The sled veered unexpectedly. Brody landed in a heap, and Lila landed with a fierce thump on top of him.

He looked up into the laughter of her eyes, the joy on her face, and he let himself have it. He let himself have this moment.

Something inside of him let go: his need to protect himself, his need to be in control, his need to not ever be hurt again.

He looked into Lila’s shining face and he could clearly see she had risen to the challenge of allowing her heart to be made braver. She was welcoming whatever was happening between them.

He let go of his own desire to run from it. If she could be so brave, than he could be too.

It was not the kind of bravery that reached into a burning car and pulled out a woman stuck behind the steering wheel.

No, it was not that kind of bravery. That kind of bravery had its place.

But it did not hold a candle to the kind of bravery that was being asked of him now. To put his heart at risk. To say yes to the mystery of something bigger than he could control. Say yes to what was in the laughter of her eyes, and the way she had rested against his chest last night.

To say yes to life.

Cara Colter lives on an acreage in British Columbia with her partner, Rob, and eleven horses. She has three grown children and a grandson. She is a recent recipient of the Romantic Times BOOKreviews Career Achievement Award in the ‘Love and Laughter’ category. Cara loves to hear from readers, and you can contact her, or learn more about her, through her website: www.cara-colter.com

Dear Reader

There is something about turning fifty (two days after Christmas for me), that makes a person ask: have I used my life wisely? Have I done enough? Been enough? Have I achieved the things I hoped to achieve?

Sometimes answers come in unexpected ways. As I was working on this Christmas story, I heard Josh Groban sing ‘The Little Drummer Boy’.

It was such a beautiful reminder that we are all given a gift—perhaps humble, perhaps grand—and it is not the gift itself that matters, but how we use it.

I recall a waiter so wonderful I still remember him with more delight than the musical concert that followed; I have a hair stylist who loves her work so absolutely it is pure pleasure to see what she’ll do this time; I was at a hotel in Mexico where the maid radiated good cheer and amazed us over and over by sculpting the bathroom towels into swans and boats and other creations.

If you bring your heart to what you do, no matter what that is, it becomes a gift to others. And to Him. That is my intention with each story I write. May it bring joy.

With holiday wishes

Cara Colter

HIS MISTLETOE BRIDE

BY

CARA COLTER

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Pat Walls,

a man dedicated to family,

and a true romantic even after forty years!

CHAPTER ONE

OFFICER BRODY TAGGERT decided he was upgrading his mood from cranky to just plain foul.

“As good a time as any to go see Miss L. Toe,” he said, out loud, heavy on the sarcasm as he said the name. Tag’s dog, Boo, the only other inhabitant of the police cruiser, who was stretched out comfortably in the backseat, woofed what Tag took as agreement.

Actually, Tag thought, given his mood, now was probably not the best time to go see Snow Mountain’s newest business owner, resident, budding author and pain in the butt.

Unfortunately the new-in-town Lila Grainger, aka Miss L. Toe, unlike most people Tag ran into who had an alias—an also known as—was not a criminal at all. She was the chief of police’s niece.

Which was the reason Tag had to go see her.

Directly ordered.

Tag’s boss, Chief Paul Hutchinson “Hutch,” was notoriously mild-mannered, but he had a core of pure steel and he had not been amused that Tag had missed the first ever meeting of the Save Christmas in Snow Mountain Committee last night.

“She’s up to something,” the chief had muttered. “She’s crafty, just like my sister, her mother. And you missed the meeting, so now we’re in the dark.”

Tag decided not to point out that in the dark was a particularly bad choice of phrase, since that was what had ignited the Christmas fervor in Snow Mountain in the first place.

Town Council had decided to turn off the lights. The Christmas lights, that was. And the traditional Christmas display in the tiny Bandstand Park that was at the end of Main Street was to be no more.

Every year since 1957, the park had been transformed into Santa’s Workshop. Ingenious motorized elves made toys and wrapped gifts, reindeer cavorted and Santa ho-ho-hoed and waved. But those particular models of elves and reindeer did not have fifty-year life spans.

Santa’s ho-ho-ho had gone into slow mo. Last year one of the elves had seriously overheated and burst into flames. Unfortunately, someone with a cell phone camera had caught on film a child wailing in fear, his face dramatically backlit by the flickering blaze, and Snow Mountain had been put on the map.

The whole issue had been causing heated debates since last January. But at the October Town Council meeting, Leonard Lemoix, who was not Tag’s favorite councilor, had gone where no one had gone before. Leonard had crunched the numbers. The cost of the much-needed repairs, setting up, and taking down of the display could, in three years, added up to enough money to buy a new police cruiser.

That didn’t even include the cost of the power bill for running the Christmas lights, which were not the new energy-efficient variety, for between six and eight weeks every year.

Town Council had voted unanimously to shut down the display and Leonard had gone up a notch or two in Tag’s estimation.

