Christmas in Cold Creek

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“I’m beginning to see why people prefer artificial trees.”

“Oh, blasphemy!” He aimed a mock frown in her direction. “What about that heavenly smell?”

“A ninety-nine-cent car air freshener can give you the same thing without the sap and the needles all over the carpet.”

He shook his head with a rueful smile but didn’t argue and she was painfully aware of the highly inconvenient little simmer of attraction. He was an extraordinarily good-looking man, with those startling green eyes and a hint of afternoon shadow along his jawline. Avoiding him would be far easier if the dratted man didn’t stir up all kinds of ridiculous feelings.

“I’ll clean up the needles, I promise.”

To Becca’s surprise, Gabrielle seemed to glow with excitement. She was such a funny kid. Becca was no closer to figuring out this curious little stranger than she was two months ago when Monica had dumped her in her lap.

“Okay, moment of truth.” Trace stepped back to look at his handiwork. “Does that look straight to you two?”

Gabrielle moved toward Becca for a better perspective and cocked her head to the side. “It looks great to me. What about you, Be—um, Mom?”

Gabi stumbled only slightly over the word but it was still a surprising mistake. Her sister was remarkably adept at deception. No surprise there since she’d been bottle-fed it since birth. Becca glanced at the police chief but he didn’t seem to have noticed anything amiss and she spoke quickly to distract him.

“Looks straight to me, too.”

“I think you’re both right. It is straight. Amazing! That didn’t take long at all. You’ve got some serious tree setup skills, young lady.”

Much to Becca’s astonishment, her sister giggled. Actually giggled. Gabrielle blinked a little, clearly surprised at the sound herself.

“Now what are we going to decorate it with?” the girl asked.

“I’ve got a couple strings of lights out in the truck. We can start with that.”

“I can probably find something around here,” Becca said quickly. “If not, I can pick some up tomorrow.”

She didn’t want him here. It was too dangerous. The more time they spent with the police chief, the greater the chance that either she or Gabi would slip again and he would figure out things weren’t quite as they seemed. She had the distinct impression he was suspicious enough of them and she didn’t want to raise any more red flags.

Her unwilling attraction to him only further complicated the situation. She just wanted him to leave so she could go back to duct-taping her life back together.

“I’ve already got the lights out in my truck. Why go to so much trouble of tracking down more?”

“You’ve already done more than enough.”

“Here’s something good to know about me.” Trace grinned. “I’m the kind of guy who likes to see things through.”

For an insane instant, she imagined just how he would kiss a woman—with thorough, meticulous intensity. Those green eyes would turn to smoke as he took great care to explore and taste every inch of her mouth with his until she was soft and pliant and ready to throw every caution out the window… .

She blinked away the entirely too appealing image to find Trace watching her. His eyes weren’t smoky now, only curious, as if wondering what she was thinking. Heat rushed to her cheeks with her blush, something she hadn’t done in a long time. He wouldn’t be talked out of helping them decorate the tree. Somehow she knew she was stuck in this untenable situation and continuing to protest would only make him wonder why she was so ardently determined to avoid his company.

Gabi was obviously pleased to have him here and it seemed churlish of Becca to make a deal about it. How long would it take to decorate a tree, anyway?

“Thank you, then. I think I saw a box of old ornaments up in the attic in my … my grandfather’s things.”

“Great. I guess we’re in business.” He headed for the door and returned a moment later with a box that had Extra Christmas Lights written on it with black permanent marker in what looked like a woman’s handwriting. He didn’t have a wife, she knew, so who had written those words? Maybe he had an ex or a steady girlfriend. Not that it was any of her business who might be writing on his boxes, she reminded herself.

He immediately started untangling the light strings and she watched long, well-formed fingers move nimbly for a moment then jerked her attention away when she realized she was staring.

“Gabi, come help me look for the ornaments.”

Reluctance flitted across the girl’s features as if she didn’t want to leave Trace Bowman’s presence, either, but she followed Becca up the narrow stairs to the cramped storage space under the eaves adjacent to the room Gabi had claimed as her own bedroom.

The space smelled musty and dusty and was piled with boxes and trunks Becca had barely had time to even look at in the few weeks they’d been in Pine Gulch. She pulled the string on the bare-bulb light and could swear she heard something scurry. They needed a cat, she thought. She didn’t want to add one more responsibility to her plate but a good mouser would be just the thing.

“I think I saw the ornaments somewhere over by the window. Help me look, would you?”

She and Gabi began sorting through boxes filled with the detritus of a lonely old man’s life. It made her inexpressibly sad to think about the grandfather she hadn’t even known existed. Monica had told her very little about the paternal side of her heritage. She had known her father had died when she was just a baby and Monica had told her she didn’t have any other living relatives on either side.

Big surprise. She’d lied. This was just one more thing her mother had stolen from her.

