Christmas in Cold Creek

Gabi looked disappointed for only a moment before she hid her emotions behind impassivity and eased away from the door to let Becca take the lead.

“Chief Bowman,” she finally murmured. “This is … unexpected.”

Not to mention unfortunate, unwelcome, unwanted.

“I know. Sorry to barge in like this but I’ve been charged with an important mission.”

She glanced at Gabi and saw a flicker of curiosity in her sister’s eyes.

The police chief seemed to be concealing something out of sight of the doorway but she couldn’t tell what it was from this angle.

“What sort of mission?” Becca was unsuccessful in keeping her wariness from her voice.

“Well, funny story. My niece, Destry, apparently is in the same school class as your daughter.”

She couldn’t correct his misstatement since she was the one who had perpetrated the lie. She shot a quick look at Gabi, willing her to keep her mouth shut. At the same time, she realized how rude she must appear to the police chief, keeping him standing on the sagging porch. She ought to invite him inside but she really didn’t want him in her space. On the porch was still too close.

“Yes, Gabi’s mentioned Destry.”

“She’s a great kid. Always concerned about those she counts as friends.”

And he was telling her this why, exactly? She smiled politely, hoping he would get to the point and then ride off into the sunset on his trusty steed. Or maybe that pickup truck she could see parked in the driveway.

To her surprise, he appeared slightly uncomfortable. She thought she detected a hint of color on his cheekbones and he cleared his throat before he spoke again. “Anyway, Destry said Gabrielle told her you didn’t have a Christmas tree yet and your daughter didn’t know if you’d be putting one up this year.”

She narrowed her gaze at Gabi, who returned the look with an innocent look. They had talked about putting a tree up. She’d promised her sister they would find something after payday the next week. She had to wonder if the concern from Chief Bowman’s niece was spontaneous or if Gabi had somehow planted the seed somewhere.

“I’m sure we’ll get something. We just … between moving in and settling into school and work, we haven’t had much free time for, um, holiday decorating. It’s not even December yet.”

“I tried to tell Destry that but when we went up into the mountains this afternoon to find a tree for the ranch house, she had her heart set on cutting one for you, too. Look at it this way. One less thing you have to worry about, right?”

Finally he moved the arm concealed around the door-jamb so she could see that he was indeed holding a Christmas tree, dark green and fragrant.

“You don’t get any fresher than this one. We just cut it about an hour ago.”

A tree? From the chief of police? What kind of town was this?

She hadn’t put up a Christmas tree in, well, ever. It had seemed far too much trouble when she was living alone. Besides, she had never had all that much to celebrate, busy with clients and contracts and court filings.

For an instant, she was transported to her very best memory of Christmas, when she was seven or eight and Monica had been working to empty the bank account of a lonely widower who had either been genuinely fond of Becca or had been very good at pretending. He had filled his house with Christmas decorations and presents. A wreath on the door, stockings hanging on the mantel, the whole bit.

She had really liked the old guy—until he’d called the police on Monica when he began to suspect she was stealing from them, and Becca and her mother had had to flee just a few steps from the law.

Now here was the chief of police standing on her doorstep with this lovely, sweet-smelling Christmas tree. “I … oh.”

She didn’t know what to say and her obvious discomfort must have begun to communicate itself to Trace Bowman.

“I can find another home for it if you don’t want it,” he finally said as the pause lengthened.

“Oh, please.” Gabrielle clasped her hands together at her heart as if she were starring in some cheesy melodrama and trying desperately to avoid being tied to the railroad tracks by some dastardly villain. It was completely an act. The part of Pleading Young Girl will be played tonight by the incomparable Gabrielle Parsons.

Becca had no choice but to give in with as much grace as she could muster. And then figure out how she was going to afford lights and ornaments for the dratted thing.

“A tree would be lovely, I’m sure. Thank you very much.” She was grateful. Her half sister might have the soul of a thirty-year-old con artist in a nine-year-old’s body, but she was still a child. She deserved whatever poor similitude of Christmas Becca could manage.

“I didn’t know if you would have a tree stand so I snagged a spare from the ranch house. If you’ll just let me know where you want it, I can set this baby up for you.”

“That’s not necessary. I’m sure I can figure it out.”

“Have you ever set a real tree up before?”

Real or fake, she didn’t know the first thing about a Christmas tree. Honesty compelled her to shake her head.

“It’s harder than it looks. Consider the setup all part of the service.”

He didn’t wait for her to give him permission; he just carried the tree through the door and into her living room, bringing that sweet, wintry-tart smell and memories of happier times she had nearly forgotten.

“It’s beautiful,” Gabi exclaimed. “I think that might be the most beautiful tree I’ve ever seen.”

Becca studied her sister. She couldn’t say she’d figured out all her moods yet, but Gabi certainly looked sincere in her delight. Her eyes shone with excitement, her face bright and as happy as she’d seen it yet over the last two months. Maybe Becca was entirely too cynical. It was Christmas. Gabi had a right to her excitement.

“It really is a pretty tree,” she agreed. “Where would you like Chief Bowman to put it, kiddo?”

“Right there facing the front window, then everyone will see it.”

Gabi was full of surprises tonight. She usually preferred to stay inconspicuous to avoid drawing attention to herself. Becca had been the same way, trained well by a mother who was always just a pace or two ahead of the law.

Trace carried the tree over to the window and positioned it. The tree fit perfectly in the space, exactly the right height, as if he’d measured it.

“Right here?” he asked, his attention focused on Gabi.

“Maybe a little more to the left.”

With a slightly amused expression, he moved the tree in that direction. When Gabi nodded he slanted a look at Becca. She shrugged. Christmas tree positioning wasn’t exactly in her skill set. Right along with waiting tables and trying to raise a precocious nine-year-old girl.

“Gabrielle, would you mind going back out onto porch for the tree stand I left there?” he asked. “I don’t want to move from the perfect spot.”

She hurried out eagerly and returned shortly with the green metal tree stand.

“Okay, I’m going to lift the tree and you set the stand with the hole right underneath the trunk. Got it?”

She nodded solemnly. When Trace effortlessly lifted the tree, she slid the stand where he indicated. Becca couldn’t help but compare her eagerness to help Trace with the tree to her grave reluctance a few moments earlier to finish four measly math problems.

For the next few moments, Trace held the tree and instructed Gabi to tighten the bolts of the stand around the trunk in a particular order for the best stability.

Becca watched their efforts with a growing amusement that surprised her. She shouldn’t be enjoying this. This was the police chief, she reminded herself, but it was hard to remember that when he was laughing with Gabi about the tree that seemed determined to list drunkenly to the side.

“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?”