He frowned, furious all over again at the man who had caused the whole situation.
Warren had put Andrea and her kids through hell, simply because he refused to accept a simple one-syllable word. No.
“Go ahead,” Andie encouraged.
“You show him,” Chloe said again, her voice whisper soft.
“I’ll do it.” Will, his tone exasperated, grabbed a paper out of his sister’s hand and thrust it at Marsh. “This is for you. It’s from Chloe.”
An odd mix of emotions tumbled through him as he looked at what was clearly an art project, a wreath cutout made from two pieces of green construction paper that had been sandwiched on either side of a glued-together mosaic of colorful tissue paper pieces.
“Did you make this?” he asked.
After a pause, Chloe nodded. She looked at him now, but her gaze didn’t rise above his chest.
“I asked my teacher if I could make two and she said I could,” she said, still nearly whispering. “I had to stay inside at recess so I could finish it before Miss Taylor had put away all the art supplies. I didn’t mind. Not really. It was snowy and cold out anyway.
Marshall wasn’t sure what to say. He almost felt like another SUV had just plowed into him.
Why would she do that for him, a virtual stranger who obviously frightened her?
He cleared his throat, telling himself the thickness there was only thirst. “Thank you. It’s beautiful,” he answered truthfully.
He considered it a small victory when she met his gaze for about half a second. “It’s really pretty when the sun comes through it,” she offered, her voice a little louder. “If you want, you can hang it in your window. That’s what we did with ours.”
“That’s a good idea. I think I’ll do that.”
She nibbled on her bottom lip, something he had seen her mother do the evening before. “Do you want me to hang it for you?” she asked after a minute. “That’s why I put a string on it and my mom gave me a hook thing.”
Not sure what to say, he glanced at Andie, who was watching the girl with a warm approval that touched him almost as much as the childish artwork. She met his gaze and gave a barely perceptible nod.
“Sure. That would be very kind of you. Thank you.”
“Which window should I put it in?” she asked. This time she didn’t look away as she waited for his answer.
“How about the middle one? Will that work?”
Her smile flashed like sunlight on snow, then she hurried to the appropriate window. She pulled a suction cup hook from her pocket.
“I want to stick it on! Can I?” her brother asked.
“I guess.” She handed the hook to him and Will licked the underside, then stood on tiptoe and reached over his head to push the hook against the window.
“That’s not high enough,” Chloe complained.
“It’s as high as I can go.”
“Mama, can you help him make it higher?”
Andrea moved to the window and repositioned the hook, then hung the wreath by the cheerful red yarn holder. “How’s that?”
“Good, I think.”
Marsh took it as another small victory when Chloe faced him head-on. “Sheriff Marshall? Is that okay?”
“Perfect,” he assured her. He tilted his head to admire the way the weak December sunlight slanted into the room just right, filtering through the tissue paper like real stained glass in a cathedral, scattering prisms of colored light around the room.
“It’s beautiful,” he told the girl again. “I can’t help but feel a bit of holiday spirit now.”
She smiled at him directly and didn’t immediately look away. Small steps, he supposed, though he had to wonder why he found such a grand sense of accomplishment in helping her lose her fear of him.
“Hey, you don’t have a Christmas tree!” Will said with the same aghast tone a person might use if his buddy’s head just rolled off his shoulders onto the floor.
“True enough.”
“Why not?”
Andrea sent Marshall an apologetic look before she turned back to her son.
“Honey, we talked about that. Everybody doesn’t celebrate Christmas like we do,” she said quickly, a sudden pink seeping across her cheeks that didn’t come from light rays bending through tissue paper.
“I don’t have anything against Christmas,” he was quick to assure them. “I’ve just been pretty busy this year and haven’t had time to decorate for the holidays.”
The last time he decorated for Christmas, he’d been deployed and he and a bunk mate had made ornaments out of spent cartridges to hang on a scraggly tree.
“And now you have a broken leg and can’t do it at all. That’s so sad.” Chloe’s big green eyes filled with compassion and she looked as if she wanted to cry.
“It’s fine, really,” he assured her. “I don’t need much. And now I have a pretty wreath in my window to remind me it’s the holidays.”
This resulted in a whispered conversation between the two children, with much gesturing, head-shaking and pointing.
Finally, Will nodded and turned back to Marshall. “If you want, Chloe and me can put up your Christmas tree.”
He blinked at the unexpected offer and cast a glance at Andie, who looked just as astonished as he felt.
“We put all the ornaments on ours all by ourselves. Only, our mom had to put the high ones on,” the boy added. “Then we had to move some ornaments up more because our cat, Mrs. Finnegan, tries to knock them off. She’s a rascal.”
“You don’t have a cat, do you?” Chloe asked, meeting his gaze despite the lingering nervousness that threaded through her voice.
“No. No pets here.”
“Okay. Then we can put the ornaments right on the bottom,” Will said.
“I can make snowflakes,” his sister offered. “And Willie is really good at paper chains.”
“I am,” the boy said with no trace of false modesty. “I can use scissors all by myself.”
Marshall didn’t know quite what to say to their magnanimous offer. He hadn’t particularly missed having a Christmas tree, though he had loved that ugly little thing in the desert years ago that had somehow made him more homesick than he would have believed.
Most years it had never seemed worth the energy and effort, especially when he always worked extra shifts over the holidays so the guys with families could have more time off with their kids. Anyway, his mother decorated her place like a glitter cannon exploded in there, and Wyn and Katrina always had, too. If he ever felt the need for a little infusion of Christmas spirit, he figured he only needed to stop in at one of their places.
It wasn’t worth the trouble now, really. A little holiday cheer wasn’t going to be enough to lift him out of the misery of sitting around on his ass for the next few weeks.
“Do you even have a Christmas tree? A fake one or a real one?” Will said. “We could go get one, if you don’t. I saw, like, a million of them by the store where we buy food for our dog.”
“Our mom might have to put it up, like she did ours,” Chloe said after a minute. “We don’t know how to plug in the lights and stuff.”
Andrea, who had been watching this interchange