Page 15 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

It was her problem that all she heard was a sinful invitation.

Four

“Are you following me, Mr. Cross?”

His trooper asked the question in her usual matter-of-fact, direct way, but Templeton could have sworn that there’d been something intriguingly molten and hot in her gaze just a moment before.

Then again, it was possible he only wanted there to have been.

Or liked that it existed, he corrected himself. Sternly. Because he didn’t want things he wasn’t going to let himself touch.

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” he said mildly. “You should have come in last night. Griffin makes a mean chili. No need to lurk around at the windows, staring in like a lost puppy.”

But if Kate was disconcerted that he knew she’d been following him around last night, she gave no sign. She charged up one step, then another. Then one more.

Until she was at his eye level.

And she made no move to switch off her headlamp, so he didn’t do a thing about his, either.

“I’ll ask again,” she said, as if he were a naughty schoolboy. Something else he probably shouldn’t have found hot. “Why did you choose to come out here this morning?”

“Two things,” he drawled. He lifted one gloved finger. “First, everybody who runs around here runs these steps. This time of year it’s safer than the trail, unless there’s ice. But if there’s ice, nothing’s safe, so we all make choices. And second? If I was following you, Trooper Holiday, I’d be following you. And you wouldn’t know it unless I wanted you to.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“I don’t make threats. I don’t really have to, if I’m honest.”

“And why is that? Is it because your organization is in itself threatening?”

“Kate,” he said, and made a meal of that sharp, sweet syllable. “Can I call you Kate?”

“You may not.”

“The thing is,Kate,” he said lazily, because it wasn’t a crime to call her by her first name, and he sure was finding those hints of temper in her addictive, “you’re barking up the wrong tree here. I’m not a threat. Alaska Force is not a threat. There can actually be good in the world, even out here in the middle of nowhere, and even if it involves a collection of military veterans you’re suspicious of, for some reason.”

Her head tilted slightly to one side. “I can’t think of anything more dangerous than a group of militaristic individuals, armed to the teeth, who are convinced not only of their own strength but of their own righteous goodness. Can you?”

Templeton shoved his headlamp back on his head and considered her, there before him on the step, dressed for a cold run and not in her uniform. He figured she’d take a dim view of it if he touched her the way he wanted to, so he kept his hands to himself.

And sighed. “I think you might want to ask yourselfwhy, when you look at a forest, you see a logging cult. When it’s just trees.”

“Thank you for that, Mr. Cross. You truly are a philosopher.” Her smile was sharp. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to return to what I was doing. I have your cell phone number. I’ll call you when and if I want to see you again.”

And he should have let her go when she turned and started climbing the stairs again. He should have trotted back down to the village, but there was something about Kate Holiday that dug under his skin and hummed there. It wasn’t that she’d followed him last night. He understood and respected the move. He’d clocked her when he’d stepped out of the Fairweather and had been impressed with her stealth as she’d tracked him through the fog to the little house that his Alaska Force brother Griffin had just moved into.

Are we going to do something about that?Griffin had asked, without looking toward the window.

Not a lot we can do, Templeton had replied. Lazily.

They’d both known when she’d melted away again. Later, he and Griffin had done a perimeter run of the village to make sure everything in Grizzly Harbor was as it should be, with no boats or storage sheds about to blow. And he’d spent longer than he planned to admit looking at the faint crack of light in the upstairs window at the Blue Bear Inn. Just making sure she made it through the fog, he’d told himself.

He’d come out this morning to run until he got his head on straight. To remind himself he’d given himself rules on purpose, and that he shouldn’t have spent far too long last night coming up with reasons why she was an exception.

And then here she was. As if he’d conjured her.

Templeton wasn’t one to look a holiday gift in the mouth, rules or no rules.

So for the hell of it, he followed her up the stairshacked into the side of the hill, matching his stride to hers, step for step.

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