “You’re making progress.”
“Well, I had to,” Miranda told him. “You were watching me.”
“So if I wasn’t here...?” He left the end of the sentence up in the air and waited for her to finish it.
She did, but not as he expected. “I wouldn’t have pizza to keep away from her in the first place.”
Colin shook his head, impressed despite himself. “I’ve got to say, you really do know how to dance around a subject.”
“I’ve learned from the best,” she said, grinning. She watched his brow furrow as he looked at her over his shoulder, perplexed.
Miranda hadn’t meant for it to sound cryptic. Following him to his vehicle, she explained, “Kids. They can spin tales that’ll make you dizzy.”
Stopping beside his car, Colin looked at her pointedly. “I know the feeling.”
He took his keys out of his pocket. Unlocking the doors, he put the potted Christmas tree on the floor in the rear. Taking the pizza, he placed the box on the passenger seat, then turned to face her.
“Well, thanks for your help with the pizza. And thanks for the tree,” he added belatedly.
He watched as a smile filled her eyes. “Don’t mention it. It’s the least I can do after all that joy you brought my kids.”
Her thanks made him feel awkward again. “I just showed up,” he insisted again, not wanting to make any more out of it than that. But with Miranda he should have known better.
“You did a lot more than that,” she insisted. “You brightened up their day. Their parents come as often as they can—and that’s a good thing,” she assured him. “But having you come to their ward was something out of the ordinary. Something special,” she said with feeling.
He opened his mouth and then shut it again. When he saw the curious look on her face, he told her, “Well, I’m not going to argue with you, because I’m beginning to get the feeling that no one stands a chance of winning an argument with you.”
“Sure they do,” she declared, although, offhand, she couldn’t think of a single example to cite.
“Uh-huh.” His response as he started to go reeked of skepticism.
“Oh, and Colin?” Miranda called after him, raising her voice.
Colin was about to round the hood to get into his side of the vehicle, but stopped. “Yes?”
“Promise you won’t forget and leave the tree in the car. It’s a hardy little thing, but if you leave it in the car indefinitely, it’ll wilt and lose all its needles.”
Indulging her, he promised, “I won’t forget.”
“Oh, and drive carefully,” she called after him.
Colin paused again. He should feel annoyed or insulted that, given the nature of his work, she still felt the need to say something like that to him. And yet this whole scene just made him smile. He had no idea why.
Waiting, he turned around. “Anything else?”
Miranda knew that she was pushing her luck to the absolute limit, but then nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?
Taking a breath, she forged ahead. “Well, there’s a Christmas Eve party, if you’d like to come.”
He hadn’t expected her to say that; he’d just assumed she’d have more trivial slogans to send his way. “At the hospital?”
He’d done his part at the hospital and she was now focusing on the other two places where she volunteered her time.
“Well, yes, there, too,” she allowed. “But I was thinking of the shelter.”
She still wasn’t narrowing it down, he realized. “Homeless or animal?”
“Homeless. Although, now that I think about it, we are having a party at the animal shelter, too,” she told him. “It’s an adoption party. There’s one every month, but there’s an extra push to find the animals a home just before Christmas.”
“Of course there is.” Listening to her, he shook his head. It was a wonder the woman didn’t just fall over and collapse. “When do you have time for you?” he asked.
“All of this is for me,” she responded. Seeing the doubtful look on his face, she insisted, “I derive pleasure out of seeing the animals find new homes and the kids getting better and going back to their families. And the women at the shelter taking stock of their situation and finding a way to create new lives for themselves and their children.”
Saints have less to do, he thought. Colin shook his head again, but the corners of his mouth had curved ever so slightly.
“All of this is for you, huh?” He watched as she nodded with feeling. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you before, Miranda Steele,” he told her in all sincerity.
“Is that a good thing?” she asked.
“I’m thinking on it,” he answered, remaining deliberately vague.
She couldn’t read his expression, and her curiosity was getting the better of her even though she knew it shouldn’t. “Let me know what you come up with.”
“I have a feeling you’ll be the first to know.”
Colin suddenly found himself fighting the urge to pull her into his arms. If he didn’t leave now, he might wind up doing something stupid, and as unique as this woman was, he didn’t need any complications in his life.
He’d already gotten too involved with her as it was.
He needed distance, not closeness, Colin insisted silently.
So why wasn’t he getting into his car and leaving? Why was he turning around and crossing back toward the woman?
