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The truth was people, even ones as cynical as Tag, could be fooled.
They could be fooled by a pretty face or an angelic air, by white hair and granny glasses, by adolescent awkwardness, by words, by body language.
Not Boo. The hackles on the dog’s neck rose when something—or someone—needed a second look, and she grinned the silliest grin when everything was all right. Tag did not substitute her judgment for his own, but the world’s ugliest dog had an uncanny knack for letting him know when he’d missed something.
She wasn’t officially a K-9, but she was unofficially the mascot of the Snow Mountain Police Department.
So, why not see how she would react to the chief’s niece? Just for interest’s sake, nothing more. Lila Grainger’s appearance and the opening of her store seemed mysterious and sudden, as if Tag needed to be any warier than he was of the woman he had never even laid eyes on. Still, the chief was usually a talker—you couldn’t shut him up when she’d signed the book deal—but he’d said nothing about his niece’s arrival in town until she had gotten here.
Tag ignored the big No Dogs Allowed sign posted on the door, since just about everyone in Snow Mountain knew Boo was more human than dog anyway, and pulled the brass handle on the heavy walnut and glass door. He stepped in. A sleigh bell jingled a greeting and he was enveloped by smells of Christmas: candy cane, mint, pumpkin pie, incense, spices, pine.
Scent, he had found, was the most powerful of triggers and the aromas swamped him in memories of what his life had once felt like and had once been. A longing for the sweet, uncomplicated days of the past enveloped him. For a moment he could almost see his brother, Ethan, at about age six, tearing into a train set not unlike that one that chugged around the window.
He shook off the feeling of melancholy, liking crankiness better. A carol played loudly, old school Bing Crosby, and everywhere he looked Tag saw the highly breakable paraphernalia of the season. He warned Boo, with a finger, not to move.
At the far end of the store, a slight figure sat behind a counter had her back to the door and was typing furiously. She had not heard him come in over the high-volume crooning of Bing and her own intensity, and he studied her, frowning. No flowered dress?
In fact, the woman seemed to be wearing low-rider jeans that were slipping to show quite a bit of naked and very slender lower back. Tendrils of blond hair, the color of fall grass streaked with liquid honey, had escaped a clasp and teased the top of a delicate neck.
Tag’s first thought was that it couldn’t be the chief’s niece. Hutch had a town full of relatives, not a niece or nephew under forty. This girl looked like she was about eighteen.
The wind picked that moment to send a vicious gust down Main Street, and it sucked the door out of his hand and slammed it so hard even the dog flinched.
The woman, who had just reached for her coffee mug, started, and the glass dropped from fingers that had not quite grasped it, and shattered on the newly refurbished hardwood floor.
She leaped from the chair, and whirled to face him, one hand over her heart, the other reaching frantically for the three-foot-high striped candy cane decoration in a box beside her.
She held it like a weapon, and he might have laughed at what a ridiculous defense a candy cane was, except that somehow the picture of his brother ripping into Christmas parcels was still with him, as was his agony over Boo, and his laughter felt as dried up as those fall leaves blowing down Main Street.
Miss Mary Christmas was not eighteen after all, but midtwenties maybe.
And her eyes were genuinely fear-glazed, in sharp contrast to the pretty joy and light world she had created in her store. She registered his uniform and her hold on the candy cane relaxed, but only marginally.
She was dressed casually, but her outfit showed off feminine curves so appealing it pierced the armor of his hurt, which made him frown. She wore hip-hugging jeans, a red sweater over a white shirt, the tails and collar sticking out. She was sock-footed, which for some reason took him off guard, an intimacy at odds with the store surroundings.
“Sorry,” she said, “you startled me.”
No kidding.
He glanced down at Boo who did something he had never seen before: laid down and began to hum, deep in her throat, not a growl, a strange lullaby. He stared at the dog, flummoxed, hoping this was not the next stage in the diagnosis the doctor had given him yesterday.
He looked back up, as confused by her as he had been by the dog’s strange humming.
She was young and beautiful, like one of those angels they sold to top the Christmas tree. Her Florida skin was only faintly sun-kissed, flawless as porcelain, her bone structure was gorgeous, but fragile, and eyes huge and china-blue fastened on his face. He could see where her pulse still beat frantically in her neck.
“You must be Miss Grainger,” he said, despite the fact he’d been determined to address her as Miss L. Toe. Now he was aware of keeping his voice deliberately soft, his reasons for being here, nebulous to begin with, even more blurred by the fear he saw in her.
“Lila,” she insisted brightly.
The chief’s niece did not have the chunky build of the rest of the Hutchinson clan. In fact, he was aware of feeling guilty even thinking it about the chief’s niece, but she was subtly but undeniably, well, sexy.
She was trying to make it look like she wasn’t afraid anymore, but he could tell she still was, so he tried to tame his frown, and canned his plans to take out his bad mood on her.
He was in a business where he got thrown plenty of curveballs, but he had never developed a liking for being caught off guard, surprised, and the chief’s niece was a surprise.
