Page 100 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

“Baby,” he drawled. “I got to be me.”

“Go be you in Grizzly Harbor,” she replied.

But she didn’t slam the door shut. And Templeton smiled.

“Here are the facts, Trooper,” he said, leaning against the doorjamb. “I’m in love with you. And you didn’t slam the door in my face, which, as far as I can tell, is your version of a sweet nothing. So I’m feeling pretty good about the whole love thing.”

He expected her to snap at him. Maybe punch him, which should be fun.

But instead, all she did was shake her head. And he watched as those cool brown eyes filled up with what looked like sadness.

And how he managed to keep from hauling her into his arms and making sure she was all in one piece, he would never know.

“Don’t you understand yet?” she asked softly. Almost defeated. And yet very, very certain, because that was Kate. “I can’t.”

Twenty-four

Templeton was the most beautiful thing Kate had ever seen, but then, he always was.

She’d been angry in Grizzly Harbor. That anger had carried her all the way to Juneau. She’d packed up her pitiful selection of possessions, informed her landlord that she was moving on, and been on her way back to Anchorage the next morning. In her plane, released at last from police custody.

Kate had taken a couple of days to fly herself back to Anchorage, keeping that anger kicking all the way.

Her mother had been declared missing while they waited to see if a body turned up, though no one was optimistic. And Kate tried her best to mourn, she really did.

But she’d grieved her mother a long time ago.

Her two second cousins were arrested and booked. Kate’s captain called her in, behaving as if her leave had never happened because he needed her advice as her relatives confessed to all the arson, the murder, and the break-in at Kate’s apartment. And it was as Kate had thought. Tracy had spearheaded the whole thing. She wanted Kate and Will to pay—but especially Kate. And they’d settled on Grizzly Harbor—and Alaska Force—as the perfecttrap after a dishonorably discharged friend of theirs had come back from the navy with a story about the secretive ex–special forces group that was still running missions out of the Panhandle.

Kate’s captain was inclined to make Kate’s cousins pay. And to make Alaska Force a whole lot less secretive, too.

She was happy to share her thoughts. She was happy to work.

And it was easy to keep her anger going strong while all of that went on. Even when Will and she attempted to stop treating each other like part of the problem, for a change.

Because they’d survived.

And really, they were the only ones who’d survived. Because others might have lived through the Holiday family, but she and Will had escaped them.

“I guess that means we’re stuck with each other,” Will said, scowling into his beer in one of Kate’s favorite bars in Anchorage. They’d beaten him up, but the bruises would fade. Kate thought he looked like a different man. Because he, too, had fought the family ghosts out there on the water. And, like her, he’d won.

They’d both changed, maybe.

“We can be stuck with each other,” she said, fiddling with her drink. “But there will be no rituals of any kind. Ever.”

“God, no.”

“I don’t need to visit Nenana again.” She even smiled at him then, and it wasn’t a fake one. “And I’m not getting a wolverine tattooed on my body.”

Will smiled back. “I think I can live with that.”

After that, the anger shifted into something heavier. Harder. Kate was working again, but she couldn’t seem to lose herself in it the way she wanted to. At night she would go home and sit on more furniture she hadn’t chosen herself, surrounded by things that weren’t hers andmeant nothing to her, and think of nothing but a man as big as a mountain.

And all the ways he made her feel, which rivaled all the mountain ranges in Alaska. Put together.

That was the problem.

“What do you mean you can’t?” Templeton asked now. And he didn’t wait for her to invite him in. He brushed past her, looking around at the apartment and rolling his eyes. “If this is going to work, we’re going to have to upgrade from this sad, lonely, furnished-apartment crap. It makes my head hurt.”

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