“My niece thinks it’s my fault,” the chief had said glumly the day after the meeting. “I didn’t know anything about the police cruiser. Now Lila’s starting a committee to keep Christmas in Snow Mountain. You know what she said to me? Uncle Paul, do you want Snow Mountain to be known as the town that canceled Christmas?”

That’s when Tag found out he’d been volunteered to be on the committee.

“We can’t have the department looking like villains who want to trade Christmas for a new police cruiser,” Hutch said. The chief’s increasing concern about image seemed to coincide with the arrival of his niece, too.

Lila was a city girl from Miami, and was very savvy about what was and wasn’t politically correct.

Despite the fact Tag was developing a dislike for the niece he had not yet met, he knew better than to bother to protest, why me? about his appointment to Lila Grainger’s committee. After six years on the force he was still, unfortunately, its most recent recruit.

He had shaken the title of rookie, and finally refused to carry the humbling joke badge he’d been required to produce at the whim of anyone senior on the force that said, Be patient, I’m new here, but he still got every single assignment that no one else wanted.

Which described the committee to keep Christmas in Snow Mountain to a T. Karl Jamison, the oldest man on the force, kept threatening to retire, which meant there would be a new rookie someday, but not in time, obviously, to save Tag from being at the whim of Hutch’s niece.

And now he’d missed her first damned meeting.

Tag had not bothered to offer excuses for his absence at the meeting. He felt his reason for not being there fell into the personal and very private category, and the truth was he would rather face his boss’s wrath than his pity. After the death of his younger brother, Ethan, Tag had handled about all the sympathy he could for one lifetime.

Still, he knew now there would be no acceptable excuse—short of an armed robbery in progress—for not going to see Miss L. Toe, aka Lila Grainger, now, tonight, immediately.

Tag swore softly. The dog moaned anxiously, able to detect the downward-spiraling mood in the patrol car.

“It’s not your fault, Boo.”

The coming of Christmas was not the dog’s fault. But with Halloween only a few weeks past, and Thanksgiving not yet here, Tag could have ignored the inevitable coming of the season for a little while longer.

Okay, he’d been glad when the town voted against the Christmas display, and not entirely because of the possibility of a new cruiser, either.

In his line of work, Brody Taggert saw the other side of Christmas, the side that did not make the front cover of the holiday editions of all the glitzy magazines. He saw what no one ever wanted to acknowledge: the season of joy and faith and miracles had a dirty underbelly, fallout.

As a cop, even a small-town cop, Tag saw firsthand that it was a time of accelerated stress for the people he dealt with most. Soon, after the Thanksgiving turkeys were cleared away, Christmas drinking would begin in earnest. Earnest drinking led to serious trouble: arguments, fights, domestic violence, car accidents, hypothermia, drunken dismantling of business establishments and homes and lives.

This was the conclusion Tag had reached about Christmas: poor people would feel poorer, lonely people would feel lonelier, desperate people more desperate, mean people meaner.

And of course, anyone who had ever known sorrow, as Tag himself knew sorrow, would feel the ache of that loss all over again, as if it were brand-new. This would be Tag’s seventh Christmas without his brother. People had assured him that time would heal his wounds, but this seventh Christmas did not feel any different than the first: bleak, instead of joyous. There was an empty hole in his life that seemed to be made emptier by all the activity and excited anticipation building around him.

But that wasn’t Lila Grainger’s world.

He’d had a nauseating peek into her world when he’d received her first enthusiastic committee announcement via e-mail three days ago. Animated snowmen danced across a pink background that implored him: Save Christmas In Snow Mountain.

Action Meeting, Free Eggnog And Jeanie Harper’s Nearly World Famous Shortbread Cookies.

The dancing snowmen had been particularly irritating to a guy whose computer skills ran to grave satisfaction that he had finally figured out the station’s computers were equipped with spelling checkers.

But irritation at the whole concept, and dancing snowmen aside, Tag really had intended to go, and not just because he’d been told it was a good idea, either. The promise of Jeanie’s shortbread was more bait than any bachelor could resist, particularly if they were the cookies that she dipped half in chocolate, which they almost always were at this time of year.

But life—real life, not the chocolate-dipped dancing snowmen variety—had intervened. He sought out his dog in the rearview mirror. Tag had missed the meeting because he’d taken Boo to see a veterinary specialist in Spokane yesterday afternoon.

The truth was he’d been back in plenty of time to make the seven o’clock gathering, but after a man had heard the words, You’ll know when it’s time, he couldn’t go. Not didn’t want to—couldn’t.

Tag was a man who had cleaned up the aftermath of a lot of ugliness, he prided himself on having total control over his emotions. But not even the world’s best shortbread cookies could have enticed him off his couch last night. His forty-two-inch flat screen and a hockey game, Boo resting on his lap, had helped him block out his sense of helplessness in the face of the doctor’s diagnosis.

Boo was dying. Boo, not just a dog, but a link to his brother; even more than that, a link to life. More than time, it was Boo who had healed in Tag what could be healed.

What Tag hadn’t been expecting was how swiftly the chief would react to his absence to Lila’s meeting.

