“But in this case, I wasn’t asking you to tell us both lies about how much you liked kissing me. I already know. I was talking about you coming to work with Alaska Force for a little while. Which is less fun than kissing me, I’ll admit.”

“It’s out of the question. Obviously.”

“Why?”

She didn’t understand why Templeton got to her like this, when no other man ever had. It had been bad enough out in Grizzly Harbor, when she couldn’t help feeling that Templeton had gotten the best of every situation she’d found herself in with him. But at least then she’d had a better understanding of what she was supposed to be accomplishing.

Today she was off-balance. There was no other way to put it. The ground was shaky beneath her feet, andshe was letting him take advantage of that. Or anyway, she wasn’t doing a whole lot to stop him. Especially not when she’d leaned in and kissed him back.

Kate fought to repress her shudder. And told herself it was from revulsion.

But she knew better. Just like she knew—because she’d taught herself, step by precarious step when she’d still been a kid—that she was the only person who could get her balance back. That if she centered herself, nothing and no one could shake her.

She looked away from the temptation lounging there beside her. Out over her lit-up dashboard, down the hill, and across the lights of downtown Juneau, then off to the west, where the mountain blocked any view of the water and islands beyond.

Kate reminded herself how it was she’d come to be sitting in this vehicle in the first place, here in Juneau, an Alaska State Trooper and an investigator, whether she was on leave or not. Why it was she wasn’t still marooned in that compound out in the snowy interior, knowing only the tiny little sliver of the frigid, isolated world that her father had wanted her to see. Or, more likely, long gone as another one of his victims. It was funny, because now and again she would meet tourists from the Lower 48, and they almost universally shuddered when they talked of Alaskan winters they’d never experienced and told her that they’d feel too trapped by the dark. Too claustrophobic. Or something along those lines.

But for Kate, endless dark or midnight sun, as long as she wasn’t in that compound, she was free.

She was alive. She was away from her family. She was making her own life, her own choices, her own way. Sometimes that meant working through the holidays. Sometimes that meant accepting a leave she didn’t want. Either way, she was living a life she couldn’t have imagined when shewas growing up. There had been very clearly defined roles for everyone her father controlled, and nothing in Kate’s life now fit that bill.

That was the part she couldn’t lose sight of, no matter what else happened.

This holiday leave might have been thrust upon her, but it was hardly the worst of the things Kate had survived in her time.

And the more she allowed herself to remember that, the more prepared she felt to try to look at Templeton’s proposition—the one about working with him and his friends, that was—with a little more clarity.

“What exactly do you mean when you saywork with you?” she asked.

“You’ve seen what we do. Or how and where we do it, anyway. Pretty certain you can figure it out from there, but if not, I could probably draw you a map.”

How did he make that sound so... dirty? More worryingly, why did her own body react as if he were painting that map directly onto her bare skin?

“I’m not military. I don’t...” Her throat was much too dry, and she blamed him for that, too. “Go out on missions or whatever it is you do.”

“Kate. Please. You flew yourself to Grizzly Harbor to interview the members of a group you were sure had nefarious intentions and were moreover responsible for a series of explosions throughout Southeast Alaska. How is that not a mission?”

She drummed her fingers against the steering wheel, turning his offer over and over in her head. Because she should refuse, of course. She should already have refused. It was the responsible, reasonable thing to do.

“I’m not supposed to have anything to do with the investigation.”

“And you won’t.” Templeton shrugged. “The official investigation. But as you already know, Alaska Force likes to do things our own way.”

“I will not be a party to breaking the law.” She turned toward him, making sure to look him straight in the eye. “That’s a hard line I will not cross.”

“No one’s asking you to break the law.”

“No breaking the law. No bending it. No gray areas.”

“Life is gray areas, Kate. That’s a fact. You like facts, don’t you?”

“We already had this debate. I believe in choices.”

“I realize this might come as a surprise to you,” Templeton drawled, sounding deeply entertained. Though there was something about the gleam in his dark eyes that made her think he was possibly less entertained than he was acting. “But I don’t actually run around encouraging people to break the law.”

Kate frowned at him, still drumming the steering wheel with her fingers. She realized she was betraying her nerves, but she didn’t make herself stop.

“I shouldn’t be considering this. Not for a moment.”