Holiday in a Stetson: The Sheriff Who Found Christmas / A Rancho Diablo Christmas

Telling her it was going to be all right didn’t seem to convince her. Or get her to stop sobbing. If Chisholm were here, she would have said that the girl needed to talk things out.

Damn it, now Garrett was channeling his deputy. Still, the notion that had popped into his head did make sense.

He gave it his best shot. “That must have been some nightmare,” he observed.

Hiccupping and still unable to talk, Ellie nodded her head.

He couldn’t take it. She was just too unhappy. Before he knew what he was doing, Garrett gathered his niece into his arms and held her against him, rocking gently.

“It’s going to be all right,” he promised. “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

She clung to him wordlessly, her tears still falling, making the front of his T-shirt damp.

“Mama’s gone,” she sobbed at last.

He could feel the words twisting like a knife in his own gut, not to mention bringing a lump to his throat.

“I know, honey,” he told her. “I know.”

Garrett held the little girl for as long as she needed him to.

Chapter Six

Over the next few weeks Garrett made an unnerving discovery.

He found that the very quality that had annoyed him the most about his blonde powder keg deputy was exactly the one he was now grateful she possessed.

Her irritating habit of taking things on and, ultimately, taking them over, turned out to be a good thing—at least in this case. Because when it came to matters that involved Ellie, he let Chisholm have free rein.

It had been three weeks since the shattering bombshell had hit, blowing up what had been his world. Three weeks since he had gone to fetch his niece and bring her back to live with him. Three weeks since he had buried his sister—here, in the cemetery right outside of the town, the way his annoying deputy had convinced him to do.

And he’d done it for exactly the reason she had specified. He’d done it for Ellie’s sake.

Chisholm seemed to know instinctively what was best for the girl, maybe, he reasoned, because she’d been one herself once. He didn’t really know. But whatever the case, the woman had an inherent knack of knowing just how to treat Ellie and how to get along with her. His niece seemed to be doing better each day, except for the unnerving habit she had of referring to Chisholm as “Aunt Lani” despite numerous corrections.

But in the sum total of things, that was a minor price to pay. So he bit his tongue and stayed out of his energetic deputy’s way, which was, he thought, tantamount to attempting to stay out of the way of a runaway steamroller.

It wasn’t exactly a matter of choice so much as one of survival. And at times, when he was around the woman, it felt as if he were barely hanging on by his fingertips.

Moreover, he was dealing with a strange sensation: he found himself not being as put off by the things his deputy did as he had been when she’d first shown up in his office.

More to the point, he was attracted to her. It had crept up on him out of nowhere, nestling amid other, totally unrelated thoughts.

He found it unnerving. Not to mention out of character for him.

Except for the four years when he’d gone off to college, he had been a lifelong resident of Booth. Yet somehow it was Chisholm who had known what steps were necessary to get Ellie registered for school here, now that this was her new, permanent home. And Chisholm was the one who had taken his niece shopping for new, warmer clothes, because the ones she’d worn in Southern California weren’t sufficient for winters in Texas, not at this latitude.

Chisholm, he’d noted, had paid for those clothes herself, and hadn’t asked to be reimbursed. Feeling that if he allowed her to do so, he would be even more in her debt, he’d informed her that he could take care of his own. Garrett had asked to see the sales receipts, had calculated the grand total in his head and then handed her a number of bills that more than covered the sum.

She’d made change, giving him back the difference despite his growled protest that the extra money was his way of paying her for her time.

“No need to reimburse me for that. I like hanging around with your niece. By the way, it’s nice to hear you actually claiming her,” she’d said, flashing that smile he found so irritating, and at the same time unsettling.

For the sake of having Chisholm continue being there for his niece, Garrett swallowed his retort.

Discretion was always the better part of valor, he tried to convince himself. But he hadn’t believed it when he’d first heard the saying, and he didn’t believe it now.

Each time he silently congratulated himself on getting better at holding his tongue, something else would crop up, knocking him back to square one. Such as when Chisholm had informed him that not only was he now the “proud owner of a top-of-the-line computer,” but she had seen to it that he was hooked up to the internet, too.

He did not receive the news well.

He’d grudgingly given in and gone along with using a computer at work, because the need for efficiency had outweighed his desire to keep things the way they had always been. But he had been adamant about avoiding computers, and everything they entailed, when it came to his personal space.

Which wasn’t his anymore, he reminded himself with a sharp pang.

Still, he wasn’t going to give up without at least some kind of a fight. “And if I said I didn’t want it?” he’d challenged.

She’d flashed that dazzling smile of hers, which was increasingly getting under his skin, and declared, “Too late.”

He’d narrowed his eyes into slits, pinning her to the wall. Then realized he had definitely lost his edge, because Lani wasn’t even pretending to be affected anymore.

“What do you mean, ‘too late’?” he asked.

“Well, that computer you bought?” she began, referring to the purchase she’d obviously had made in his name sometime in the last twenty-four hours. “I had Wally, the computer tech, hook it up to the internet for you at lunchtime.”

Earlier today, around noon, Garrett remembered, she’d darted out, mumbling something about having Ellie-related errands to run. He had just assumed they had something to do with buying more clothes or schoolbooks. And, to be honest, he had reveled in the fact that for one glorious hour the office was quiet and his again, so he hadn’t really questioned her very closely about the nature of this “Ellie-related” undertakings.

Garrett suppressed a weary sigh. He should have known better.

“In my house?” he asked his deputy now. Actually, it was more of an accusation.

Lani pretended to regard the rhetorical question seriously. “Well, having the hookup and the computer up on the roof would be a little inconvenient, what with it being slippery and all, so yes, in your house.”

There really seemed to be no boundaries to this woman’s pushiness. And it was his fault, he knew, because he’d given her free rein.