Page 69 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

Kate sidestepped him, smooth and easy.

Which meant the only face Russ had in front of him was Templeton’s.

Templeton put him down. Harder than necessary. Then held him there, with a foot at his neck. Happily filtering out the screaming from the loft above and the blue streak Liberty’s husband was swearing up and down.

Liberty herself moved toward Kate as if she intended to finish her brother’s job, but it was Kate who stopped her dead.

“One more step,” she told her in a voice that was entirely steel-edged trooper, “and you too will be facedown on the floor with a foot on your neck. My foot. Do you understand me?”

Templeton hadn’t gotten around to asking Kate if she had any martial arts training or self-defense experience. Probably because he was far more interested in all that sleek fitness of hers on a very personal level. But he could see from the way she stood, on the balls of her feet and perfectly ready for whatever might come, that she did.

Of course she did. She knew whose daughter she was. He imagined that on some level, Kate had been preparing for a day like this since that night she’d lit out of that original compound on a snowmobile in the winter dark.

Something he couldn’t really let himself think about too hard, especially not when he had her cousin at his mercy.

“If I wanted to,” Kate said into the tense silence, “I could bring all of you in. There are always consequences for behavior, on that we agree, but I won’t strip you both down and throw you outside to see if you can magically survive the elements. I’m not a monster. You can’t say the same about yourselves. Or the man you think is so great that he planned to sacrifice his own child because I dared to have thoughts of my own. I hope you remember that when your own kids start acting up, the way kids do.”

“I hope I never see you again,” Liberty gritted out. “Unless it’s reading your obituary.”

“Keep making threats,” Kate suggested. “It’s not going to end well for you.”

But she didn’t ask any more questions. She stepped away from Liberty and headed toward the door. She slid a look Templeton’s way as she went, and he understood it at once.

He let Russ up, grinning when the other man scrambled to his feet, red-faced and puffing with fury. He looked as if he was about to take another swing. Templeton wished he would.

“I’d think twice if I were you, friend,” he drawled, because he really was a saint. “I have six inches on you, not to mention enough training to knock you out before you hit the ground. Twice. Choose wisely.”

“You better pray to God I don’t shoot you in the back on your way out of here,” Russ all but shouted at him.

“I hope you do,” Templeton replied lazily. “I’ll die a happy man, knowing you’ll join the rest of your creepy family behind bars. Which is where all of you belong, as far as I’m concerned.”

And then, because it was insulting, Templeton turned his back on the room and took his time sauntering outside, following Kate to the SUV.

Her cousins followed them out, standing in theirclearing with different degrees of rage and hatred all over their faces.

And later, Templeton would look back and pick this as the moment that his heart sustained a fatal blow.

Because beside him, his prickly, tough, ridiculously beautiful trooper smiled big and bright, then gave her family a cheerful wave as they drove away.

Seventeen

“It makes me sick to say this out loud,” Kate said about halfway through their drive back to Fairbanks, while the low sun hit them too bright to last and the temperature sank like a stone, “but I think I have to visit my father.”

She’d been fighting it since they’d left Russ and Liberty’s nauseating new version of the same old compound. She hadn’t wanted to think it, much less say it out loud.

And she was holding her breath, she realized, as she waited for Templeton’s answer.

“I’d like to visit your father,” Templeton said shortly. “But not in a prison where we’ll be monitored.”

That was gratifying. She was surprised at how it worked its way through her like separate strands of warmth, braiding together and wrapping all around her. And she hadn’t understood how cold she felt until he heated her up a little.

“But yeah,” Templeton said after a moment. “That seems like a reasonable next move.”

“Russ and Liberty seem as deluded as I remember the entire family being, back in the day,” Kate said, staring out the windshield in front of her at the wintry, snowy highway, because that still felt safer than lookingdirectly at Templeton Cross. “But they said they don’t have a plane. That fits with what the troopers told me about them. They don’t have the capability to fly themselves in and out of the Panhandle to make mischief for Alaska Force or break into my apartment. They would have to fly commercial, which I doubt they can afford. Or involve a third party. And none of that gels in my head with freaky little wannabe cult members, hunkered down for the winter out there. But not too far out there, so they can drive into Nenana for supplies.”

“Agreed.” Templeton shifted his big body in his seat. “Oz is already doing deeper background checks. If any of them flew commercial in the past six months, we’ll know soon. And knowing Oz, he’s going to dig into all the private planes that left the airport in Nenana over the last month. I’ll nudge him on that, too.”

The winter road was loud, no matter how quiet it was inside the car.

---