Page 101 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

“It’s not going to work.”

“Well, not with that attitude.”

“Templeton.”

If he heard the warning in her voice, he gave no sign. He was too busy stripping off his coat, kicking off his boots, and then sauntering over to her sofa and flinging himself down.

“I’m not built for this,” she told him, and frowned. “And I don’t need an argument.”

“There’s no point arguing with sheer insanity,” he replied. “You are, literally, perfectly built. For this. For me.”

There was a smile on his mouth, but it was the intensity of his gaze that made her shudder.

“I’ve had time to think about this,” she said.

“You mean you’ve had time to come up with excuses.”

“That’s your department, if I recall correctly,” she shot back at him before she could think better of it. And knew she’d lost ground when his eyes began to gleam, gold and dangerous.

“You can come at me all you want, Trooper,” he drawled. “I like it. I like you. I like the whole Trooper Holiday package. I don’t think you’re an alien. I don’t think there’s a single thing wrong with you, except maybe that you’re standing across the room from me.”

“I’m broken,” she announced matter-of-factly. “If Ihad any doubt about that, I toured every aspect of my family and childhood in the past month, and it was made perfectly clear to me. That’s where I come from. That genetic swamp.”

“What it should have proved to you is that you’re absolutely nothing like any of them.”

She shook her head again, because she could feel the emotion sloshing around inside of her. And she knew how terrifying it was. She knew where that led.

“But don’t you understand? I’m exactly like them.” When he looked like he would argue the point, she shook her head again, insistently. “I never understood it while I lived there, and I didn’t understand it after I escaped. Because all I could see was the crazy. I’d never felt it myself.”

“Because you’re not crazy.”

“You make me feel completely out of my mind,” she threw at him, and the proof was there in how she sounded. Too loud. Too uncontrolled. “I was standing on a boat in the open sea in December. Moments from my own death. Do you know what I kept thinking about?”

“If it’s not me, Kate, I’m going to be gravely disappointed.”

“Of course it was you.” She threw up her hands. “Who does that? I’m a trained law enforcement officer. I should have been thinking strategy, tactical options, how to save my own cousin. I probably should have saved my mother.”

“You saved yourself,” Templeton reminded her. “And not for the first time.”

“When you came down on that rope, I wanted to jump on you and let you carry me away forever.” When he only looked at her as if he thought that was a fine idea, she made a sound of frustration. “I might as well be my mother. She would have followed that man anywhere. She did. And look what happened.”

He shifted as if he was going to say something, so she kept going.

“That’s how people love in my family. Into prison, out of prison, through murders and assaults and criminal conspiracies. Until they weigh themselves down with an anchor and drown. That’s what’s in here.” She put one hand over her heart, aware it was beating too fast. And aware that her breathing sounded a little too much like sobbing. “That’s what I have to offer.”

But Templeton didn’t react the way he should have. He shrugged. “I accept.”

He said that lazily. Easily. She might have thought that he wasn’t taking this seriously if she hadn’t been able to see the fierce expression in his gaze.

“You can’t...accept,” she sputtered. “This is an escape hatch, Templeton. You need to take it.”

“I think you just told me you’re in love with me,” he said, in that dark, low voice that shivered around inside her and made her feel like a different woman. One who was really free, not simply... no longer trapped. One who was his. “Buried in all that, somewhere. I don’t need an escape hatch.”

“The only way that I managed to not end up like all the rest of them is by keeping to myself,” she told him, and she was aware that her voice was cracking. That her hands were in fists at her side. “I work. That’s it. That’s the only thing that lets me stayme.”

Templeton sat up. He leaned forward so he could rest his elbows on his knees and dangle his hands between his legs.

“Do you trust me?” he asked her, without a trace of a smile on that beautiful, wicked face of his.

---