Three Nights before Christmas (7 page)

“Whatever you’re here for, whatever you’re looking for, just do it already and leave me to get on with my life. That’s all I want to do. Just get on with my
life
!”

The few birds that hadn’t made it farther south shot from the trees as her shout shook the air. Austin’s jaw tensed, but for once he wasn’t wearing those dark glasses and his eyes didn’t show the anger she expected to see, given the stiffness of his stance. In fact, now that she took a second to look at him, she realized something her brain had been slow to pick up on.

He wasn’t in uniform.

Her brows drew together in confusion. “Please tell me you’re not here to buy a tree.”

A corner of his mouth twitched. “I’m not.”

“Okay, then please tell me you’re not here to arrest me.”

“Have you done something I should—” He shook his head. “Sorry, force of habit. I’m not here to arrest you.”

Sorry
. He’d said sorry—just in passing, in the conversational way of people who didn’t think they had anything to apologize for except impoliteness. But still, Officer Austin Wilder had said sorry.

That took some of the fire out of her.

“You don’t want a tree and you’re not going to arrest me.” She lifted her arms and let them fall in bafflement. “I’m stumped. Why are you here?”

His throat worked as he swallowed. “I need a favor.”

Her brows shot up and her jaw unhinged. Sounds ground out from the back of her throat, but they weren’t word-like at all.

“A big favor.”

She tried to shake herself from her stupor, falling back on the dark humor that had helped her through hundreds of knocked-off-balance situations in prison. “Tell me you’re not going to propose a marriage of convenience.”

His body jerked. “What?”

“This is sounding eerily familiar. I read a lot in prison, mostly books where men needed wives for weird business reasons so they blackmailed down-on-their-luck women into marriage.”

“Sounds…not like the kinds of books I read.”

“Let me guess…police procedurals? True crime? Books where the lawman’s the hero?”

“Histories and biographies, mostly.”

“Ah. Boring stuff about life as it really is.”

“Fascinating stuff about life as it really can be.”

She shrugged, wanting to get back to this favor of his but refusing to let him know how he’d intrigued her. “I can give you a fifteen percent discount on a tree, if that’s what you’re looking for. Anything more needs to be approved by Sawyer.”

He shook his head in near exasperation. “I don’t need a tree. I need you.”

Her fingers twitched for the saw. “I don’t know what gave you the impression I’m on offer—”

“Not like that.” He sighed. “Look, it’s a long story. Maybe we could go sit down, and I can explain over a cup of coffee.”

“No.” Coffee was too personal. She didn’t want to know if he took his with milk and sugar. And sitting together implied a balance of power. That wasn’t what they had, and she wouldn’t be fooled into thinking it was. “No sitting. No coffee.”

“You’re a tough woman.”

“Cream puffs don’t survive.” The first lesson Charlene had taught her.

His lips thinned and he nodded in brief acknowledgment. “How about—”

“How about you tell me what you need so I can do it and get you off my back?”

“That mean you’re agreeing?”

“Let’s be honest, Officer. I know what happens when guards ‘ask’ for a favor and don’t get the right response. I’m not an idiot. Whatever you’re going to ‘ask’”—she added a heaping dose of sarcasm to the word—“I’m clearly going to do. So let’s get it over with.”

His nostrils twitched in displeasure, and he shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans. “You have the right to say no.”

“You read me my rights three years ago. I haven’t forgotten. Silence was one. Saying no wasn’t.”

He dug his fingertips into the corners of his eyes. Maybe she’d given him a headache.

Good.

“I’m trying to restore an old steam train,” he said, “and I could use your professional advice.”

It was a damn good thing she’d put the saw down, otherwise she might’ve seriously injured herself. “You…what?”

He sat hard on the trunk of the fallen tree, moving the saw to make space for her to sit next to him.

She didn’t.

Finally, he seemed to give up on manipulating her into sitting next to him. “I have a nephew. Well, my brother’s engaged to this boy’s mom, and he’s an amazing kid. Full of energy and life and passion. Last year, at the end of summer, he went camping on Copper Mountain—in
my
forest, the one I’m supposed to protect people in—and he fell into a defunct mine shaft.”

Her heart slowed to a sickening thump. “Josh Dekker?”

His gaze shot to hers. “You know him?”

“No. Sawyer got me a subscription to the
Courier
. I kept up on local news.” And that story had touched her for some reason. She’d never met Josh or his mom, but she could relate to having her life derailed in one heart-stopping moment. “He was the kid in the wheelchair at your stand yesterday?”

“Yeah. Gabriel—my brother—he and Josh’s mom are trying to raise money to start a camp for kids with disabilities. My older brother, Wyatt, leased some land on our family’s old ranch. But we need equipment, specially adapted cabins, publicity…all kinds of things. One of our fundraising ideas was to create Santa’s Wonderland up here during the run-up to Christmas. We have everything—a guy who’s willing to play Santa, another guy who owns reindeer, horses and an old-fashioned sleigh—and I even convinced my boss to let us restore an old steam train the NFS owns that’s just been sitting outside on display for decades. That’s the part of the wonderland I’ve been responsible for organizing.”

His eyes shifted away. Failure radiated from his slumped shoulders and stormy face. Part of her wanted to gloat. Part of her wanted to repeat the words she’d greeted him with today.

But another part of her, one she’d thought long dead and buried, asked, “What kind of train are we talking about?”

*

Austin downshifted as
he rounded the last snowy corner and parked in front of the old Copper Mountain Railway Station. Beside him, Lacey had been silent for the drive. Since it was his day off, he’d driven his own truck to find her at work, not his service vehicle. He hadn’t wanted to freak her out. But he also hadn’t anticipated that she would need a ride. If he’d thought about it, he would’ve realized her driver’s license had probably lapsed while she was in prison, which would necessitate her taking the test before being able to drive again. Apparently the two guys working with her picked her up every morning and dropped her back at home just after sunset.