He’d been called in to see the chief at the start of his shift, and told he’d better get with the program.

The Save Christmas in Snow Mountain program that was.

Tag was pretty sure if he read over his job description and contract there was nothing in there about having to cooperate with the fruitcake plans of the chief’s niece, even if it was going to be good for the police department’s image, as Hutch claimed.

The word image, up until this point in the department’s history, had meant being nice to little kids, keeping a crisp uniform, polished shoes and a clean car and Tag would have been content if it stayed that way forever.

He was also pretty sure there was nothing in his contract about cleaning cells if he didn’t comply, either.

On the other hand, Hutch had thrown Tag a lifeline, offering him a job on the police department when Tag had just about swamped himself in misery, had been heading down a wrong road fast, after Ethan’s accident.

The chief had also known, without ever saying one word to indicate that he knew, that he and Boo were partners in the rescue of Tag’s troubled soul and so he had turned a blind eye to the dog riding in the backseat. Tag knew he owed Hutch, and owed him dearly.

He turned the patrol car down Main Street. It was just dusk, and the icy winds of mid-November were beginning to blow down Snow Mountain, the black, jagged silhouette forming a backdrop for the town.

Dry leaves and a few newspapers blew down a street lined by single-story brick-and-sandstone businesses that had largely seen a better day. Tilley’s Dry Goods had had Going Out Of Business soaped on the windows for at least ten years.

The “D” in the Mountain Drugstore sign was burned out, the odd summertime tourist ventured in there expecting rugs. There were no wintertime tourists, something the optimistic Miss Grainger thought would be a cinch to change.

According to her vibrant pink e-mail, Snow Mountain could not only revive its Christmas display of Santa’s Workshop in Bandstand Park, but become a Destination, the capital “D” emphasized with both bold lettering and neon-green.

But as Tag watched the lights winking out, one by one, on Main Street, he thought this was probably the town least likely to ever be a Destination. In fact, he was aware of thinking it wasn’t the prettiest picture of small-town U.S.A. that he had ever seen. He was also aware of missing the garish display of lights and moving figurines in the park at the end of the street just the tiniest little bit.

Lila Grainger’s store, of course, was a shining jewel in the middle of that street, the one-hundred-year-old limestone recently sandblasted back to soft, buffed ivory, the new sign hanging above it, green, red and white, saying in tasteful letters, Miss. L. Toe, and in smaller letters underneath it, The Christmas Store At Snow Mountain.

Miss. L. Toe. Cute. Nauseatingly so. Welcome to her world. The opening of the store lent itself to motive, too. Lila Grainger had a vested interest in keeping the Christmas in Snow Mountain, now that she’d invested her whole book advance in opening a store here.

When she’d signed a contract to write a book about Christmas, the chief had practically sent out announcement cards he’d been so pleased and proud. Then, unexpectedly, she’d decided to move here from Florida and invest her windfall in this old building.

Tag had yet to meet her, but he had formed a picture of the kind of person who opened a year-round Christmas store on what seemed to be a whim: scrawny, wire-rim glasses, flowered dress, blue eyes spilling over moistly with that do-gooder glow.

The store windows, cleaned until they sparkled, were filled with fairy tale like displays that confirmed his worst suspicions. Mrs. Santa incarnate had arrived in Snow Mountain. One gigantic window display contained an entire town in miniature, completely decked out for Christmas. A train moved through it; he could hear the muffled choo-choo of the whistle right through the plate glass.

The other window contained a tree, at least seven feet tall, decorated entirely and in his mind, hideously, in various shades of purple.

It was a fantasy, not appealing at all to a man who spent the days of his life dealing with harsh reality.

“I’m getting a headache,” Tag admitted to the dog as he reached over to the seat beside him, put on his hat, pulled the shiny black brim low over his eyes.

The dog whined.

“You are not coming in.”

Boo, who usually obeyed instantly and without argument, ignored him, hurtled over the seat into the front of the car and was out the door as soon as Tag opened it.

The dog sat on the sidewalk, and waited, her tail thumping enthusiastically. Tag looked at her, the world’s ugliest dog, and felt the downward swoop of his heart.

Cancer. Who knew dogs got cancer?

Boo, the exact color of a mud puddle, had the head of a Great Dane, the body of a Chinese Shar-pei, and the legs of a dachshund. There was nothing the least bit “cute” about the combination of a wrinkled dog with a painfully oversize head waddling around on very crooked and too-short legs.

Tag knew darn well that the visit to the specialist’s office, the promise that his Christmases were about to get worse than ever, rather than better, was the real reason his mood was blacker than the silhouette of Snow Mountain. Since he could change nothing, especially not the mood, there was no sense letting it go to waste. The rawness of his own hurt was under control tonight, as it had not been last night.

He felt a moment’s sympathy for Miss L. Toe, having to face him when he was in this frame of mind, but then he quelled it.