He’d been around enough fear to recognize the real McCoy, and to see wariness still haunted her eyes, despite his uniform. Or maybe because of it. Lots of people were afraid of police. He kept the space between them, but Boo began to wiggle forward on her belly, still humming happily. Tag snapped his finger at his dog, pointed at his feet.
Boo gave him a pleading look over her shoulder, then flopped over on her back and pointed all four feet in the air.
Lila Grainger’s eyes left his face for the first time. Despite his uniform, he had the feeling she would bolt for the back if he made one move toward her. But when she looked at Boo, she smiled, and some finely held tension left her.
“What an adorable dog.”
Maybe that explained her overreaction to the slamming of the door. Visual impairment. Boo was about the furthest thing from adorable on the planet!
An upside-down paw waved at her, and Lila Grainger laughed, proving she could see just fine, and that she was even sexier than he had first thought, which was unfortunate, because he’d rated her plenty sexy on that first glance.
“I missed the meeting last night,” Tag said, getting down to business. He folded his arms over his chest, to make himself look big and remote, not a man in the least moved by the sexiness of strangers.
“Meeting?” she stammered, uneasily.
“I’ve been assigned to the Committee.” He wanted to make that very plain. Assigned. Not volunteered.
“Oh, that meeting,” she said too hastily, and tucked a wisp of that feathery hair behind her ear, “That’s fine. We have enough people. More than enough. You look like a busy guy. No time for this type of thing. But thanks for dropping by. There’s some leftover shortbread by the cash register. Go ahead and take some.”
She was trying to get rid of him. Even with the distraction of the cookies, which he stole a glance at and saw were chocolate dipped, and with the further distraction of that wisp of hair popping back out from behind her ear, the policeman in him went on red alert as her eyes shifted uneasily to the right. The chief had been right. She was up to something. Something that she didn’t want him to know about.
He was really watching her now. Every detail suddenly interested him, including ones that had nothing to do with what she might be trying to hide, like the fact she had faint circles under her eyes, as if she had trouble sleeping, and the fact that her ring finger was empty.
She was single. Miss L. Toe not Mrs. L. Toe. There was absolutely no reason he should feel uneasy about that. He didn’t do the relationship thing. He’d become a master at ignoring that initial twitch of interest that could lead a man into that quicksand world of caring.
At his brother’s funeral, six and a half years ago, the minister had said, All love leads to loss. Somehow it had become a credo Tag lived by—the dog had wormed her way by his defenses, but no one else.
And now, Boo, too, was going to drive the point home. That to develop attachments, to care about anything, even a dog, made a man vulnerable, stole his power from him as surely as Delilah had stolen Sampson’s hair.
Not that he could indulge in such introspection right now. He made himself not look at Boo, who was still waving her paw engagingly at Lila Grainger.
“Well, nice of you to drop in, Officer, um—”
“Taggert,” he supplied. What was causing her to feel such discomfort? He’d startled her, but there was more. He could sense it, even without Boo’s help. Her uncle had been absolutely right.
She was up to something.
Or else the news he’d gotten yesterday, and that sudden poignant memory of his brother tearing into that gift, had rattled him badly enough that he was jumping at shadows.
After all, what could she be up to that she wouldn’t want the police department—her uncle—to know about? She hardly looked like the type to decide to finance the saving of Christmas with a little illegal activity, like selling drugs or smuggling.
Still, Tag had a cop’s gift. He knew instinctively when people were hiding something, and she was.
“Have you got some minutes from the meeting?” he pushed, just a little.
“Minutes?” her voice became suspiciously squeaky. “Of course not. It was very informal.”
“So did you come up with a plan of action? For saving the Christmas display in Bandstand Park?”
“Oh,” Lila said, her voice filled with bright and very fake cheer again, “we just bounced some preliminary ideas around. You know.”
“I don’t,” he said uncooperatively.
“We changed the name. We’re going to call ourselves Save Our Snow Mountain Christmas. SOS for short.”
She looked at him like she expected his approval. When he said nothing she began to talk fast and nervously, another sure sign of a person who was being evasive.
“We might put up a tree. A big one,” she said in a rush, “just to keep the Christmas spirit alive until we can come up with some money and get the Santa’s Workshop display fixed. Or get the town to change their minds.”
She blushed when she said that, as if she was planning something naughty to get the town to change their minds, but just looking at her he could tell her idea of naughty and his would be completely different. He thought if she showed up in one of those red, fur-trimmed bikinis the town would do whatever the hell she wanted.
As if to prove how differently their minds worked, and that she was the girl least likely to ever wear a red fur-trimmed bikini, she said, “We might try putting a real Santa in the park on weekends.”
“There are no real Santas,” he said dryly, knowing with new conviction he was hearing only part of the story.
“I was thinking of asking that portly man who works with Uncle Paul. Do you think he’d do it for free?”
