Page 13 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

Kate stopped where she was, several doors down, because she recognized the man who shouldered his way out into the night.

Templeton.

She watched her own breath against the night, escaping in a gust like she’d been socked in the stomach.

He finished zipping up his coat, then jerked his gloves on. He lifted his head and stood there a moment, as if he were listening to all the same sounds of the town she was. He tugged his hat down on his head, turned, and headed off around the back of the bar. Then up the steep little hill that led to the next so-called street.

Kate didn’t question her instincts. She followed him.

There wasn’t much to the village, but it was dark and the fog was only thickening, providing Kate with all the cover she could possibly need. Templeton moved silently for such a big man, and there was nothing loud or gregarious about him as he slipped through the night. The way he moved reminded her of the look she’d seen on his face when he’d first pushed his way into the café today. That leashed power that made him the man she’d read about in the files, not the performer she’d met at their interview.

The contrast made her shiver.

Kate followed him up the hill, then waited as he made his way to a house set back in the trees, away from the main clump of the village. She stayed where she was, some ways behind him and covered by the shroud of fog. She watched him as he knocked twice on the front door, then let himself in.

One breath. Another. Then a third, and only then did Kate ease herself out from behind the tree she’d been waiting behind. She picked her way toward the house.

She didn’t know what she expected to find. Or maybe she did know, she thought, when she peeked through the window and saw what was inside. She’d expected something out of her own childhood. Bare walls and hardfloors, because possessions were a distraction, the mission was everything, and the more it hurt, the better.

She blinked at her father’s voice wedged deep inside her, then focused on what was actually happening in the house before her.

It looked comfortable. Cozy, even. She was looking into a living room that opened up into a cheerful kitchen behind it. The walls were filled with bookshelves, not machine guns, swastikas, or any of the other weird and creepy things she’d have expected. And in the kitchen, Templeton was kicked back against one of the counters, a bottle of beer in his hands, looking relaxed and at ease.

Not that lazy watchfulness he’d put on for her benefit in the café earlier, but actually relaxed. She was shocked at what a difference it was even though she’d known he was performing.

It looked like the beginnings of the making of dinner. A cozy, domestic scene. Another man was chopping up spices and vegetables and adding them to a pot, the way he held himself and his body language—like the very precise way he wielded his knife—suggesting that he was another elite, special forces kind of guy like Templeton.

The other person in the room was a stunningly gorgeous, elegant blond woman, who wore a black turtleneck sweater that even from this side of the window Kate could tell was made of the finest cashmere. There was a hint of gold at her wrist where the sleeve fell back as she held a glass of wine. Her hair was tossed up into the kind of hairstyle that likely came with a fancy French word to describe it. She looked entirely too elegant for a remote fishing village clinging to the side of an Alaskan mountain.

It took Kate a moment, but she knew who the woman was. Mariah McKenna, a former Alaska Force client turned main prosecution witness in a highly publicized upcoming trial against her rich and powerful former father-in-law. As Kate watched, Mariah leaned in to kiss the man at the stove’s jaw with all the possessivecertainty of an established lover. And Kate wasn’t sure how she’d missed the fact that Mariah had very obviously started shacking up with the man who had to be Griffin Cisneros, former marine sniper, who’d been involved in foiling the kidnap and murder plot against Mariah this past spring.

Just as Kate wasn’t sure why the sight of them as a couple made her heart kick at her a little, since Kate would certainly never start dating someone she was investigating. The very idea was absurd.

Or the idea had seemed more absurd before today, anyway.

The thing was, if Kate hadn’t known how deadly the two men in the kitchen were, she might have imagined she was looking in at a perfectly normal, unobjectionable evening among normal everyday friends. A glass of wine, a beer. A shared meal.

Like regular people.

Something in her flipped over, and she backed away from the window, feeling flushed again. And disconcerted, somehow. As if something inside her had shifted out of place.

Without Templeton’s big, confident form to follow, it took Kate a lot longer to make it back to the main stretch of town. But she did, and then she finally made her way to the Blue Bear Inn, which, except for a light on out front, looked dark and unwelcoming. When she got to the door, she found an envelope pinned to the wood withTROOPERscrawled across the front.

Inside the envelope she found a note inviting her to make herself at home in whatever room she liked.

Kate wasn’t surprised to find the front door to the inn unlocked, because this was about the worst place in the world she could think to rob. There was nowhere to go. Everybody knew everybody, and at this time of year, there was no getting away with any stolen goods. There was only huddling somewhere and waiting to be discovered.

But that didn’t mean she was particularly thrilled to walk into a dark, unfamiliar building. She was relieved to find, when she pushed the door open, that there were a few solitary lights on inside, showing her a small reception area and a quintessentially Alaskan lounge area, complete with a cute little grizzly to one side of the fireplace. Kate took her time finding her way to a room, making sure to check all over the inn first, in case there were any lurking surprises. But everything was as it should have been, which meant that she could breathe easy when she found a room she liked. She took the key out of the lock to shut herself inside and made sure to pull the curtains tight so there was no possibility anyone could watch her the way she’d just watched Templeton and his friends.

Only then did Kate allow herself to relax.

She took off her uniform, carefully hanging it in the closet so it would look as crisp as possible in the morning. Though she might have to use the ancient-looking iron she found there. She pulled her hair out of its tight, serviceable bun and rubbed her fingertips over her scalp, releasing the tension. She always packed a merino wool base layer in her go bag, because she never knew where she might have to spend the night or under what conditions, and she pulled it on now as pajamas. Her room had a hot plate and a couple of packages of Top Ramen, so she made herself a little bowl of noodles instead of eating one of the energy bars she kept stashed in her bag.

She settled in on the four-poster bed, slurping up ramen and writing down her impressions and thoughts on everything she’d discovered today. She charged her phone. She checked her messages and responded to her colleagues and her captain, making sure to note her location and schedule as much as humanly possible. Just to make sure she left a very clear trail while she was off investigating.

When she opened the curtains and looked out thewindow later, the fog was so intense she couldn’t see more than a few inches, and she blew out a breath, happy she hadn’t found it necessary to attempt flight under these conditions. Just because she could fly—and knew many other local pilots who would fly under any circumstances at all, as long as they had the fuel—didn’t mean it was a good idea.

Kate hadn’t escaped her childhood to go around unnecessarily risking her life now.

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