He debated wrestling Boo back into the car, but the dog had an amazing instinct for people: Boo could tell good from bad with such telepathic accuracy it was spooky. Even before the dog saw a person, while Tag was still sitting in his cruiser running a license plate, Boo would be watching intently, sniffing the air, “sensing” things unseen.

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.

She tried to thrust the thought away as soon as she had it. You could not know that about a complete stranger, even if he was wearing a police uniform. Despite making great strides since arriving in Snow Mountain, she was not sleeping well, and she knew her judgment was not what it once had been.

Naturally, now, she was doing her darnedest to be as perfectly poised and professional as he was, trying to act as though being picked up and carried down the hall by an extraordinarily appealing man was an everyday ho-hum kind of experience for her.

The dog seemed determined for them all to get cozy again. It had squeezed in between the toilet bowl and the sink, and was nuzzling her hand with its warm, damp nose.

“This really isn’t necessary,” she said again, her world is a better place feeling causing her to feel guilty about the secret she was determined to keep from him.

She was amazed that he had not seen the results of last night’s meeting crammed into the dark corner by the bathroom: protest signs, freshly painted.

Lila had found out this morning that it was necessary to have a permit to assemble in Snow Mountain, a ridiculous formality given the tininess of the town, she felt. She had also found out that it took a number of weeks to get a permit, and she needed to draw attention to the fact Town Council had voted to cancel Christmas at Snow Mountain, now.

The unpermitted protest was scheduled for the Thursday before Thanksgiving. The SOS team was nearly delirious with delight over the plan to close down Main Street right in front of the town hall until some funding was reinstated for the Santa’s Workshop display at Bandstand Park.

Her committee was not a bunch of hotheaded rebels, either, not the kind of people one would ordinarily expect at a protest. They were nice people, decent, law-abiding, hardworking people who were willing to stand up for what they believed in.

And they believed in Christmas.

Still, Lila was pretty sure her uncle would kill her if he knew. And this man in front of her? If the world was a better place because of him, it was probably because he would be exceedingly intolerant of schemes that fell even the teensiest bit outside of the law.

She shivered, still taken totally aback by her reaction of such total awareness to Officer Taggert. She, of all people, knew to be distrustful of instant attraction, since she had paid the horrific price of someone’s totally unwanted and unencouraged attraction to her.

She’d been reminded of the consequences of that just a few minutes ago, when she’d once again experienced that horrible startled reflex, a reflex she had assured herself was almost gone—until the door had slammed tonight.

She had known as soon as she’d arrived in

Snow Mountain that her doubts about opening the first storefront for her unexpectedly successful Internet Christmas company had been unfounded. It had been the right decision to pack up her life and move across the country.

Her healing, her return to normal, could begin here, in this sleepy little town nestled among forests and mountains.

Finally she was going to be able to overcome the block that she’d been experiencing ever since she’d been approached, because of the Internet success of her small company, to write How to Have a Perfect Christmas under the pseudonym, Miss L. Toe.

For weeks now, Lila had been experiencing excitement and hope instead of that horrible feeling of flatness, interspersed with anxiety. Except for the sleep problem, she was feeling so much better.

Snow Mountain had so much unrealized potential! It was a magical place, a town off a Christmas card. It was the place that could inspire her to write a great first book, to launch a great storefront for her Internet business.

But no lights? No Christmas display in the town square?

She remembered that display so clearly from the time her family had flown up here from their home in Florida to spend Christmas with her mother’s oldest brother, Uncle Paul, the year she’d turned ten. She still remembered that Christmas more vividly than any other. The magic of snow, and real Christmas trees, the feeling in that small town.

Maybe that’s what had pulled her back to this place when her world had fallen apart.

So, she just wasn’t having Town Council squash her dreams before they even got started! She was giving herself over to creating the perfect Christmas store and the perfect Christmas town and the perfect book on creating the perfect Christmas. It gave her a sense of safety and control over the things that had been snatched from her.

Her arrival in Snow Mountain had returned to her a belief that there were places in the world that were wonderfully old-fashioned, where children still walked to school and played in the streets without their parents hovering, where women never gave a thought to walking alone, where violent things rarely happened.

But then the wrench—Town Council practically canceling Christmas!

Still, despite that challenge to her control over creating the perfect Christmas, Lila was aware of beginning to feel safe again. Tonight was a perfect example: She’d left her door unlocked even after store hours.

Lila was aware that her initial reaction of panic to the unexpected arrival in her shop had faded. It had not faded because she knew the man who had changed her world forever was in jail, but rather illogically because Officer Taggert radiated the strength and calm—the certain forbidding sternness—of a man who could be relied on to protect, to keep the world safe, to uphold standards of decency.

At first, she’d felt anxious that maybe he’d heard a whisper about the planned protest, especially when he seemed so suspicious, probing. Minutes of the meeting, for Pete’s sake.

But it had soon become very apparent to her that, despite his offer to help, Officer Taggert’s heart was not in it at all. He’d been ordered here by her uncle, and had put in an appearance.

Unless he saw the signs on his way out the door, the protest was safe.