“He’s nice, isn’t he?”

She glanced at Gabi, who was looking toward the doorway and the stairs with a pensive sort of look.

“He’s the police chief, Gab. You know what that means.”

“We haven’t done anything wrong here.”

“Except tell the world I’m your mother.”

She never should have done it, but it was one of those tiny lies that had quickly grown out of control. When she’d tried to enroll Gabi in school after they arrived in Pine Gulch, Becca had suddenly realized she didn’t have any sort of guardianship papers or even a birth certificate. Worried that Gabi would be taken from her and placed into foster care, she had fudged the paperwork at the school. Thinking the school authorities would be more likely to take her word for things if she was Gabi’s mother rather than merely an older sister, she had called upon the grifting skills she hadn’t used in years to convince the secretary she didn’t know where Gabi’s birth certificate was after a succession of moves—not technically a lie.

The secretary had been gratifyingly understanding and told Becca merely to bring them when she could find them. From that moment, they were stuck in the lie. She didn’t want to think about Trace Bowman’s reaction if he found out she was perpetrating a fraud on the school and the community. She wasn’t a poor single mother trying to eke out a living with her daughter. She was stuck in a situation that seemed to grow more complicated by the minute.

“I still think he’s nice,” Gabi said. “He brought us a Christmas tree.”

She wanted to warn her sister to run far, far away from sexy men bearing warm smiles and unexpected charm. “You’re right. That was a very kind thing to do. Actually, it was his niece’s idea, right? You must have made a good friend in Destry Bowman.”

“She’s nice,” Gabi said, avoiding her gaze. “Where do you think you saw the ornaments?”

An interesting reaction. She frowned at Gabi but didn’t comment, especially when her sister found the box of ornaments just a moment later, next to a box of 1950s-era women’s clothing.

Her grandmother’s, perhaps? From the attorney who notified her of the bequest, she had learned the woman had died years ago, before she was born, but other than that she didn’t know anything about her. Since coming to Pine Gulch, she had been thinking how surreal it was to live in her grandfather’s house when she didn’t know anything about him, surrounded by the personal belongings of a stranger.

She had picked up bits and pieces since she’d arrived in town that indicated that her father and grandfather had fought bitterly before she was born. She didn’t know the full story and wasn’t sure she ever would, but Donna told her that her father had apparently vowed never to speak to his own father again. She could guess the reason. Probably her mother had something to do with it. Monica was very good at finding ways to destroy relationships around her.

Kenneth Taylor had been killed in a motorcycle crash when Becca was a toddler and her parents had never been married. Her only memories of him were a bushy mustache and sideburns and a deep, warm voice telling her stories at night.

She’d been curious about her father’s family over the years, but Monica had refused to talk about him. She hadn’t even known her grandfather was still alive until she’d heard from that Idaho Falls attorney a few months earlier, right in the middle of her own legal trouble. When he had told her she had inherited a small house in Idaho, the news had seemed an answer to prayer. She had been thinking she and Gabi would wind up homeless if she couldn’t figure something out and suddenly she had learned she owned a house in a town she’d never visited.

This sturdy little Craftsman cottage was dark and neglected, but she knew she could make a happy home here for her and Gabi, their lies notwithstanding.

As long as the police chief left her alone.

Females with secrets. He’d certainly seen his share of those.

Trace carefully wound the colored lights on the branches of their Christmas tree, listening to Becca and Gabi talk quietly as they pulled glass ornaments from a cardboard box. Something was not exactly as it appeared in this household. He couldn’t put his finger on what precisely it might be but he’d caught more than one unreadable exchange of glances between Becca and her daughter, as if they were each warning the other to be careful with her words.

What secrets could they have? He had to wonder if they were on the run from something. A jealous ex? A custody dispute? That was the logical conclusion but not one that sat comfortably with him. He didn’t like the idea that Becca might be breaking the law, or worse, in danger somehow. That would certainly make his attraction for her even more inconvenient.

He couldn’t have said why he was still here. His plan when Destry had begged him to do this had been to merely do a quick drop-off of the tree, the stand and the lights. He’d intended to let Becca and Gabi deal with the tree while he headed down the street for a comfortable night of basketball in front of the big screen with his squash-faced little dog at his feet.

Instead, when he had shown up on the doorstep, she had looked so obviously taken aback—and touched, despite herself—that he had decided spending a little time with the two of them was more fascinating than even the most fierce battle on the hardwood.

He wasn’t sorry. Gabi was a great kid. Smart and funny, with clever little observations about life. She, at least, had been thrilled by the donated Christmas tree, almost as if she’d never had a tree before. At some point, Gabi had tuned in on a Christmas station on a small boom box–type radio she brought from her bedroom. Though he still wasn’t a big fan of the holiday, he couldn’t deny there was something very appealing about working together on a quiet evening while snowflakes fluttered down outside and Nat King Cole’s velvet voice filled the room.

