Page 31 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

Her smile was thin, but he noticed it wasn’t that same impenetrable cop smile he’d gotten used to back in Grizzly Harbor.

“Of course I’m affected by my childhood.” Kate’s expression became one of exaggerated patience. “It made me who I am today. But I don’t flail around, constantly looking for reasons to be upset about things that happened more than half my life ago. I understand that’s all the rage these days, but that’s not me.”

“Okay, fine. Great.” His fingers curled around the headrest of her seat, taking what he could get. For God’s sake. “But just because you’re so psychologically sound, it doesn’t mean they are.”

She frowned and opened her mouth—no doubt to protest. Then she closed it again.

And Templeton waited as she thought her way through it. If he was surprised at how fascinating he found watching this womanthink, well... He wasn’t the sort of man who fought his instincts. He never had been. No matter what the rules were.

You have a crush on this trooper, Blue had said, laughing, in one of their morning briefings.

I don’t have crushes, brother, Templeton had drawled.I operate on intent.

That had gotten him a lot of rolled eyes and muttered insults regarding his character, which he’d chosen, out of the goodness of his heart, to ignore.

I think that means that, yes,Templeton has a crush, Griffin had chimed in from across the room, where he liked to stand with his back to a wall, as if the enemy—any enemy—might crash through all their safeguards and be upon them at any moment.

Templeton has rules, Templeton had said, grinning broadly, as if he thought it was all a big joke.Unlike somepeople in this room, I don’t break those rules every time apretty face shows up in Grizzly Harbor.

Blue and Griffin had sized him up as he lounged there with his chair tipped back, like they were trying to figure out the best way to bum-rush him. He’d really, really hoped they would.

Isaac had called them all to order, but it wasn’t the first time Templeton had enjoyed making the point that there was a difference between him and a number of his Alaska Force brothers. It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen the same dark stuff they had. And then some. He had, but he hadn’t brought the dark out with him.

He figured it was because he’d gone in broken and the army had fixed him. He’d done what was necessary, and he didn’t let the nightmares he had from time to time—because there were some things that a man couldn’t forget if he tried—wreck his days. He didn’t forget what he’d lived through, but it didn’t own him.

And he didn’t pretend he didn’t want something when he did.

Wanting something was one thing. Taking it was another, especially when he knew better.

“Various family members made threats, particularly during the court cases,” Kate said, snapping Templeton back to the cab of this SUV with the engine running to keep them warm. While the early night pressed in tight all around them.

Not the time, in other words, to be thinking this hard about all the ways he’d like to get his hands on this woman. And not only because it was against his rules. Or because he doubted she’d appreciate his thoughts in that direction. But, more practically, because he was entirely too large for any shenanigans in a closed car.

“Credible threats?”

She shot him a look. “I didn’t think so. And even if I had, nothing came of them. It was years ago. Over a decade, in some cases.”

“But not all of them are still in prison.”

“I know who’s behind bars and who isn’t,” Kate said in her steady, matter-of-fact cop way. “I said I hadn’t talked to them myself, not that I didn’t check in on what they were doing every now and again. As far as I can tell, they’re all living exactly the squalid sort of livesthey always wanted to live, only with less power over helpless family members, fewer death threats against national figures, and a whole lot more oversight from parole officers.” She shook her head. “Mostly, they’re just drunk and angry. But so are a lot of people.”

“What we kept coming back to is the fact that they chose your seaplane as a stage for the body,” Templeton said. “If this is about Alaska Force, how does that work? We literally had an Alaska State Trooper checking out our facilities when it happened, so we couldn’t possibly have done it ourselves.”

“Unless one of the unaccounted-for members of Alaska Force went ahead and staged the scene for the express purpose of shifting focus off of you.”

“One, there are no unaccounted-for members of Alaska Force. You might not know where they were, but we do, and could prove it if necessary.” Templeton shifted, because there was never enough room for his legs. “Second, walk me through how this works. If we’re behind all this, we torch our own stuff and a random cabin, light a boat on fire in the place where we live, and then, after attracting all that attention, shove it away from us by staging a murder scene to implicate someone else. That seems pretty convoluted.”

Kate’s smile was icy. “The thing about criminals is no matter how smart they are about one thing or another, they almost always find a way to be dumb.”

“Then lay out this case for me.” Templeton nodded at the dashboard as if they were standing in an incident room. “Pretend I’m, God forbid, a lawyer, and you need to convince me to prosecute. What’s the story?”

Kate rubbed at her forehead. “I’m not saying I have an airtight case. I’m saying that’s the obvious first question when you tell me Alaska Force couldn’t have done it because I was there. The fact is, I can’t think of a particularly good reason why you and your friends would suddenly turn to abducting transients from ferries,murdering them, and leaving them around for people to find. Whatever else I might think of you, that certainly doesn’t fit your MO.”

“Damned with faint praise,” Templeton murmured.

“I’ll tell you what I told my captain.” She tilted her chin up a little as she spoke, as if this was hard for her. “I think that it makes sense to give some serious side-eye to private military companies of any size, no matter their mission parameters or their glossy websites touting their commitment to their supposed values. Whatever those are. I have a deep and abiding distrust for secretive militias. But I’ve been studying you and your friends for the past six months, and I don’t see it. I might not be an enthusiastic supporter of the work you do, but as much as it’s possible to do that work aboveboard and right, I think you do it.”

“Why, Trooper Holiday. You are fixing to make a grown man blush.”

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