She felt the tiniest little shiver of apprehension that she was on the wrong side of the law, but her purpose was so right that she felt justified.

Then it occurred to her that maybe the shiver she was feeling was not apprehension, but a treacherous little stirring of something else, despite the deliberate remoteness of the man who shared the bathroom with her.

Appreciation, primal compared to her rather philosophical thought that the world was a better place because he was in it. It was an almost clinical awareness of a healthy female for a healthy male. It didn’t help that she had felt the strong bands of his arms around her, his easy strength as he had carried her to the bathroom.

He had seemed indifferent to their close proximity. But then again, he’d missed the protest signs, and he didn’t look like a man who missed much, so maybe he’d felt a forbidden little stirring, too. He was a healthy male after all.

Taggert was at least six-one of pure male perfection: sleek muscle, long legs, deep chest, broad, broad shoulders, all accentuated magnificently by the crisp lines of his light blue on navy police uniform.

His face was astounding, chiseled masculine perfection, unconscious strength in the set of his chin, the firmness around his mouth, the lines around his eyes. His eyes, which had initially been shaded by the brim of his hat, were now fully visible since he had removed the hat.

While the rest of him was pure cop, one-hundred- percent intimidating and authoritative presence, his eyes were the softest shade of brown, shot through with threads of pure gold. His eyes did not reflect the remoteness of his demeanor, though there were walls up in them, walls that guarded a mystery…and most likely his heart.

He carried himself with the utter confidence of a man who knew his own strength and capabilities perfectly. No swagger, only pure, unadulterated self-assurance.

Now he was on one knee in front of her, focused on her foot. His hair was short, but incredibly thick and shiny, the rich color of dark chocolate. She was amazed by a renegade desire to feel its silk beneath her fingertips.

His hands were unbelievably sure on her ankle, and she stifled a gasp when he pulled her sock away and held her naked foot in the warm, hard cup of his hand. The shiver of appreciation she’d felt graduated to a betraying tingle of pure awareness. She felt terrified in a much different way than she had felt terrified the last two years of her life when she had become the victim of a stalker. He was a man she had worked with, and whose interest in her had seemed so benign…at first.

“Really,” she managed to croak, “I can look after it.”

“Look, either I’m taking a look at it, or I’m taking you to the hospital. You choose.”

He glanced up, and she noticed just the faintest shadow of whiskers on his clean-shaven face, felt swamped by his closeness, his pure masculine scent.

“Are you all right?” he asked, genuine concern faintly overriding the professionalism in the masculine deepness of his voice. “You aren’t going to faint, are you?”

“Faint?” she managed to say, inserting proud outrage into her voice, a woman determined not to be seen as weak ever again. “I am not the fainting kind.”

But she had managed to sound more certain than she actually felt. Was she all right? Why did she feel as if she was standing in the open doorway of a plane, deciding whether to jump?

“I’ve been doing this a long time,” he said patiently. “There is no fainting kind. I’ve seen a Marine faint at the sight of his own blood.”

“Oh.”

“Can I go ahead then? Or do you want me to take you to the hospital?”

The eyes were intent on her face, the voice no-nonsense, though his offering her a choice relaxed something in her, even though, logically, she knew it was not a real choice and he was very much in control.

“Go ahead,” she squeaked.

“It’s not so bad,” he reassured her, lifting her leg so he could get a good look at the heel, gently swabbing away the blood with an alcohol pad. “I see a single cut, not very deep. I think there’s a little piece of glass still in there.”

He reached for tweezers, tugged, held up a tiny fragment of glass for her to see before he dropped it into the wastepaper basket that was painted like a toy drum.

“I’m just going to dress the wound,” he explained, his voice deep, soothing, as if he was talking to a small child. “I don’t see any more glass, no need for stitches. A wound to this part of the body just bleeds a lot.”

The voice of a man who had seen many wounds and much blood, without ever coming even remotely close to fainting; a man who would be just this coolly and reassuringly competent in crises of any magnitude.

He placed a cotton gauze on her foot, held it in place by winding a bandage over her heel and up her ankle in a crisscross pattern, all very professional, clinical, detached.

Not, apparently, being bothered by tingles the way she was.

“You’re obviously used to doing this sort of thing,” she said. “This is obviously your first trip to the North Pole, though.”

He looked surprised, and then he smiled.

It was just the tiniest hint of a smile, but it changed the stern lines of his face completely. She glimpsed for a moment something of his past: something reckless, devil-may-care, mischievous. Charming.

He got up, picked up his hat and brushed off his knee with it. He glanced around at the bathroom decor, his eyes resting briefly on a jar of bright candies labeled Jolly Beans, For Medicinal Use Only.

The smile that had tickled his lips evaporated, and she was aware whatever he had once been, he was not that now. He actually winced, as if such adorable corniness hurt his eyes. He stepped quickly out of the bathroom and back into the hallway.

All she could think of was he had nearly brushed against the protest signs, and for the first time in her life she was completely unworthy of trust.

