Christmas in Cold Creek

It didn’t seem right somehow. Why couldn’t Trace Bowman be some kind of stereotype of a fat old guy with a paunch and a leering eye and a toothpick sticking out of the corner of his mouth? Instead he was much younger than she might have expected the chief of police to be, perhaps only mid-thirties. With brown hair and those piercing green eyes and a slow heartbreaker of a smile, he was masculine and tough and very, very dangerous, at least to her.

She should not have this little sizzle of awareness pulsing through her every time she risked another look at him. Police. Chief. Did she need any other reason to stay far, far away from Trace Bowman?

With habits ingrained from childhood, she catalogued all she had picked up about him from their brief encounter. He either worked or played hard, judging by the slight red streaks in his eyes, the circles under them and the general air of fatigue that seemed to weigh down his shoulders. Since he was still in uniform and his boots were mud-splattered, she was willing to bet it was the former.

He probably wasn’t married—or at least he didn’t wear a wedding ring. She was voting on single status for Pine Gulch’s finest. If he had a wife, wouldn’t it be logical he’d be going home for a home-cooked breakfast and maybe a quickie after a long night instead of coming into the diner? It was always possible he had a wife who was a professional and too busy to arrange her schedule around her husband’s, but he gave off a definite unmarried vibe.

He didn’t seem particularly inclined to like her. She might have wondered why not if he hadn’t made that comment about being her grandfather’s neighbor. He apparently thought she should have visited more. She wanted to tell him how impossible that would have been since she’d never even heard of Wally Taylor until she received the notification of his death and his shocking bequest, right when her own life in Arizona had been imploding around her.

A customer asked her a question about the breakfast special, distracting her from thoughts of the police chief, and she forced herself to smile politely and answer as best she could. As she did she was aware of Trace Bowman standing up from the counter and tossing a few bills next to his plate, then shoving his hat on and heading out into the cold drizzle.

The minute he left, she took her first deep breath since she’d looked up and seen the uniform walking into The Gulch.

The man didn’t particularly like her and she had the vague sense that he was suspicious of her. Again, not what she needed right now.

She hadn’t done anything wrong, she reminded herself. Not really. Oh, maybe she hadn’t been completely honest with the school district about Gabi’s identity but she hadn’t had any other choice, had she?

Even knowing she had no reason to be nervous, law enforcement personnel still freaked her out. Old, old habit. Savvy civil servants ranked just about last on her mother’s list of desirable associates. Becca would be wise to follow her mother’s example and stay as far away from Trace Bowman as possible.

Too bad for her, he lived not far from her grandfather’s house.

She glanced at her watch—one of the few pieces of jewelry she hadn’t pawned—and winced. Once again, time was slipping away. She felt as if she’d been on her feet for days when it had been only an hour and a half.

She rushed over to Gabrielle, engrossed in reading To Kill a Mockingbird, a book Becca would have thought was entirely too mature for her except she’d read it herself at around that age.

“It’s almost eight. You probably need to head over to the school.”

Her half sister looked up, her eyes slightly unfocused, then released a heavy sigh and closed her book. “For the record, I still don’t think it’s fair.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know. You hate it here and think the school is lame and well below your capabilities.”

“It’s a complete waste of my time. I can learn better on my own, just like I’ve always done.”

Gabi was eerily smart for her age. Becca had no idea how she’d managed so well all these years when her education seemed to have been haphazard at best. “You’ve done a great job in school so far, honey. You’re ahead of grade level in every subject. But for now school is our best option. This way you can make friends and participate in things like music and art. Plus, you don’t have to be by yourself—and I don’t have to pay a sitter—while I’m working.”

They had been through this discussion before. Her arguments still didn’t seem to convince Gabi.

“I can find her, you know.”

She gave a careful look around to make sure they weren’t being overheard. “And then what? If she’d wanted you with her, she wouldn’t have left you with me.”

“She was going to come back. How is she supposed to find us now, when you moved us clear across the country?”

Moving from Arizona to eastern Idaho wasn’t exactly across the country, but she imagined it seemed far enough to a nine-year-old. She also wasn’t sure what other choice she’d been given because of the hand Monica had dealt her.

“Look, Gab, we don’t have time to talk about this right now. You have to head to school and I have to return to my customers. I told you that if we haven’t heard from her by the time the holidays are over, we’ll try to track her down, right?”