Portly was a very kind way to describe the most senior member of the Snow Mountain department.
“Jamison?” Tag asked, incredulously. “You want Karl Jamison to play Santa?”
Jamison, who was not portly, but obese, who chewed—and spat—tobacco, and who had the world’s largest off-color vocabulary thanks to ten years in the Marine Corp, was the man least likely to play Santa.
“He just looked like he’d make a good Santa,” she said wistfully.
Karl Jamison was the man most likely to kill Christmas forever on Snow Mountain should he ever be appointed a weekend Santa Claus.
“You wouldn’t make a good Santa,” she said, eyeing Tag speculatively before turning her eyes away, fiddling with the candy cane. “You’re too—”
Despite the insult of being declared a worse Santa than Jamison, a number of ways to finish that sentence came to his mind: tall, dark, handsome, which just served to prove he had not been as successful at shutting down that initial spark of interest as he had hoped.
But she shot him another glance and finished her sentence with, “Unjolly.”
He was not a literary giant like her, but he was pretty sure if he ran unjolly through the computer spelling checker at the station, it was going to make that noise he hated.
Still, unjolly was as accurate a description as any, so why was he vaguely annoyed that she had spotted his true nature, completely unsuitable in the peace and joy department, so instantly and accurately?
And since she had handed him his escape from her ridiculous committee practically gift-wrapped, why wasn’t he gratefully bowing his way toward the door?
Instead he heard himself asking, “So besides that, did you come up with any other ideas for saving Christmas in Snow Mountain?”
He did not try to hide his cynicism, and her look of uneasiness increased.
“No, nothing at all,” she said, way, way too quickly.
She was afraid of him. Or something. There were a lot of mysteries in Lila Grainger’s eyes, and a man could be drawn to them, tempted to probe them, which was another reason to just get out of here, accept with grace and gratitude there was no room for cynical, Christmas-hating cops on the SOS committee.
But the chief wasn’t going to believe he hadn’t done something: kicked an elf, broken a manger, been rude and unreasonable, to get himself off the Save Christmas Committee hook. He slid one wistful look over his shoulder at the door, but sucked it up.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to do something?” he asked gruffly. Damn. Now he was probably going to end up building a Santa throne that could hold Jamison without collapsing. Which would be a gigantic project.
But she was as eager to get rid of him as he was to leave.
“No, really, I can’t think of a single thing.” In fact, now she was backing away from him.
Only she’d forgotten the broken glass on the floor, and she was in her socks. She cried out, lifted her foot, the heel already crimson with blood.
“It’s nothing,” she said as he moved instinctively toward her. She slammed her foot back down with such conviction she nearly made herself faint.
She toppled, just as he arrived at her, and he managed to scoop her up before she hit the floor. She weighed practically nothing, perhaps a few pounds more than Boo, not that she was anything like Boo.
It had been a long, long time since he had held anything so close and so soft as Miss Lila Grainger. A yearning so intense it nearly stole his breath shot through him. Before he could stop himself, he had pulled her scent, wild summer strawberries, deep inside himself and it felt as if it was filling an emptiness he had not thought could be filled.
He wanted to drop her. He wanted to hold her tighter. He wanted to be the same man he had been thirty seconds ago, and was not sure he ever could be again.
“Oh, my,” she moaned, her breath warm against his chest. “This has gone very badly.”
He felt her sweet weight in her arms, saw the pulse going crazy in her neck, heard the dog humming at his heel with what he could suddenly and clearly identify as adoration, and thought, You got that right.
Out loud he said, without a single shred of emotion that might clue her in to how he felt about her softness pressed against him, “Where’s your first-aid kit?”
CHAPTER TWO
LILA sat on the edge of the toilet in the bathroom, staring at the dark head bent over her foot.
Despite the fact Officer Taggert had perfected that policeman look of professional remoteness, he had actually flinched at the bathroom decor, which she knew to be fabulous: an imaginative creation of what Santa’s washroom would look like.
There was a fake window, framed in snowmen-patterned curtains, looking out over beautifully hand-painted scenes from the North Pole. The towels had Christmas trees on them, the soap had glitter, the toilet paper, one of her top selling items, was printed with Ho, Ho, Ho.
In fact, before he had arrived, Lila had been sitting at her desk, contemplating starting her first ever book, How to Have a Perfect Christmas, with a really fun chapter on bathroom decorating for the holidays.
But now, despite the cheer of the bright red and white paint and the merry decor, the atmosphere in the close quarters of the bathroom seemed mildly icy. Taggert was remote, determined to keep his professional distance though, really, it seemed a little too late for that.
She had already felt him, felt the hard, unrelenting, pure-man strength of him, and been as dazed by that as by the pain in her foot.
Dazed would describe her reaction to him, period—the reason she had stepped on broken glass.
After the initial fear had come something even more frightening. A feeling, unfounded because you could not know a person from simply looking at them.
But her feeling had been instant, and felt deeply.
The world is a better place because this man is in it.