He clamped his hat back on his head, pulled it low, so his amazing eyes were once more shadowed. Then he whistled for his dog, and let himself out the front door.

She limped after him and locked it behind him, aware that even though Snow Mountain itself felt safer to her than it had half an hour ago, she herself did not feel as safe, as if she stood on the edge of something scary. And wonderful.

But that she of all people, she reminded herself with stern warning, should know how very scary a brief encounter with a strange man could become.

It was the reason she’d sworn off real life and chosen to embrace fantasy instead. Her beautiful store, this beautiful town, her literary adventures—those were going to be enough for her. It was going to fill every void, make her feel safe, fulfilled, in control.

A woman would never feel one hundred percent in control around a man like Taggert. Never.

Determined to make the creation of a perfect Christmas her life mission, she marched back to her computer.

Suddenly decorating a bathroom seemed like a terrible place to start How to Have A Perfect Christmas. Terrible.

“You have to start somewhere,” she told herself, aware of a panicky little edge in her voice as she said it. She’d accepted the advance, and worse, she’d spent it. She had a deadline!

Obviously the writer’s block was coming, at least in part, from her insomnia. But it wasn’t helping one little bit that the place on earth most likely to be chosen for a poster of the perfect Christmas town had practically canceled Christmas. Once she looked after that, everything else was going to fall into place.

With a new sense of verve, Lila picked up the phone, took a deep breath and did the thing she had been debating about and putting off since the meeting last night.

“CLEM TV, Spokane,” a voice on the other end answered.

“Could I speak to Jade Flynn, please?” She named the reporter who seemed to do the majority of the human interest stories for the station.

“Can I tell her what you’re calling about?”

“The cancellation of Christmas,” Lila said firmly.

Brody Taggert joined the other men at the window of the Snow Mountain Police Department, took a sip of his coffee and looked across Main Street at the fracas outside of Snow Mountain Town Hall.

The protesters had completely blocked the street, and were enthusiastically waving lovingly hand-painted signs.

Elves Have Rights, Too! Say Yes To Christmas. Save Our Snow Mountain. Save Santa. As they marched around in a circle, they chanted, “Heck no, the elves won’t go.”

It was an unlikely-looking group of protestors—not a dreadlock or pierced body part on any of them. Lots of gray hair out there, with one glaring exception, of course.

Her hair, where it showed beneath the brim of her fur-trimmed Santa hat, was catching the sun, and looked like it was spun through with gold.

It seemed to him Lila Grainger was as eye-catching in that hat, bundled up in a pink oversize parka that made her look like a marshmallow, as she would have been in a furtrimmed bikini.

The CLEM TV mobile van from Spokane was pulling up. Bruce Wilkes from the Snow Mountain News was already happily snapping pictures.

“What are you going to do, Chief?” Randy Mulligan asked uncertainly.

Tag slid Hutch a look. Have a heart attack, came to mind. The chief looked apoplectic.

Of course, his niece, looking positively radiant, was in the very middle of the mêlée. When she separated from the other protestors to go and talk to Jade Flynn, who was getting out of the news van, it was more than obvious who was in charge of the protest.

Tag, instead of making the professional assessment ringleader, noticed that aside from the fact she looked cute as a button, she was still limping.

“You didn’t even catch a whisper of this when you went to see her?” Hutch asked Tag accusingly.

“No, sir. She told me they were going to ask Jamison to play Santa—”

“Like hell I’m playing Santa,” Jamison muttered indignantly, putting enough curse words between playing and Santa to do his Marine corps heritage proud.

“—and that they’d come up with a new name. That’s it.” Well, that wasn’t it. Tag had known she was up to something naughty. He could now clearly remember the guilty blush when she’d mentioned getting city hall to change their minds. He felt he’d probably been distracted by naughty thoughts of his own, especially after he’d carried her down that endless hall to her bathroom, and then spent agonizing minutes administering first-aid to the cut on her foot.

You didn’t admit to your boss you’d had naughty thoughts about his niece, thoughts that might have prevented you from seeing certain things coming, he told himself.

Besides, the grim news about Boo had been pretty fresh that night; Tag knew it had clouded his thinking, and still did, though he wore the mask of functioning perfectly.

“Go arrest her,” Hutch said, thankfully to no one in particular.

Randy Mulligan obviously thought of some urgent work he had to do. He stampeded from the room as if the Hells Angels had arrived in town and he had to personally deal with them.

“Arrest her?” Pete Harper said. “Are you kidding? You know how that’s going to look on the evening news? This town has barely recovered from the elf on fire last year.”

“How’s it going to look if I don’t arrest her and she’s my niece?” Hutch snapped. “Like I’m playing favorites, that’s how. If I don’t do something decisive right now every special interest group in Snow Mountain from the Grannies for Justice to Pals for Pooches is going to think they can shut down the town anytime they don’t get what they want. Pals for Pooches has been trying to get an animal shelter for a lot longer than Lila’s been trying to save Christmas.”

