His Mistletoe Bride

“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 protesters had completely blocked the street, and were enthusiastically waving lovingly hand-painted signs.

Elves Have Rights, Too! Say Yes To Christmas. Save Our Snow Mountain. Save Santa. As they marched around in a circle, they chanted, “Heck no, the elves won’t go.”

It was an unlikely-looking group of protestors—not a dreadlock or pierced body part on any of them. Lots of gray hair out there, with one glaring exception, of course.

Her hair, where it showed beneath the brim of her fur-trimmed Santa hat, was catching the sun, and looked like it was spun through with gold.

It seemed to him Lila Grainger was as eye-catching in that hat, bundled up in a pink oversize parka that made her look like a marshmallow, as she would have been in a furtrimmed bikini.

The CLEM TV mobile van from Spokane was pulling up. Bruce Wilkes from the Snow Mountain News was already happily snapping pictures.

“What are you going to do, Chief?” Randy Mulligan asked uncertainly.

Tag slid Hutch a look. Have a heart attack, came to mind. The chief looked apoplectic.

Of course, his niece, looking positively radiant, was in the very middle of the mêlée. When she separated from the other protestors to go and talk to Jade Flynn, who was getting out of the news van, it was more than obvious who was in charge of the protest.

Tag, instead of making the professional assessment ringleader, noticed that aside from the fact she looked cute as a button, she was still limping.

“You didn’t even catch a whisper of this when you went to see her?” Hutch asked Tag accusingly.

“No, sir. She told me they were going to ask Jamison to play Santa—”

“Like hell I’m playing Santa,” Jamison muttered indignantly, putting enough curse words between playing and Santa to do his Marine corps heritage proud.

“—and that they’d come up with a new name. That’s it.” Well, that wasn’t it. Tag had known she was up to something naughty. He could now clearly remember the guilty blush when she’d mentioned getting city hall to change their minds. He felt he’d probably been distracted by naughty thoughts of his own, especially after he’d carried her down that endless hall to her bathroom, and then spent agonizing minutes administering first-aid to the cut on her foot.

You didn’t admit to your boss you’d had naughty thoughts about his niece, thoughts that might have prevented you from seeing certain things coming, he told himself.

Besides, the grim news about Boo had been pretty fresh that night; Tag knew it had clouded his thinking, and still did, though he wore the mask of functioning perfectly.

“Go arrest her,” Hutch said, thankfully to no one in particular.

Randy Mulligan obviously thought of some urgent work he had to do. He stampeded from the room as if the Hells Angels had arrived in town and he had to personally deal with them.

“Arrest her?” Pete Harper said. “Are you kidding? You know how that’s going to look on the evening news? This town has barely recovered from the elf on fire last year.”

“How’s it going to look if I don’t arrest her and she’s my niece?” Hutch snapped. “Like I’m playing favorites, that’s how. If I don’t do something decisive right now every special interest group in Snow Mountain from the Grannies for Justice to Pals for Pooches is going to think they can shut down the town anytime they don’t get what they want. Pals for Pooches has been trying to get an animal shelter for a lot longer than Lila’s been trying to save Christmas.”

Unfortunately Tag could see his point.

“Well, I’m not arresting her,” Pete said. “My mother would kill me.”

His mother was out there right beside Lila, carrying a sign that showed a tombstone with Santa on it, RIP, and then Killed By Snow Mountain Town Council. Jeanie Harper was also dispensing cookies to the news crews, practically guaranteeing all stories would be slanted in favor of the protestors.