“That’s what you said.”

The girl didn’t need to finish the sentence for Becca to clearly understand. Gabrielle had spent nine years full of disappointments and empty promises. How could Becca blame her for being slow to trust that her sister, at least, meant what she said?

“We’re doing okay, aren’t we? School’s not so bad, right?”

Gabi slid out of the booth. “Sure. It’s perfect if you want me to be bored to death.”

“Just hide your book inside your textbook,” Becca advised. It had always worked for her, anyway, during her own slapdash education.

With a put-upon sigh, Gabi stashed her book into her backpack, slipped into her coat and then trudged out into the rain, lifting the flowered umbrella Becca had given her.

She would have liked to drive her sister the two blocks to school but she didn’t feel she could ask for fifteen minutes off during the busiest time of the morning, especially when the Archuletas had basically done her a huge favor to hire her in the first place.

As she bused a table by the front window, she kept an eye on her sister. Between the umbrella and the red boots, the girl made a bright and incongruously cheerful sight in the gray muck.

She had no idea what she was doing with Gabi. Two months after she’d first learned she had a sister after a dozen years of estrangement from her mother, she wasn’t any closer to figuring out the girl. She was brash and bossy sometimes, introspective and moody at others. Instead of feeling hurt and betrayed after Monica had dumped her on Becca, the girl refused to give up hope that her mother would come back.

Becca was angry enough at Monica for both of them.

Two months ago she’d thought she had her life completely figured out. She owned her own town house in Scottsdale. She had a job she loved as a real-estate attorney, she had a wide circle of friends, she’d been dating another attorney for several months and thought they were heading toward a commitment. Through hard work and sacrifice, she had carved her own niche in life, with all the safety and security she had craved so desperately when she was Gabi’s age, being yanked hither and yon with a capricious, irresponsible con artist for a mother.

Then came that fateful September day when Monica had tumbled back into her life after a decade, like a noxious weed blown across the desert.

“Order up,” Lou called from the kitchen. She jerked away from the window to the reality of her life now. No money, her career in tatters, just an inch or two away from being disbarred. The man she’d been dating had decided her personal troubles were too much of a liability to his own career and had dumped her without a backward glance, she had been forced to sell her town house to clean up Monica’s mess, and now she was stuck in a sleepy little town in southeastern Idaho, saddled with responsibilities she didn’t want and a nine-year-old girl who wanted to be anywhere else but here.

Any minute now, somebody was probably going to write a crappy country music song about her life.

To make matters even more enjoyable, now she’d raised the hackles of the local law enforcement. She sighed as she picked up the specials from Lou. Her life couldn’t get much worse, right?

Even if Trace Bowman was the most gorgeous man she’d seen in a long, long time, she was going to have to do her best to keep a polite distance from the man. For now, she and Gabi had a place to live and the tips and small paycheck she was earning from this job would be enough to cover the groceries and keep the electricity turned on.

They were hanging by a thread and Chief Bowman seemed just the sort to come along with a big old pair of scissors and snip that right in half.

Chapter Two

Trace leaned back in his chair and set his napkin beside his now-empty plate. “Delicious dinner, Caidy, as always. The roast was particularly fine.”

His younger sister smiled, her eyes a translucent blue in the late-afternoon November light streaming through the dining room windows. “Thanks. I tried a new recipe for the spice rub. It uses sage and rosemary and a touch of paprika.”

“You know sage in recipes doesn’t really come from the sagebrushes out back, right?”

She made a face at the teasing comment from Trace’s twin brother, Taft. “Of course I know it’s not the same. Just for that, you get to wash and dry the dishes.”

“Come on. Have a little pity. I’ve been working all night.”

“You were on duty,” Trace corrected. “But did you go out on any actual calls or did you spend the night bunking at the firehouse?”

“That’s not the point,” Taft said, a self-righteous note in his voice. “Whether I was sleeping or not, I was ready if my community needed me.”

The overnight demands of their respective jobs had long been a source of good-natured ribbing between the two of them. When Trace worked the night shift, he was out on patrol, responding to calls, taking care of paperwork at the police station. As chief of the Pine Gulch fire department and one of the few actual fulltime employees in the mostly volunteer department, Taft’s job could sometimes be quiet.