Page 57 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

“Now they’re farming. Kind of. Living off the land, but within driving distance of supplies.”

“Will.”

But that was all Kate said. Just her cousin’s name.

“I don’t know,” he said, begrudgingly. “I haven’t gone looking, and I’m not sure you should, either, without an invitation.”

“Is it starting again?” Kate asked softly. “Has it already started?”

“You know everything I know.”

She made an impatient noise. “Are you really telling me that it could be happening again, right now, and you’re sitting up here an hour away doing absolutely nothing to stop it? Again?”

It was thatagainthat was the hit. It made her cousin flinch.

And Templeton watched as that same expression moved over the other man’s face once again. Loss. Pain. Maybe it was grief, simple as that.

Though nothing about it looked simple to Templeton.

“You look like you’re doing well, Katie,” her cousin said, his voice rough. “It’s nice that one of us is. I’m sure that once I think about it, once you’re gone again, I’ll be real glad about that. But tonight I want you to go back where you came from. And stay there.”

Fourteen

Templeton was quiet as they trudged back out to the SUV. He spoke only when he called in to update Jonas, who was running point on the two or three Alaska Force cases that were still active at this time of year.

Dirtbags don’t take a vacation,Templeton had told her when Kate had asked him directly why they didn’t go dark over the holidays the way it seemed the rest of the world did.Neither do we.

A sentiment she’d appreciated, since the Troopers certainly didn’t take time off during the drunkest, darkest part of the year. Even if Kate had been personally ordered to take a step back at present.

But she appreciated it even more that he didn’t say anything to Kate directly as he drove back down the short, snow-packed drive toward the road, leaving Will and all Kate’s bad memories behind them.

She tried pretending she was grateful. That she waspleasedhe was giving her the space to sort it all out in her own head.

But when he pulled out of her cousin’s drive and paused there to look both ways through the falling snow at the edge of the tree line,gratefulwas not the word thatcame to mind. If she didn’t know better—if it wasn’t ridiculous—Kate would have said that she was actually in something of a fury.

Kate had no right. She knew that. Templeton wasn’t her friend. He wasn’t even really a colleague. They had common interests, that was all, and he didn’t have to pretend that they had any sort of closeness—she refused to use the wordintimacy—just because there had been some nudity. All hers.

And she hated the fact that it mattered to her. That he was treating her differently, suddenly, and it bothered her. That anything he did bothered her.

She wrestled with herself for another long moment or two because the kind of disconnection that she could feel between them now was what she had always wanted from her working relationships. No banter, no invites to family cookouts in the summer, no disrobing in log cabins.

Why should she feel hollow that she’d finally gotten what she wanted?

“If you’re waiting for me to offer some commentary about your family,” Templeton said as he drove along the road, leaving Will firmly behind them, “or judge you in some way because of what you got away from, you’re going to be waiting a long time.”

And Kate didn’t understand how that hollow sensation could turn so quickly into a sort of aching heat instead.

“Will was the cousin I was closest to, growing up,” Kate heard herself say, which was astonishing because she was sure she’d intended to say something very dry about strategy. Or their next move. Something very deliberately impersonal. “Looking back, I guess I could have tried to stay in touch with him. Or the others. We were all kids, after all. But when no one reached out to me after the trials, I thought that was what they wanted.”

She didn’t know where that came from, either. She’dkept tabs on every last member of her family. Distantly. She’d always assumed that if they’d really wanted, they could have kept track of what she was doing, too. And it wasn’t a secret that she’d become a trooper. The newspapers had run big stories when she’d graduated from the academy, dredging up all the Holiday family history.

Then again, perhaps Kate was being unkind. According to every movie she’d ever seen that addressed the topic, family wasn’t meant to judge such things. Family was meant to be accepting, no matter what. No matter the different life choices relatives made, everyone was supposed to gather together for cheery meals and act like they loved one another. Particularly at Christmas.

That hadn’t exactly been one of her father’s preferred manifestos.

“Your cousin is a grown man, Kate,” Templeton said. And when did she start thinking of his low, deep voice as comforting?When have you thought ofanythingas comforting?she asked herself. “Perfectly capable of reaching out if that’s what he wanted.”

“That goes both ways.”

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