His Mistletoe Bride

The truth was people, even ones as cynical as Tag, could be fooled.

They could be fooled by a pretty face or an angelic air, by white hair and granny glasses, by adolescent awkwardness, by words, by body language.

Not Boo. The hackles on the dog’s neck rose when something—or someone—needed a second look, and she grinned the silliest grin when everything was all right. Tag did not substitute her judgment for his own, but the world’s ugliest dog had an uncanny knack for letting him know when he’d missed something.

She wasn’t officially a K-9, but she was unofficially the mascot of the Snow Mountain Police Department.

So, why not see how she would react to the chief’s niece? Just for interest’s sake, nothing more. Lila Grainger’s appearance and the opening of her store seemed mysterious and sudden, as if Tag needed to be any warier than he was of the woman he had never even laid eyes on. Still, the chief was usually a talker—you couldn’t shut him up when she’d signed the book deal—but he’d said nothing about his niece’s arrival in town until she had gotten here.

Tag ignored the big No Dogs Allowed sign posted on the door, since just about everyone in Snow Mountain knew Boo was more human than dog anyway, and pulled the brass handle on the heavy walnut and glass door. He stepped in. A sleigh bell jingled a greeting and he was enveloped by smells of Christmas: candy cane, mint, pumpkin pie, incense, spices, pine.

Scent, he had found, was the most powerful of triggers and the aromas swamped him in memories of what his life had once felt like and had once been. A longing for the sweet, uncomplicated days of the past enveloped him. For a moment he could almost see his brother, Ethan, at about age six, tearing into a train set not unlike that one that chugged around the window.

He shook off the feeling of melancholy, liking crankiness better. A carol played loudly, old school Bing Crosby, and everywhere he looked Tag saw the highly breakable paraphernalia of the season. He warned Boo, with a finger, not to move.

At the far end of the store, a slight figure sat behind a counter had her back to the door and was typing furiously. She had not heard him come in over the high-volume crooning of Bing and her own intensity, and he studied her, frowning. No flowered dress?

In fact, the woman seemed to be wearing low-rider jeans that were slipping to show quite a bit of naked and very slender lower back. Tendrils of blond hair, the color of fall grass streaked with liquid honey, had escaped a clasp and teased the top of a delicate neck.

Tag’s first thought was that it couldn’t be the chief’s niece. Hutch had a town full of relatives, not a niece or nephew under forty. This girl looked like she was about eighteen.

The wind picked that moment to send a vicious gust down Main Street, and it sucked the door out of his hand and slammed it so hard even the dog flinched.

The woman, who had just reached for her coffee mug, started, and the glass dropped from fingers that had not quite grasped it, and shattered on the newly refurbished hardwood floor.

She leaped from the chair, and whirled to face him, one hand over her heart, the other reaching frantically for the three-foot-high striped candy cane decoration in a box beside her.

She held it like a weapon, and he might have laughed at what a ridiculous defense a candy cane was, except that somehow the picture of his brother ripping into Christmas parcels was still with him, as was his agony over Boo, and his laughter felt as dried up as those fall leaves blowing down Main Street.

Miss Mary Christmas was not eighteen after all, but midtwenties maybe.

And her eyes were genuinely fear-glazed, in sharp contrast to the pretty joy and light world she had created in her store. She registered his uniform and her hold on the candy cane relaxed, but only marginally.

She was dressed casually, but her outfit showed off feminine curves so appealing it pierced the armor of his hurt, which made him frown. She wore hip-hugging jeans, a red sweater over a white shirt, the tails and collar sticking out. She was sock-footed, which for some reason took him off guard, an intimacy at odds with the store surroundings.

“Sorry,” she said, “you startled me.”

No kidding.

He glanced down at Boo who did something he had never seen before: laid down and began to hum, deep in her throat, not a growl, a strange lullaby. He stared at the dog, flummoxed, hoping this was not the next stage in the diagnosis the doctor had given him yesterday.

He looked back up, as confused by her as he had been by the dog’s strange humming.

She was young and beautiful, like one of those angels they sold to top the Christmas tree. Her Florida skin was only faintly sun-kissed, flawless as porcelain, her bone structure was gorgeous, but fragile, and eyes huge and china-blue fastened on his face. He could see where her pulse still beat frantically in her neck.