Miranda was standing at the curb, ready to wave at him as he pulled away.
When instead of leaving, he approached, she looked at him uncertainly, slightly confused even while she felt her heart climbing up into her throat.
Her breath was backing up in her chest. “Did you forget something?”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “My sanity.”
Her confusion mounted. “I don’t know what that means.”
Colin didn’t respond. At least not verbally. Instead, he took her into his arms just the way he’d told himself not to, and kissed her the way he knew he shouldn’t.
The way every fiber of his being felt that he just had to.
Confusion ran rampant all through Miranda. One moment she was standing at the curb, getting ready to watch Colin drive down the street and disappear; the next moment she found herself smack in the middle of an old-fashioned twister, being sucked up into its very core and whirling around so hard she couldn’t breathe. She certainly couldn’t think or get her bearings.
But then, bearings were highly overrated, she decided.
Standing up on her toes, Miranda
dug her fingertips into his shoulders in a desperate attempt to anchor herself to something solid before she was swept so completely away she would never be able to find her way back again.
This wasn’t a kiss. She’d been kissed before, kissed by faceless, unremarkable men who faded from her memory before they had a chance to even walk out the door.
But this—this was an experience. A mind-blowing, incredible experience that she would remember to her dying day even if she lived to be a hundred and ten.
* * *
Colin fought the urge to deepen this kiss and take it to its natural conclusion. Fought the urge to sweep her up into his arms and carry her back inside her house so that he could make love with her. Make love with her until they were both too exhausted to even breathe.
He came within a hair’s breadth of giving in to that urge, that desire.
And then a last sliver of sanity rose up, stopping him.
He couldn’t do this, he silently insisted, couldn’t make love with her. Because if he did, he would be willfully bringing his darkness into her world.
She was a bright, shining ray of light, bent on bringing happiness to everyone and everything. If he took this to its natural conclusion, he would be guilty of if not extinguishing that light, then at the very least dimming it considerably.
He couldn’t be responsible for that, couldn’t do that to her and all the other lives that Miranda would wind up touching.
Although every fiber of his being fought it, trying to keep him from following through, he separated himself from Miranda. He removed her arms, which she’d wound around his neck, and pushed them down against her sides, held them there for a long moment—until he could collect himself.
“I’ve got to go,” he told her hoarsely.
Then, without another word, Colin got into his car and turned on the ignition. He pulled away from the curb without a single backward glance.
Then, unable to help himself, he looked in the rearview mirror.
Miranda was still standing there at the curb where he had left her.
A pang of regret seized his very being.
Colin struggled with the impulse to turn the car around and head back to her. Instead, he pushed down hard on the accelerator, determined to put more and more distance between them.
“Count yourself lucky,” he said, addressing the figure that was growing progressively smaller and smaller in his rearview mirror. “You don’t need someone like me in your life.”
He had a very strong feeling that if he had given in to himself tonight, if he had weakened and made love to Miranda, he wouldn’t have been able to walk away from her, short of being sandblasted away.
That would be a very bad thing.
For her.
* * *
Miranda had a sinking feeling as she watched Colin drive off that he could very well be gone from her life for good.
There’d been something about the set of his shoulders, about the foreboding expression on his face as he had removed her arms from around his neck and stepped away, that made her think of an iron gate coming down, separating the two of them.
Cutting her off from him.
But even so, she kept watching for him every time she looked up, every time her attention was drawn to something—a noise, a flash of light out of the corner of her eye.
Every time she raised her eyes, she was looking for Colin.
And every time she did, he wasn’t there.
He wasn’t leaning in the doorway of any of the hospital rooms belonging to the small patients she attended, wasn’t standing across the street from the animal shelter, waiting for her to come out. He wasn’t walking into the women’s shelter, wasn’t ringing her doorbell and standing on the front step until she opened the door.
He wasn’t anywhere in her life—except in her mind, and there he had set up housekeeping, big-time.
If she was going to function properly, she was either going to have to purge him from her mind and forget all about him, or else beard the lion in his den, Miranda thought in a moment of madness.
Get hold of yourself, she silently lectured.
She was far too busy for this, far too busy to mentally dwell on a man who—a man who...
In the middle of her rounds, Miranda abruptly came to a dead stop. She’d initially been drawn to the tall, dark, silent police officer not because he could kiss like nobody’s business and set her soul on fire. She’d been drawn to him because of the sadness she saw in his eyes. She remembered thinking that Colin needed someone to brighten his world, to help him find hope and hang on to it.
