A big one,” she said in a rush, “just to keep the Christmas spirit alive until we can come up with some money and get the Santa’s Workshop display fixed. Or get the town to change their minds.”
She blushed when she said that, as if she was planning something naughty to get the town to change their minds, but just looking at her he could tell her idea of naughty and his would be completely different. He thought if she showed up in one of those red, fur-trimmed bikinis the town would do whatever the hell she wanted.
As if to prove how differently their minds worked, and that she was the girl least likely to ever wear a red fur-trimmed bikini, she said, “We might try putting a real Santa in the park on weekends.”
“There are no real Santas,” he said dryly, knowing with new conviction he was hearing only part of the story.
“I was thinking of asking that portly man who works with Uncle Paul. Do you think he’d do it for free?”
Portly was a very kind way to describe the most senior member of the Snow Mountain department.
“Jamison?” Tag asked, incredulously. “You want Karl Jamison to play Santa?”
Jamison, who was not portly, but obese, who chewed—and spat—tobacco, and who had the world’s largest off-color vocabulary thanks to ten years in the Marine Corp, was the man least likely to play Santa.
“He just looked like he’d make a good Santa,” she said wistfully.
Karl Jamison was the man most likely to kill Christmas forever on Snow Mountain should he ever be appointed a weekend Santa Claus.
“You wouldn’t make a good Santa,” she said, eyeing Tag speculatively before turning her eyes away, fiddling with the candy cane. “You’re too—”
Despite the insult of being declared a worse Santa than Jamison, a number of ways to finish that sentence came to his mind: tall, dark, handsome, which just served to prove he had not been as successful at shutting down that initial spark of interest as he had hoped.
But she shot him another glance and finished her sentence with, “Unjolly.”
He was not a literary giant like her, but he was pretty sure if he ran unjolly through the computer spelling checker at the station, it was going to make that noise he hated.
Still, unjolly was as accurate a description as any, so why was he vaguely annoyed that she had spotted his true nature, completely unsuitable in the peace and joy department, so instantly and accurately?
And since she had handed him his escape from her ridiculous committee practically gift-wrapped, why wasn’t he gratefully bowing his way toward the door?
Instead he heard himself asking, “So besides that, did you come up with any other ideas for saving Christmas in Snow Mountain?”
He did not try to hide his cynicism, and her look of uneasiness increased.
“No, nothing at all,” she said, way, way too quickly.
She was afraid of him. Or something. There were a lot of mysteries in Lila Grainger’s eyes, and a man could be drawn to them, tempted to probe them, which was another reason to just get out of here, accept with grace and gratitude there was no room for cynical, Christmas-hating cops on the SOS committee.
But the chief wasn’t going to believe he hadn’t done something: kicked an elf, broken a manger, been rude and unreasonable, to get himself off the Save Christmas Committee hook. He slid one wistful look over his shoulder at the door, but sucked it up.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to do something?” he asked gruffly. Damn. Now he was probably going to end up building a Santa throne that could hold Jamison without collapsing. Which would be a gigantic project.
But she was as eager to get rid of him as he was to leave.
“No, really, I can’t think of a single thing.” In fact, now she was backing away from him.
Only she’d forgotten the broken glass on the floor, and she was in her socks. She cried out, lifted her foot, the heel already crimson with blood.
“It’s nothing,” she said as he moved instinctively toward her. She slammed her foot back down with such conviction she nearly made herself faint.
She toppled, just as he arrived at her, and he managed to scoop her up before she hit the floor. She weighed practically nothing, perhaps a few pounds more than Boo, not that she was anything like Boo.
It had been a long, long time since he had held anything so close and so soft as Miss Lila Grainger. A yearning so intense it nearly stole his breath shot through him. Before he could stop himself, he had pulled her scent, wild summer strawberries, deep inside himself and it felt as if it was filling an emptiness he had not thought could be filled.
He wanted to drop her. He wanted to hold her tighter. He wanted to be the same man he had been thirty seconds ago, and was not sure he ever could be again.
“Oh, my,” she moaned, her breath warm against his chest. “This has gone very badly.”
He felt her sweet weight in her arms, saw the pulse going crazy in her neck, heard the dog humming at his heel with what he could suddenly and clearly identify as adoration, and thought, You got that right.
Out loud he said, without a single shred of emotion that might clue her in to how he felt about her softness pressed against him, “Where’s your first-aid kit?”
CHAPTER TWO
LILA sat on the edge of the toilet in the bathroom, staring at the dark head bent over her foot.
Despite the fact Officer Taggert had perfected that policeman look of professional remoteness, he had actually flinched at the bathroom decor, which she knew to be fabulous: an imaginative creation of what Santa’s washroom would look like.
There was a fake window, framed in snowmen-patterned curtains, looking out over beautifully hand-painted scenes from the North Pole. The towels had Christmas trees on them, the soap had glitter, the toilet paper, one of her top selling items, was printed with Ho, Ho, Ho.
In fact, before he had arrived, Lila had been sitting at her desk, contemplating starting her first ever book, How to Have a Perfect Christmas, with a really fun chapter on bathroom decorating for the holidays.
But now, despite the cheer of the bright red and white paint and the merry decor, the atmosphere in the close quarters of the bathroom seemed mildly icy. Taggert was remote, determined to keep his professional distance though, really, it seemed a little too late for that.
She had already felt him, felt the hard, unrelenting, pure-man strength of him, and been as dazed by that as by the pain in her foot.
Dazed would describe her reaction to him, period—the reason she had stepped on broken glass.
After the initial fear had come something even more frightening. A feeling, unfounded because you could not know a person from simply looking at them.
But her feeling had been instant, and felt deeply.
The world is a better place
