Christmas In Snowflake Canyon

Thanksgiving dinner had been a grand social affair, as usual. Her parents had invited several of their friends over and Genevieve had endured as best she could and escaped to her room at the earliest opportunity.

Then this morning after breakfast, William had asked her to come into his study. Her mother had been there, looking pale and drawn. As usual, sobriety wasn’t agreeing with Laura.

It certainly hadn’t agreed with Genevieve as she had sat, sober as a nun, while William outlined the financial mess she was in and then proceeded to give her the horrifying news.

He was closing her credit accounts, all of them, and withdrawing her access to her trust fund.

“I’ve been patient long enough.” His grim words still rang in her ears, hours later. “For nearly two years, I’ve let you have your way, do what you wanted. I told myself you were healing from a broken heart and deserved a little fun, but this is becoming ridiculous. It stops today. You’re twenty-six years old. You graduated from college four years ago and haven’t done a damn thing of value since then.”

Her father had thrown her one miserable bone. Her grandmother Pearl had left her hideous house to her only son when she died in the spring. If Genevieve could take the house, fix it and sell it at value within three months, she could take the earnings back to Paris to seed the interior-design business she had been talking about for years.

And if she could turn a profit within the first year of her business, her father would release the rest of her trust fund permanently.

William had been resolute, despite her best efforts to cajole, plead or guilt him into changing his mind. She was stuck here in Hope’s Crossing—this armpit of a town where everyone hated her—throughout the winter.

Furious with all of them, she had packed her suitcase, grabbed the key to Pearl’s house and left her parents’ grand home in Silver Strike Canyon—the second biggest in town, after Harry Lange’s.

Yet another big mistake. Pearl’s house was far, far worse than she had expected. Was it any wonder she had gone to the Lizard with the intention of getting good and drunk?

True to form, she had taken a lousy situation and made it about ten times worse. She could only blame it on mental duress brought on by hideous pink porcelain tubs and acres and acres of wallpaper.

That was really no excuse. What had she been thinking? She didn’t pick fights, take on annoying people, punch someone, for heaven’s sake! She had just been so angry sitting there in the Liz, feeling her life spiral out of control, certain that she would have to spend the next several months in this town where everybody snickered at her behind their hands.

Now she was sitting in the backseat of a police squad car, handcuffed to Dylan Caine, of all people.

He shifted in the seat and she was painfully aware of him, though she couldn’t seem to look at him. He used to be gorgeous like all the Caine brothers—tough, muscular, rugged. They all had that silky brown hair, the same blue eyes, deep creases in their cheeks when they smiled. Keep-an-eye-on-your-daughters kind of sexy.

He was still compelling but in a disreputable, keep-an-eye-on-your-wallet kind of way. He hadn’t shaved in at least three or four days and his hair was badly in need of a trim. Add to that the scars radiating out around his eye patch and the missing hand and he made a pretty scary package.

Each time she looked at him tonight—damaged and disfigured—sadness had trickled through her, as if she had just watched someone take a beautiful painting by an Italian master and rip a seam through the middle.

Yes, that probably made her shallow. She couldn’t help herself.

He did smell good, though. When he shifted again, through the sordid scents of the police car, she caught the subtle notes of some kind of outdoorsy scent—sandalwood and cedar and perhaps bergamot, with a little whiskey chaser thrown in.

“I’m sorry you were arrested, but it’s your own fault.”

He scoffed in the darkness. “My fault. How do you figure that, Ms. Beaumont?”

“We are handcuffed together,” she pointed out. “I think you could probably call me Genevieve.”

“Genevieve.” He mocked the way she had pronounced her own name, as her Parisian friends had for the past two years—Jahn-vi-ev, instead of the way her family and everyone she knew here had always said it, Jen-a-vive—and she felt ridiculously pretentious.

“You didn’t have to come riding to my rescue like some kind of cowboy stud trying to waste his Friday-night paycheck. I was handling things.”

He snorted. “Last I checked, Genevieve, that bitch looked like she was ready to take out your eyeball with her claws. Trust me. You would have missed it.”

Like he missed being able to see out of two eyes? She wanted to ask but didn’t dare.

“You wouldn’t be here if you had just minded your own business.”

“It’s a bad habit of mine. I don’t like to watch little cream puffs get splattered.”

It annoyed her that he, like everybody else she knew, thought so little of her.

“I’m not a cream puff.”

“Oh, sorry. I suppose it would be еclair.”

He said the word with the same exaggerated French accent he had used on her name, and she frowned, though she was aware of a completely inappropriate bubble of laughter in her throat. It must be the lingering effect of those stupid mojitos.

“I believe the word you’re looking for is profiterole. An еclair is oval and the filling is piped in while a profiterole, or cream puff, is round and the pastry is cut in half then some is scraped away before the rest is filled with whipped cream.”

It was one of those inane, obscure details she couldn’t help spouting when she was nervous.

He snorted. “Wow. You are quite a font of information, Genevieve. This evening is turning into all kinds of interesting.”

She couldn’t see his features well through the snow-dimmed streetlights but she was quite certain he was laughing at her. She hated it when people laughed at her—one of the biggest reasons she hated being here in Hope’s Crossing.

Before she could respond, the vehicle stopped and she saw the solid, somehow intimidating shape of the police station outside the ice-etched window.

A moment later, the door on her side of the vehicle opened and Pete Redmond loomed over her. “You two having fun back here?”

Dylan didn’t answer, making her wonder if he had been having fun.

“What do you think?” Genevieve tried for her frostiest tone. Pete had tried to ask her out once when she was home for the summer, before her engagement to Sawyer.

“I think you’re in a pickle, Ms. Beaumont,” he answered.

Oh, she could think of a few stronger words than that.

“I think we all need to suit up for the you-know-what to hit the fan after Mayor Beaumont gets that phone call,” the female police officer with the split ends and the improper lipstick shade said as she helped pull Genevieve out of the backseat and Dylan, by default, after her.

Her stomach cramped again, just picturing her father’s stern disapproval. What if he decided her latest screw-up was too much? What if he decided not to give her the chance to sell Pearl’s house as her escape out of town?

She might be stuck here forever, having to look for excitement at a dive like The Speckled Lizard.

A sudden burst of wind gusted through, flailing snow at them, rattling the bare branches of a tree in front of the station. Gen shivered.

“Let’s get you two inside,” the female officer said. “This is shaping up to be a nasty one. We’re going to be dealing with slide-offs all night.”

Despite the nerves crawling through her, the warmth of the building seemed almost welcoming.

She had never been inside a police station. Somehow she expected it to be...grittier. Instead, it looked just like any other boring office. Cubicles, fluorescent lighting, computer monitors. It could be a bland, dreary insurance office somewhere.

She was aware of a small, ridiculous pang of disappointment that her walk on the wild side had led her to this. On the other hand, she was still shackled to the scruffy, sexy-smelling, damaged Dylan Caine.

The officers led them not to some cold interrogation room with a single lightbulb and a straight-backed chair but to what looked like a standard break room, with a microwave, refrigerator, coffee maker.