Page 62 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

Running in fresh snow was fun. Kate had always enjoyed it, in her years in cold and snowy places like right here in Fairbanks. It was the potential ice packed beneath the snow from warmer temperatures that was the problem, so quickly could it take a runner down. And then the real trouble happened, out in the dark with a broken ankle or worse, risking hypothermia with potentially no cell phone service.

But Kate wasn’t worried about that today. On the main road, the snowplows had already been out this morning. Kate could run in the street, parallel to the snow berm the plow had pushed to the side. It was as much a test of agility as it was of regular endurance, with her headlamp casting a little circle of light before her and the strange, somehow comforting and yet unsettling awareness of the big man keeping pace with her at her back.

She didn’t know what she expected Templeton to do. Make noise, make his presence known the way he always did.Something.

But all he did was run. The only sound was her breath and his and their feet crunching against the snowpack. It was like they were the only people alive and awake in all of Alaska, when Kate knew better.

Once again, Kate felt the embrace of it. That damnable intimacy, wrapping around her like the sort of hug she would decline if it was offered to her.

It made her mad. It made her run faster, as if shecould outrun it—and not because she was trying to show off to an ex–Delta Force Army Ranger whose very physicality was a testament to his commitment to keeping himself battle ready. Kate had spent almost fifteen years building up her walls, creating and bolstering her boundaries, and policing the vast gulf of distance—physical and emotional—she kept between herself and other people. She’d weathered the uncomfortable silences, the “lost” invitations to group activities she didn’t want to attend anyway, the whispers behind her back when her “attitude” inevitably caused offense. She was happy with where she’d ended up in her career, able to do her own thing without worrying about office politics.

Kate was well known as an ice queen, and she liked it that way.

And all it took was one visit to Templeton and his friends and it all started crumbling.

Like it had been dominoes all along, instead of stone walls and sheets of arctic ice.

She wasn’t a good judge of the male half of the species, but everything she’d witnessed as a child suggested that Templeton was nothing like the men in her family and was much more like the troopers who had listened to her, understood what was happening, and made sure she never had to go back out into the bush to the compound she’d escaped. Then died because they’d protected her. And the more adult truth she had no desire to acknowledge was that she already had more of a relationship with Templeton than she’d had with any of the other men who’d walk-on roles in her life.

Kate wanted absolutely no part of this, whatever it was.

Seeing her cousin yesterday had crystallized that for her. Will was family. He was the least offensive member of her family, as a matter of fact, and she had no desire to do anything about the state of her broken relationship with him. If it hadn’t been for her Alaska Force investigation and that body in her seaplane, she never wouldhave looked him up. She would have let that bridge burn down into dust, and if she’d thought about it at all, she would have roasted marshmallows in the flames.

Kate didn’t want intimacy. She didn’t want cozy chats over red wine in cheerful log cabins with women she barely knew. And she had never been all that interested in oral sex, with all that forced vulnerability. She still didn’t want any of it, she snapped at herself.

She pumped her arms, moving faster over the frigid ground, because her body was warm and limber now despite the cold—and she didn’t like the fact that Templeton seemed to have his own private access to her body and its reactions no matter what she thought about it. She didn’t like that at all.

Kate liked sugar, too. A lot. Yet she knew that it was far better to moderate its use than to indulge herself, because no matter how good it tasted, it was never worth how she felt afterward. Templeton was no different. He was just... sugar in male form. Tempting, impossible to consume without that little bit of a head rush, but no good for her.

She was solitary like a rock and alone like an island, like the old song had always told her.

“Are you running toward something?” came Templeton’s amused voice from behind her. That was when she realized she was practically sprinting at breakneck pace down a snowy, treacherous road with only the faintest stirrings of approaching daylight lightening up the dark sky. “Or is something chasing us?”

“I was thinking about sugar,” she said, having to yell a bit to make sure her words made it through the covering she had over the lower part of her face.

“Sugar makes me cranky,” Templeton observed. Kate noticed that he wasn’t out of breath. At all. That was so annoying that she ran even faster. “It doesn’t make me feel like I need to try to break the land speed record.”

She made it to the turn of the road that led farther intotown. That put them at about two miles from Isaac’s sister’s house—which Kate would count as four, because she always counted miles as doubles in weather like this. It was that much harder to move. She stopped running, and hated the fact that she was panting a bit. She could see his breath in the air, too, but he looked as if he could run at twice the pace she’d set, straight up the side of Denali and on into forever.

And sure, that was the entire point of his existence. That was who he was.

But it still irritated her.

“And I’m thinking about communities,” she told him. The sky really was getting brighter, so she pulled her headlamp down around her neck and scowled at him, not caring that her eyelashes were frozen. His were, too. It only made his eyes that much more formidable. “Some people are put on this earth to bond. To make connections. To form big and little groups, or whatever you want to call it.”

“I call it being a person, actually.”

“But as I’ve already proved more than once, my purpose on this earth is to seek out unhealthy communities and either set them on the path to a healthier future or take them apart. That’s good work. It’s my work. There aren’t a lot of people who can do it.”

“Is this your résumé?” She didn’t hear that signature laugh of his, but it still seemed to fill the air between them, like the puff of his breath against the frigid air. “I already know what you do, Kate. It’s why we’re up here in subzero weather, preparing to take on the second coming of Samuel Lee Holiday’s freaky family compound.”

Kate hopped from foot to foot to keep her body temperature from dropping. “All I’m saying is that some people, because of who they are and what they do, need to maintain certain distances. Surgeons are cold andoff-putting. People make jokes about their bedside manner. It’s a big cliché, but the reality is, they have to be more scientific than social. Or how could they do what they need to do?”

“You’re going to have to leave me a trail of breadcrumbs here,” Templeton said, though he didn’t sound confused. He sounded entertained. And maybe a little chilly. “Because you lost me long before you got to bedside manners.”

“Not everybody can sail through life with a big belly laugh and a few off-color remarks, Templeton.”

That landed awkwardly. And distinctly, in that space between them.

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