Unfortunately Tag could see his point.

“Well, I’m not arresting her,” Pete said. “My mother would kill me.”

His mother was out there right beside Lila, carrying a sign that showed a tombstone with Santa on it, RIP, and then Killed By Snow Mountain Town Council. Jeanie Harper was also dispensing cookies to the news crews, practically guaranteeing all stories would be slanted in favor of the protestors.

As if they wouldn’t be anyway.

“I ain’t arresting nobody, either,” Jamison said. He jerked his thumb at Pete. “His mother wouldn’t bake me cookies anymore.”

Pete shot him a look. “My mother bakes you cookies?”

“Go arrest her, Tag,” Hutch said wearily.

It fell neatly into that category of a job no one else wanted to do, and besides, he was the one who had missed the signs that this was going to happen. Now that he thought about it, hadn’t there been something stuffed in that dark corner of the hallway by her bathroom?

Oh, yeah, signs.

“You mean arrest her?” Tag hedged uncomfortably, “Or just take her aside, and try to talk some sense into her?”

Her uncle sighed. “She’s just like her mother. Talking sense to her is like trying to explain algebra to a chimp. Impossible. Besides, you think she’s going to give in quietly? What kind of news story would that make?”

Unfortunately Tag could see his point. He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, turned and lifted his jacket off the back of his chair, pulled on his hat. Boo, who had been snoozing under his desk, lifted her head and thumped her tail on the floor, hopeful for an invitation.

“Fat chance,” he told her sourly, while silently searching for signs of the dog’s deterioration. “I count on you to warn me about who I have to keep an eye on. You failed me on this one, Boo. You loved Lila Grainger.”

He realized he did not want to be using the word love in any sentence addressed to Boo, especially one that also included the name Lila Grainger. She was just that kind of woman, the kind who could storm a man’s defenses before he even knew he was under attack.

The kind of woman where you noticed the fact she was limping, rather than the fact she was leading an insurrection.

The kind of woman with a foot so enchanting, you overlooked the signs of revolt brewing all around you.

The dog sighed, put her head back down and closed her eyes. Almost easier to go out there and deal with that than the dog’s easy surrender to being left behind.

Moments later, he was shouldering his way through a crowd worthy of a big-city Santa Claus parade, with the same attitude of excited anticipation in the air. There hadn’t been this much excitement in Snow Mountain since the Snow Leopards, the high school football team, had made state finals three years ago.

Over the chanting, Tag could hear a tinny loudspeaker wailing out a sentimental rendition of the song, “You Light up My Life.”

It seemed as if the entire population of Snow Mountain—plus most of the surrounding area—had known about the demonstration. This was a town that could not keep secrets, so how it had stayed below the police radar was something of a miracle.

The air of celebration toned down a bit as he shoved his way through to the center of activity. He tried to tell himself he had probably been in worse positions, but he could not remember when.

By the time he arrived in front of Lila Grainger, he was very aware of the hostility the crowd had toward him.

She saw him coming. So did the news crews. Every camera, cell phone and video recorder within a hundred miles had accumulated in front of town hall. And every single one of them was pointed at him.

“Hello, Officer Taggert,” she said bravely, trying for, but missing, defiance. Hell, she was trembling slightly.

“Miss Grainger.”

Damn it. She looked adorable in the ridiculous hat. The oversize coat made her look even smaller than she was.

He leaned close to her, could smell that heady scent of wild strawberries, tried to avoid the mistake he had made last time of breathing in too much of it. He fought back a sudden impulse to ask her about her damned foot. “Miss Grainger, would you come with me?”

He said it quietly, for her ears only. She looked like the type that buckled under to authority, but of course the wild-strawberry scent should have warned him of, well, a wilder side.

She took a step back from him, fixed the incredible deep sea-blue of her eyes on him, and squared her shoulders. “Am I under arrest, Officer Taggert?”

Jeanie Harper gasped, which probably meant a life sentence of no more shortbread for Tag, her son or Jamison. This was not something he wanted to be held responsible for, but he was the new guy. The flak always landed on him.

The cameras were snapping, the film rolling. The news crew moved in closer, and Jade Flynn flipped her hair and moistened her lips, her timing for the story impeccable. Microphones shaped like huge foam hot dogs dangled over them.

“You need a permit to assemble,” he said quietly. “You’re obstructing traffic.”

“Am I under arrest?” she demanded again. She pointed her chin upward, stubbornly, but he could see she was shaking even more now.

And that she was all of five foot three and probably weighed about a hundred and ten pounds. He remembered that weight in his arms, struggled to keep his facial expression absolutely impassive.

Standing there in her Santa hat, she looked exactly like the girl who had probably not done one naughty thing in her whole life. She’d probably never even had a speeding ticket, never mind fur-trimmed bikinis.

She was just one of those people who became passionate about causes. Not that he wanted to be thinking about her and passion. What a waste. All that passion over a silly display in the park.

