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 because this man is in it.
She tried to thrust the thought away as soon as she had it. You could not know that about a complete stranger, even if he was wearing a police uniform. Despite making great strides since arriving in Snow Mountain, she was not sleeping well, and she knew her judgment was not what it once had been.
Naturally, now, she was doing her darnedest to be as perfectly poised and professional as he was, trying to act as though being picked up and carried down the hall by an extraordinarily appealing man was an everyday ho-hum kind of experience for her.
The dog seemed determined for them all to get cozy again. It had squeezed in between the toilet bowl and the sink, and was nuzzling her hand with its warm, damp nose.
“This really isn’t necessary,” she said again, her world is a better place feeling causing her to feel guilty about the secret she was determined to keep from him.
She was amazed that he had not seen the results of last night’s meeting crammed into the dark corner by the bathroom: protest signs, freshly painted.
Lila had found out this morning that it was necessary to have a permit to assemble in Snow Mountain, a ridiculous formality given the tininess of the town, she felt. She had also found out that it took a number of weeks to get a permit, and she needed to draw attention to the fact Town Council had voted to cancel Christmas at Snow Mountain, now.
The unpermitted protest was scheduled for the Thursday before Thanksgiving. The SOS team was nearly delirious with delight over the plan to close down Main Street right in front of the town hall until some funding was reinstated for the Santa’s Workshop display at Bandstand Park.
Her committee was not a bunch of hotheaded rebels, either, not the kind of people one would ordinarily expect at a protest. They were nice people, decent, law-abiding, hardworking people who were willing to stand up for what they believed in.
And they believed in Christmas.
Still, Lila was pretty sure her uncle would kill her if he knew. And this man in front of her? If the world was a better place because of him, it was probably because he would be exceedingly intolerant of schemes that fell even the teensiest bit outside of the law.
She shivered, still taken totally aback by her reaction of such total awareness to Officer Taggert. She, of all people, knew to be distrustful of instant attraction, since she had paid the horrific price of someone’s totally unwanted and unencouraged attraction to her.
She’d been reminded of the consequences of that just a few minutes ago, when she’d once again experienced that horrible startled reflex, a reflex she had assured herself was almost gone—until the door had slammed tonight.
She had known as soon as she’d arrived in
Snow Mountain that her doubts about opening the first storefront for her unexpectedly successful Internet Christmas company had been unfounded. It had been the right decision to pack up her life and move across the country.
Her healing, her return to normal, could begin here, in this sleepy little town nestled among forests and mountains.
Finally she was going to be able to overcome the block that she’d been experiencing ever since she’d been approached, because of the Internet success of her small company, to write How to Have a Perfect Christmas under the pseudonym, Miss L. Toe.
For weeks now, Lila had been experiencing excitement and hope instead of that horrible feeling of flatness, interspersed with anxiety. Except for the sleep problem, she was feeling so much better.
Snow Mountain had so much unrealized potential! It was a magical place, a town off a Christmas card. It was the place that could inspire her to write a great first book, to launch a great storefront for her Internet business.
But no