It reminded him of happier memories when he was a kid, before the Christmas that had changed everything.

“That’s the last of the lights. You ready to flip the switch?”

“Can I?” Gabi asked, her eyes bright.

“Sure thing.”

She plugged in the lights and they reflected green and red and gold in her eyes. “It looks wonderful!”

“It really does,” Becca agreed. “Thank you for your help.”

Her words were another clear dismissal and he decided to ignore it. He wasn’t quite ready to leave this warm room yet. “Now we can start putting up those ornaments.”

She chewed her lip, clearly annoyed with him, but he only smiled and reached into the box for a couple of colored globes.

“So where were you before you moved to Pine Gulch?” he asked after a few moments of hanging ornaments. Though he pitted his question as casual curiosity, she didn’t seem fooled.

Becca and her daughter exchanged another look and she waited a moment before answering. “Arizona,” she finally said, her voice terse.

“Were you waitressing there?”

“No. I did a lot of different things,” she said evasively. “What about you? How long have you been chief of police for the good people of Pine Gulch?”

He saw through her attempt to deflect his questions. He was fond of the same technique when he wanted to guide a particular discussion in an interview. He thought about calling her on it but decided to let her set the tone. This wasn’t an interrogation, after all. Only a conversation.

“I’ve been on the force for about ten years, chief for the last three.”

“You seem young for the job.”

“I’m thirty-two. Not that young. You must have been a baby yourself when you had Gabi, right?”

He thought he saw a tiny flicker of something indefinable in the depths of her hazel eyes but she quickly concealed it. “Something like that. I was eighteen when she was born. What about you? Any wife and kiddos in the picture?”

Again the diversionary tactics. Interesting. “Nope. Never married. Just my brothers and a sister.”

“And you all live close?”

“Right. My older brother runs the family ranch, the River Bow, just outside town. We run about six hundred head. My younger sister helps him around the ranch and with Destry. Then my twin brother, Taft, is the fire chief. You might have seen him around town. He’s a little hard to miss since we’re identical.”

“Wow. There are two of you?”

“Nope. Only one. Taft is definitely his own man.”

She smiled a little as she reached to hang an ornament on a higher branch. Her soft curves brushed his shoulder—completely accidental, he knew—and his stomach muscles contracted. He hadn’t felt this little zing of attraction in a long, long time and he wanted to savor every moment of it, despite his better instincts reminding him he knew very little about the woman and what he did know didn’t seem completely truthful.

She moved away to the other side of the tree and picked up a pearly white globe ornament from the box.

He thought her color was a little higher than it had been before but that could have been only the reflection from the Christmas lights.

“You haven’t had the urge to explore distant pastures? See what’s out there beyond Pine Gulch?”

“Been there, done that. I spent four years as a Marine MP, with tours in the Middle East, Germany, Japan. I was ready to be back home.”

He didn’t like to think about what had happened after he came home, restless and looking for trouble. He’d found it, far more than he ever imagined, in the form of a devious little liar named Lilah Bodine.

“And the small-town life appeals to you?”

“Pine Gulch is a nice place to live. You won’t find a prettier place on earth in the summertime and people here watch out for each other.”

“I’m not sure that’s always a good thing, is it? Isn’t that small-town code for snooping in other people’s business?”

What in her past had made her so cynical? And what business did she have that made her eager to keep others out of it?

“That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose. Some people find it a comfort to know they’ve always got someone to turn to when times are tough.”

“I’m used to counting on myself.”

Before he could respond to that, Gabi popped her head around the side of the Christmas tree, a small porcelain angel with filigree wings in her hand. “This was the last ornament in the box,” she said. “Where should I put it?”

Becca looked at the tree. “Well, we don’t have anything at the top. Why don’t we put her there?”

“That seems about right,” Trace said. “A tree as pretty as this one deserves to have an angel watching over it.”

“Okay. I’ll have to get a chair.”

“Why?” He grinned at the girl and picked her up. She seemed skinny for her age and she giggled a little as he hefted her higher to reach the top of the tree. She tucked the little angel against the top branch and secured her with the clip attached to her back.

“Perfect,” Gabi exclaimed when she was done.

He lowered her to the ground and the girl hurried to turn off the light switch to the overhead fixture and the two lamps until the room was dark except for the gleaming, colorful tree.

They all stepped back a little for a better look. Much to his surprise, as he stood in this dark, dingy little house with that soft music in the background and the snow drifting past the window and the tree lights flickering, he felt the first nudge of Christmas spirit he’d experienced in a long, long time.

“It’s magical,” Gabi breathed.

Becca leaned down and hugged her. “You know what, kiddo? Magical is exactly the right word.”

They all stood still for a moment. Becca was the first to break the spell.