He needed her, and somehow, she had lost sight of that.
But not anymore, she vowed. She was back on track and determined to strip that sadness, that darkness out of him until Officer Colin Kirby found a reason to smile of his own accord.
He could keep those lips to himself. That wasn’t what was important here. What she wanted was his happiness.
And she was determined to help him find it if it was the last thing she did.
Chapter Fifteen
Despite his resolve, he couldn’t seem to get Miranda out of his head. Not that day, nor the next. The harder he tried, the less success he had. His thoughts turned to the bubbly nurse over a dozen times a day. More, if he was being honest with himself.
For the first time in his adult life, Colin’s laser-like focus completely failed him.
He couldn’t get himself to concentrate exclusively on his work. Images of Miranda’s face kept materializing in his mind’s eye at the worst possible times, impeding him at every turn.
Colin had never been one to throw in the towel. He struggled to regain control over himself and his thoughts. He’d triumphed over the racking pain of losing his parents—especially his mother, who he’d been so close to—and managed to keep going during his tour overseas when more than half his platoon had been wiped out all around him.
And though they hadn’t been close, guilt had skewered him when he’d lost his partner, Andrew Owens, while on the job.
But he’d managed to rise above all that, erasing it from his mind and functioning as if his insides hadn’t been smashed into a thousand pieces. He did it to survive, to continue putting one foot in front of the other and moving on the path he found himself on.
But this—this was completely different. For some mysterious reason, he’d lost his ability to isolate himself, to strip all distracting thoughts from his mind.
He’d lost the ability to continue, and he knew he had to resolve this if he had any hopes of functioning and moving on with his life.
He just had to figure out how.
* * *
How had this happened? It felt as if Thanksgiving had been only yesterday, then somehow she’d blinked, and now Christmas was a week away and Miranda had more than enough to keep not just herself but half a dozen people busy.
To paraphrase Dickens, it was both the best time of the year and the worst time of the year, mainly because of all the things that were associated with the season. The shelters as well as the hospital needed her more than ever, and there was enough for her to do thirty-six hours a day if she could somehow find a way to create that many hours out of thin air.
But even with everything she had to handle, she couldn’t stop thinking about Colin. Worrying about Colin. It was interfering not just with her ability to devote herself to her work as a nurse, but also as a volunteer—in both areas that used her services.
She needed to talk to Colin, she decided, and she needed to do it face-to-face, not over the phone. Any other means would be far too impersonal.
Because of the hectic pace this time of year generated, taking time off from the hospital was not an option. The only thing she could do was try to shave a little time from her volunteer work. The pace t
here was hectic, as well, and there were a great many demands on her time whenever she had any to spare. But she had to do this. Because not talking to Colin was unthinkable.
The problem was, since she still didn’t know where the man lived, the only place she could hope to find him was along the route he patrolled or at the precinct before he went off duty.
However, both conflicted with her shift at the hospital.
Still, maybe if she played the odds and really hurried—and hopefully he was getting off late—she might be able to catch Colin before he left work for the day.
Miranda felt stressed because even if she was lucky enough to catch him, she’d have to talk fast because the women’s shelter’s Christmas party, the one she’d helped organize for the children, was scheduled to begin the minute she walked through the door.
She was exhausted already.
As Miranda dashed to her car, all set to take off for the precinct, her cell phone rang.
Please let it be a wrong number, she prayed as she took it out of her purse and then quickly put in her password.
The caller ID that came up belonged to the homeless shelter. Specifically, to Amelia.
Maybe the director was just checking in with her, Miranda thought, mentally crossing her fingers as she answered.
“Hi, Amelia.” She used her free hand to buckle her seat belt. “What’s up?”
“We’ve got an emergency,” the woman said, without even bothering to return the greeting. “I just hung up with Santa Claus. He called to say he’s stuck in traffic in LA and he’s not going to be able to get here in time.”
Miranda knew the director was referring to the man she had hired to play Santa for the kids at the shelter. Thinking of the children’s disappointment, she felt her heart sink.
The words came out before she could stop them. “But the kids are expecting to see Santa Claus.”
“I know. I know,” the director answered. “The toys are here, but they’re going to feel really let down that Santa Claus couldn’t make it to hand them out.”
Her mind going in all directions, Miranda searched for a solution. And then she thought of something. “Do you still have that old Santa suit from last year?”
Christmastime Courtship Page 13