Page 51 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

And the truth was, Kate didn’t really like howthatfelt, either. As much because she wasn’t actually on vacation as because, when her captain had asked where she was, she’d said she was holed up on an island in the Inside Passage to ring in the New Year.

That wasn’t a lie. Kate couldn’t tell lies directly to anyone. She refused. But it wasn’t exactly the truth, either.

It felt a lot like one of those gray areas she’d avoidedher whole life. She hated it. She hated that it made her wonder if she was on a slippery slope that led directly to megalomaniacal homesteading in the Alaskan interior like her father, ranting at captive family members aboutpurity. Something that also did not feel great.

Kate was full up onfeelings.

And that was before she got to thinking about what else had happened that night in Fool’s Cove.

She’d woken that morning with the expected drumbeat in her temples, though it wasn’t bad enough to allow her to feel truly sick, which would have been a terrific way to not face up to the previous night’s behavior. Sadly, the couple of ibuprofen she’d swallowed had dealt with the headache but done absolutely nothing to wipe away the details of what had transpired between her and Templeton. On that couch, and then—worse by far—on her bed.

She’d chugged a huge glass of water. Then another. She’d made herself a strong pot of coffee as she checked her phone and learned what had transpired in Juneau while she’d been eating pasta and then rolling around naked with a completely inappropriate man, letting him do things that she would have sworn up and down she wouldn’t like at all. Except she had.

Her unmanageable feelings churned around inside of her, no matter how hard she tried to shove them back down, into place.

Especially since it was a text from Templeton—sent late the previous night, after he’d left her—that had very tersely outlined what had happened in Juneau.

By the time Kate had finished her rounds of endless phone calls, she was edgy. So she’d dealt with all of it—her issues and her hangover and those unwieldy, unwelcomefeelings—the way she’d always dealt with such things and always would.

Kate had gotten back to work.

And by the time Templeton ambled back around tofind her, it was already dark again on Friday afternoon. Only a rainy, insubstantial little spit of daylight earlier had indicated that Kate had worked almost all the way through the night, nibbling on a power bar when she thought of it. She’d passed out on the couch for a few hours around four in the morning, then jumped right back in when she’d woken a few hours later.

Kate had finished going through Oz’s lists and all her old cases. Which was a good thing, because she could see that questioning sort of expression on Templeton’s face and wanted nothing to do with it.

“Whatever you’re about to say,” she said briskly—professionally—when she opened the door to his knock and that knowing gleam in his dark eyes, “it’s going to have to wait. I’m ready to talk about these lists.”

She expected him to argue. Because didn’t he always argue?

But instead, Templeton grinned big and wide, as if he’d expected her to do exactly this, which was deeply irritating. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t tease her or make suggestive remarks. He didn’t glance in the direction of the couch, or her bedroom, or even her body.

He made her want to scream.

Kate did not scream. Because she’d decided that all she could really do was exude professionalism from every pore and treat Templeton the way she’d treated any of the other cops she’d gotten involved with in one way or another over the years. With distance and disinterest until they got the message and went away.

And the fact that Templeton had made her feel things she’d always thought were the sort of overheated, overwrought, deeply unrealistic fantasies best suited for romantic movies was something Kate planned to keep to herself.

Templeton waited—still grinning, damn him—while Kate pulled on her jacket and boots, then he led her back to the main part of the lodge. He brought her throughthat main lobby area and into the back rooms that she’d seen briefly when she’d toured this place that very first visit. And it was in one of those back rooms that she sat with Oz himself, who looked like no computer geek or man behind a curtain that Kate had ever known, with clever eyes and the build of a world-class athlete.

Together, she and Oz had gone through the lists again until they’d hammered out one they both agreed on. Out of all the cases that Kate had worked on in her career, they narrowed it down to three potentials.

One was a family of human traffickers who’d operated a “pleasure cruise” out of Ketchikan, up through the Inside Passage. Another was a group of religious separatists whose base on a communal farm outside of Anchorage had been the center of a number of abuses and alleged exploitation of minors and laborers. Kate had been instrumental in dismantling both and putting the leaders in jail.

The third was her own family. Samuel Lee Holiday, his three brothers and two cousins, and their foiled plot to alter the political landscape with homemade pipe bombs. Her uncles and second cousins were in jail, along with her father, and Kate had been more than “instrumental” in making that happen. She’d cracked the case wide open when she’d walked into that Trooper station and told them who she was and why she’d stolen that snowmobile to get away from her father’s compound.

Not that Kate wanted to believe her personal history was relevant to explosions fifteen years later and an intruder in her Juneau apartment. But she couldn’t say with certainty that itwasn’t.

She and Oz had dug into all three of those cases—and more important, the current whereabouts, if known, of every person connected to those cases—ever since. They’d pulled another near-all-nighter, with Kate crashing out for a couple of hours on one of the couches in the lobby, lulled to sleep by the crackling fire. Then she’dbeen back at it, breaking only to experience the mess hall conditions Bethan had been talking about.

And the best part of throwing herself into all this research was that it left her absolutely no time to consider the ramifications of getting naked in front of, and all over, Templeton Cross.

But she’d be lying to herself—and not in a gray area, slippery-slide sort of way, but an all-out, full-scale lie—if she pretended she ever really got anything that had happened that night out of her head.

Whatever she was doing, whatever lead she was trying to follow, she would always find herself lapsing back into the memory of Templeton’s mouth between her legs, those huge shoulders of his holding her legs apart, and his hands—

It was not helpful. The memory might kill her. Kate was a little surprised it hadn’t already.

But it was also drawing closer to Christmas.

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