Though every time he drove by Bandstand Park, he had to admit he was aware of the black emptiness of it, instead of the lights, the little characters, Santa’s reverberating ho-ho-ho. Suddenly, without warning, he remembered Ethan coming home when he was about twelve with Santa’s hat, swiped from the park.

And he, the older brother, making him take it back, foreshadowing his career, which at this moment he hated.

“Are you arresting me, Officer Taggert?”

“Yeah,” he said reluctantly, “you’re under arrest.”

A discontented hum began in the crowd. Jeanie called out, “Shame on you, Brody Taggert.”

This was the problem with becoming a police officer in the small town where you had grown up. Jeanie Harper no doubt had memories of him raiding her garden, and knocking over her mailbox on Halloweens past.

He put a hand on Lila’s shoulder, intending to guide her out of the crowd, but she shrugged out from under his hand, and stubbornly presented her wrists to him.

He bit the inside of his cheek, whether to keep his temper or to keep from laughing he wasn’t quite sure. Miss L. Toe did look ludicrous, but since he had not laughed since Boo’s diagnosis, he figured it was his temper.

He heard Jade Flynn say to her cameraman, “Oh, boy. Be sure and get this.”

Everybody wanted a show to go with the storyline about the town that was canceling Christmas. And every show needed a villain. Jade Flynn didn’t care who looked bad. Lila looked like she might, but not enough to let go of this opportunity to get the publicity she wanted.

And he was the who that was going to look bad.

He stared her down, she was obviously frightened, but not enough to back down. She was willing to sacrifice herself to her cause. He noticed she still had little circles of fatigue under her eyes.

“Okay then,” he said, his voice deliberately flat, his expression hard. “Put your hands behind your back.”

She did and he took the cuffs off his belt, and snapped them around her wrists, which were so small he had to adjust the cuffs. He was nearly blinded by flashes, and he felt like an idiot. If she was humiliated it didn’t show one little bit in the proud tilt of her chin.

He told her she was being arrested for unlawful assembly and obstructing traffic, and told her her rights. She nodded that she understood, standing ramrod straight, her dignity intact while he felt his own was in tatters.

He spun her around, his hand on her elbow and marched her, her limp visible, through the crowd. He was aware of feeling as if he had to protect her from the crush of people, though it was him getting the looks. Several people clicked their heels and gave him straight-armed salutes.

Lila flinched more than he did from the insulting gestures.

As soon as he had his prisoner safely inside the police station, Hutch appeared.

“Was that really necessary?” he asked Tag of the cuffs.

Tag said nothing, but sighed inwardly. Who had ordered the arrest? Still, he was now aware this was something of a family dispute. No one ever wanted to be in the middle of that.

“Ask her,” Tag said, and unlocked her wrists.

“He was just doing his job, Uncle Paul.”

Tag shot her a look that clearly told her he didn’t need a one-hundred-pound waif in a Santa hat and a marshmallow coat to defend him.

“Get into my office,” Hutch said quietly to his niece. “Now.”

She sent Tag an imploring look, which he ignored. He’d done his bit, and he wasn’t the least bit proud of it, either.

“I’m not normally the kind of person who gets arrested,” Lila said to him, ignoring her uncle’s command, the only person Tag had ever seen do that.

“I kind of figured you for a virgin,” he said, their department’s lingo for a first-time offender.

It had slipped out, and it was a mistake. He knew it even before Hutch sent him a killing look and her blush went the color of a smashed raspberry.

Which of course made him entertain the extremely naughty thought that maybe she was every kind of virgin it was possible to be.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“Of course not,” she said soothingly. “We’re all rattled.”

The thing was, he shouldn’t be. He was no virgin. Of any kind.

“I hope we meet again,” she said formally, “under better circumstances.”

“Really? I was hoping the exact opposite.” He knew as soon as he said it, it was way too harsh, a defense against everything she was making him feel. Rattled. Off-kilter. Guilty. Worried about her foot.

Boo chose that moment to waddle out from under his desk. She plopped down at Lila’s feet and began humming.

Lila sat down on the floor beside the dog, wrapped her puffy pink marshmallow arms around Boo’s neck and burst into tears.

She’s exhausted, Tag thought, noticing the fatigue around her eyes again. And then, annoyed that he felt sympathy toward her, he told himself it was probably planning the little extravaganza outside that had exhausted her.

Then he noticed Hutch and Boo glaring at him with identical expressions of accusation. He threw up his hands in exasperation and went and found a cell to clean. Hopefully it would keep him busy until the crowd outside had dispersed, Lila had gone home, her uncle had cooled off and his dog had been returned to her senses.

Hopefully it would keep him busy long enough to forget the way he felt when he saw she was still limping.

CHAPTER THREE

“…DONATIONS are pouring in,” Lila told her aunt Marla, tossing a raft of envelopes she’d been sorting through into the air. “And the best? A man, Henry, who retired in Spokane, but used to work in maintenance at a big California theme park, thinks he can fix the elves and the reindeer. He’s sure he can save the Santa’s workshop display!”

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