“You must be Miss Grainger,” he said, despite the fact he’d been determined to address her as Miss L. Toe. Now he was aware of keeping his voice deliberately soft, his reasons for being here, nebulous to begin with, even more blurred by the fear he saw in her.

“Lila,” she insisted brightly.

The chief’s niece did not have the chunky build of the rest of the Hutchinson clan. In fact, he was aware of feeling guilty even thinking it about the chief’s niece, but she was subtly but undeniably, well, sexy.

She was trying to make it look like she wasn’t afraid anymore, but he could tell she still was, so he tried to tame his frown, and canned his plans to take out his bad mood on her.

He was in a business where he got thrown plenty of curveballs, but he had never developed a liking for being caught off guard, surprised, and the chief’s niece was a surprise.

He’d been around enough fear to recognize the real McCoy, and to see wariness still haunted her eyes, despite his uniform. Or maybe because of it. Lots of people were afraid of police. He kept the space between them, but Boo began to wiggle forward on her belly, still humming happily. Tag snapped his finger at his dog, pointed at his feet.

Boo gave him a pleading look over her shoulder, then flopped over on her back and pointed all four feet in the air.

Lila Grainger’s eyes left his face for the first time. Despite his uniform, he had the feeling she would bolt for the back if he made one move toward her. But when she looked at Boo, she smiled, and some finely held tension left her.

“What an adorable dog.”

Maybe that explained her overreaction to the slamming of the door. Visual impairment. Boo was about the furthest thing from adorable on the planet!

An upside-down paw waved at her, and Lila Grainger laughed, proving she could see just fine, and that she was even sexier than he had first thought, which was unfortunate, because he’d rated her plenty sexy on that first glance.

“I missed the meeting last night,” Tag said, getting down to business. He folded his arms over his chest, to make himself look big and remote, not a man in the least moved by the sexiness of strangers.

“Meeting?” she stammered, uneasily.

“I’ve been assigned to the Committee.” He wanted to make that very plain. Assigned. Not volunteered.

“Oh, that meeting,” she said too hastily, and tucked a wisp of that feathery hair behind her ear, “That’s fine. We have enough people. More than enough. You look like a busy guy. No time for this type of thing. But thanks for dropping by. There’s some leftover shortbread by the cash register. Go ahead and take some.”

She was trying to get rid of him. Even with the distraction of the cookies, which he stole a glance at and saw were chocolate dipped, and with the further distraction of that wisp of hair popping back out from behind her ear, the policeman in him went on red alert as her eyes shifted uneasily to the right. The chief had been right. She was up to something. Something that she didn’t want him to know about.

He was really watching her now. Every detail suddenly interested him, including ones that had nothing to do with what she might be trying to hide, like the fact she had faint circles under her eyes, as if she had trouble sleeping, and the fact that her ring finger was empty.

She was single. Miss L. Toe not Mrs. L. Toe. There was absolutely no reason he should feel uneasy about that. He didn’t do the relationship thing. He’d become a master at ignoring that initial twitch of interest that could lead a man into that quicksand world of caring.

At his brother’s funeral, six and a half years ago, the minister had said, All love leads to loss. Somehow it had become a credo Tag lived by—the dog had wormed her way by his defenses, but no one else.

And now, Boo, too, was going to drive the point home. That to develop attachments, to care about anything, even a dog, made a man vulnerable, stole his power from him as surely as Delilah had stolen Sampson’s hair.

Not that he could indulge in such introspection right now. He made himself not look at Boo, who was still waving her paw engagingly at Lila Grainger.

“Well, nice of you to drop in, Officer, um—”

“Taggert,” he supplied. What was causing her to feel such discomfort? He’d startled her, but there was more. He could sense it, even without Boo’s help. Her uncle had been absolutely right.

She was up to something.

Or else the news he’d gotten yesterday, and that sudden poignant memory of his brother tearing into that gift, had rattled him badly enough that he was jumping at shadows.

After all, what could she be up to that she wouldn’t want the police department—her uncle—to know about? She hardly looked like the type to decide to finance the saving of Christmas with a little illegal activity, like selling drugs or smuggling.

Still, Tag had a cop’s gift. He knew instinctively when people were hiding something, and she was.