Today, he was her carpool.

The sun had dipped behind the mountains around 4:30, not long after he’d told her about the train, so he’d waited as she packed up her equipment and a load of trees and said goodbye to the two guys. Then she’d climbed silently into his truck and hadn’t spared him a glance since.

That was fine with him. He wasn’t looking for a buddy. He just needed some help. He could look at the situation one of two ways. Either it sucked that the one person who could help him was a woman he’d arrested and sent to prison. Or he was really damn lucky she’d been paroled in time to give him a hand.

His brothers had often accused him of being an optimist. He was struggling to stay one.

He set the emergency brake and turned off the ignition. Lacey didn’t get out. She just stared out the windscreen at the shadows of his temporary home.

“I came here on a field trip in elementary school,” she said, finally breaking the tense silence.

“Me too. Fourth grade. It used to be a museum about copper mining and the railway.”

“I remember. It—” She hesitated, concentrating hard on picking a piece of caked-on dirt from her jeans. “It was the first time I realized people drove trains. That probably sounds stupid, but I’d never thought of it before. Trains were just these huge machines that roared past too fast for me to ever notice their drivers. But there was an exhibition on some of the early locomotive engineers, and I was amazed. I couldn’t stop thinking about them.”

“Funny, I just remember being bored.”

Her face twitched, and he wondered if she was in danger of smiling. It passed so quickly he might’ve only imagined it.

She unclipped her seatbelt. “What exhibitions are on now?”

“None. The museum went broke. The NFS owned the building and the land, and they refurbished the station house into a cabin that they rent out.”

She twisted to face him. “The museum’s gone?”

“Afraid so.”

“Oh.” The disappointment in her voice hit him harder than it should. “So, what? People rent this place out now?”

“Not people. Me.”

The ragged sound of her breathing filled the truck’s cab, seeming to grow louder the more she clearly fought to control it. “You.”

“Yep. For the past few months, since I came up with this ridiculous plan.”

She sighed, her head tipping back against the headrest. “I can’t go into your house.”

“Parole restrictions?”

Her laugh was raw and unpleasant. “Depends. Are you an ex-con?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so. Then no, that’s not it. I just…can’t.”

He understood. He didn’t really want her in his personal space either. “The train’s in an annex around the back. You don’t need to go into the house unless you have to use the bathroom.”

She grabbed the door handle and yanked it open. “I’ll cross my legs.”

Why did her attitude make him all hot and squirmy inside? It didn’t make sense. The feeling bordered on attraction, admiration, but the women he liked weren’t hardened and mouthy. They certainly didn’t have a record. He liked women like Molly—though he valued his life too much to ever tell Gabriel that. He wasn’t attracted to Molly herself, but she was his type. Warm and compassionate. Great with kids. Smelled like freshly baked cookies. Usually had tempera paint stains on her fingers. Molly fought her battles with dignity and a quiet pride, not sarcasm and a hint of threatened violence.

But as he led Lacey through the crunchy snow and around the side of the house, he had to fight to keep himself from reaching out for her. Just a little touch, an accidental stroke of his fingertips across the small of her back as he guided her toward the annex.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and balled them into fists, the only way to be sure he wouldn’t do something so insane.

“Tell me more about the train.”

“She was built by Davenport Locomotive Works in 1916. There’s a narrow-gauge railway running from here up the mountain, to where the main NFS ranger station is now. Back then, it was a mining camp. A lot of the trains that ran on the line, including this one, were bought from a railway in Colorado that had gone bust, but they stopped being used when this railroad closed in the Twenties.”

“How big’s her gauge?”

“Thirty inches.”

“Cylinders?”

“Nine by fourteen.” He gave her the answers quickly but calmly. He wasn’t a dummy. He knew when he was being tested. She grunted in begrudging approval.

“How’d you get her?”

“She belongs to the NFS, but she’d just been sitting here for decades because we don’t have the money to pay someone to restore her.”

“So your bosses were waiting for a schmuck to come along and do the work for free.”

He grimaced. “Maybe. But I’m not doing it for them.”

“No.” Her voice softened, something he noticed happened the last time Josh had come up. She stopped right outside the annex door, staring at his chest as if she couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. “It’s a big job, something most people only do if they’re hardcore train enthusiasts, which I doubt you are. So why are you doing it? Really?”

“I want to help raise money—”

She waved his answer away. “Yeah, I’m sure you do. But uncles don’t go to lengths like this, and especially not step-uncles when the marriage hasn’t even happened yet. This has to have cost you a hell of a lot of your free time, and I’m guessing some money, too. Why not just give them that money for the camp? Why invest so much of your life in this?”

Shit. Her words stroked him deep, finding the dark place where the answer lay. No one had asked him before. Either they already suspected or they figured it was just the kind of thing a guy like him would do. He’d never divulged his reasons, and he wasn’t about to now. “What else am I going to do with my free time?”

Her hard gaze called him on his bullshit, but she didn’t press him. “What’s her name?”

He blinked. “What? I’m not trying to impress a woman, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

She snorted. “I doubt you have problems impressing women. I was talking about the train.”

“Oh. Uh, the
Copper Mountain Express
.”

“Lame.” She turned and strode into the annex, leaving him outside in the cold with one thing repeating through his brain.

“You doubt I have problems impressing women?”

Her voice rang out from inside. “No doubt whatsoever. We can be incredibly stupid about men.”

‡