the rest of him was pure cop, one-hundred- percent intimidating and authoritative presence, his eyes were the softest shade of brown, shot through with threads of pure gold. His eyes did not reflect the remoteness of his demeanor, though there were walls up in them, walls that guarded a mystery…and most likely his heart.
He carried himself with the utter confidence of a man who knew his own strength and capabilities perfectly. No swagger, only pure, unadulterated self-assurance.
Now he was on one knee in front of her, focused on her foot. His hair was short, but incredibly thick and shiny, the rich color of dark chocolate. She was amazed by a renegade desire to feel its silk beneath her fingertips.
His hands were unbelievably sure on her ankle, and she stifled a gasp when he pulled her sock away and held her naked foot in the warm, hard cup of his hand. The shiver of appreciation she’d felt graduated to a betraying tingle of pure awareness. She felt terrified in a much different way than she had felt terrified the last two years of her life when she had become the victim of a stalker. He was a man she had worked with, and whose interest in her had seemed so benign…at first.
“Really,” she managed to croak, “I can look after it.”
“Look, either I’m taking a look at it, or I’m taking you to the hospital. You choose.”
He glanced up, and she noticed just the faintest shadow of whiskers on his clean-shaven face, felt swamped by his closeness, his pure masculine scent.
“Are you all right?” he asked, genuine concern faintly overriding the professionalism in the masculine deepness of his voice. “You aren’t going to faint, are you?”
“Faint?” she managed to say, inserting proud outrage into her voice, a woman determined not to be seen as weak ever again. “I am not the fainting kind.”
But she had managed to sound more certain than she actually felt. Was she all right? Why did she feel as if she was standing in the open doorway of a plane, deciding whether to jump?
“I’ve been doing this a long time,” he said patiently. “There is no fainting kind. I’ve seen a Marine faint at the sight of his own blood.”
“Oh.”
“Can I go ahead then? Or do you want me to take you to the hospital?”
The eyes were intent on her face, the voice no-nonsense, though his offering her a choice relaxed something in her, even though, logically, she knew it was not a real choice and he was very much in control.
“Go ahead,” she squeaked.
“It’s not so bad,” he reassured her, lifting her leg so he could get a good look at the heel, gently swabbing away the blood with an alcohol pad. “I see a single cut, not very deep. I think there’s a little piece of glass still in there.”
He reached for tweezers, tugged, held up a tiny fragment of glass for her to see before he dropped it into the wastepaper basket that was painted like a toy drum.
“I’m just going to dress the wound,” he explained, his voice deep, soothing, as if he was talking to a small child. “I don’t see any more glass, no need for stitches. A wound to this part of the body just bleeds a lot.”
The voice of a man who had seen many wounds and much blood, without ever coming even remotely close to fainting; a man who would be just this coolly and reassuringly competent in crises of any magnitude.
He placed a cotton gauze on her foot, held it in place by winding a bandage over her heel and up her ankle in a crisscross pattern, all very professional, clinical, detached.
Not, apparently, being bothered by tingles the way she was.
“You’re obviously used to doing this sort of thing,” she said. “This is obviously your first trip to the North Pole, though.”
He looked surprised, and then he smiled.
It was just the tiniest hint of a smile, but it changed the stern lines of his face completely. She glimpsed for a moment something of his past: something reckless, devil-may-care, mischievous. Charming.
He got up, picked up his hat and brushed off his knee with it. He glanced around at the bathroom decor, his eyes resting briefly on a jar of bright candies labeled Jolly Beans, For Medicinal Use Only.
The smile that had tickled his lips evaporated, and she was aware whatever he had once been, he was not that now. He actually winced, as if such adorable corniness hurt his eyes. He stepped quickly out of the bathroom and back into the hallway.
All she could think of was he had nearly brushed against the protest signs, and for the first time in her life she was completely unworthy of trust.
He clamped his hat back on his head, pulled it low, so his amazing eyes were once more shadowed. Then he whistled for his dog, and let himself out the front door.
She limped after him and locked it behind him, aware that even though Snow Mountain itself felt safer to her than it had half an hour ago, she herself did not feel as safe, as if she stood on the edge of something scary. And wonderful.
But that she of all people, she reminded herself with stern warning, should know how very scary a brief encounter with a strange man could become.
It was the reason she’d sworn off real life and chosen to embrace fantasy instead. Her beautiful store, this beautiful town, her literary adventures—those were going to be enough for her. It was going to fill every void, make her feel safe, fulfilled, in control.
A woman would never feel one hundred percent in control around a man like Taggert. Never.
Determined to make the creation of a perfect Christmas her life mission, she marched back to her computer.
Suddenly decorating a bathroom seemed like a terrible place to start How to Have A Perfect Christmas. Terrible.
“You have to start somewhere,” she told herself, aware of a panicky little edge in her voice as she said it. She’d accepted the advance, and worse, she’d spent it. She had a deadline!
Obviously the writer’s block was coming, at least in part, from her insomnia. But it wasn’t helping one little bit that the place on earth most likely to be chosen for a poster of the perfect Christmas town had practically canceled Christmas. Once she looked after that, everything else was going to fall into place.
With a new sense of verve, Lila picked up the phone, took a deep breath and did the thing she had been debating about and putting off since the meeting last night.
“CLEM TV, Spokane,” a voice on the other end answered.
“Could I speak to Jade Flynn, please?” She named the reporter who seemed to do the majority of the human interest stories for the station.
“Can I tell her what you’re calling about?”
“The cancellation of Christmas,” Lila said firmly.
Brody Taggert joined the other men at the window of the Snow Mountain Police Department, took a sip of his coffee and looked across Main Street at the fracas outside of Snow Mountain Town Hall.
The
