The Sheriff's Christmas Surprise

She needed him.

Finding Tina would take a lot longer if she went about it on her own and the man had resources he could tap. Those resources could prove very useful and time saving in the long run.

Besides, she assumed that he was familiar with the area. She definitely wasn’t. That all added up in his favor, even if he was too nosy for her own good.

Since the sheriff continued watching her, quietly waiting for a response, she had to tell him something. Otherwise, she ran the risk of alienating the man. And while alienating people normally didn’t bother her, this time it might prove to be a liability.

Oh, damn it, Tina, why couldn’t you just stay put? Why are you such a flake? What would Mom and Dad say if they were alive now?

If they were alive now, none of this would have happened. Tina had adored their father and would never have done anything to incur his disapproval.

Instead, Tina had become involved with someone who had no redeeming qualities whatsoever, gotten pregnant and then irresponsibly run off. And on top of that, from at least outward appearances, she’d abandoned her baby. Something like that could get her locked up for a long time in a place like this, Olivia thought.

After a moment’s debate, she decided to tell the sheriff something she didn’t normally share. None of the people at the firm where she worked were aware of this. But maybe if Santiago knew, it would make him go easier on Tina.

Right now, she could see that he wasn’t about to nominate her sister for Mother of the Year, or even of the hour. And she just wanted to take Tina and the baby home, not hang around to do battle over any kind of charges he would want to bring against her sister.

Taking a breath and mentally bracing herself for the words she was about to say, Olivia began. “Ten years ago, my parents were gunned down in the jewelry store they operated.” The corners of her mouth curved in a humorless smile. “Gunned down for two hundred twenty-three dollars and seventeen cents. That was all the money that was in the register. The rest were credit card receipts that did the thieves no good.

“My sister,” Olivia continued grimly, “was in the store at the time, in the back, doing her homework. The gunmen never saw her, but she saw them and what they did. I couldn’t get her to talk for a week.”

She remembered rushing home from college. Remembered the awful, empty feeling inside her as she’d identified the lifeless bodies of the people who had once filled the corners of her world so richly, so lovingly.

“Tina started acting out shortly after that, getting into fights at school. Crying at the drop of a hat. She was always afraid to go out by herself, always looking over her shoulder.” Olivia looked up at him and lifted one shoulder in an almost hapless shrug. “I did what I could to make her feel safe.”

Rick didn’t follow her reasoning. “By giving her things?” he asked.

Olivia inclined her head. “Among other things,” she allowed. She could see the sheriff didn’t understand. Most men wouldn’t, she supposed. “Possessions give you a feeling of stability, of continuity. Owning something feels good.”

Rick laughed shortly. The sideways logic interested him, not that he bought into it.

“Then Ed Murphy must feel really stable,” he commented. When she raised a quizzical eyebrow in response, he told her, “Ed’s one of Forever’s more eccentric citizens. He’s always pawing through things other people throw out. A lot of that stuff finds its way into Ed’s one-bedroom house. I hear it’s like a rat’s nest in there these days.”

She didn’t know if he was just relating a quaint story or subtly ridiculing her. Sheriff Enrique Santiago looked like a simple man on the surface—sexy as all hell, but simple—but she had a strong suspicion that beneath those prominent cheekbones was a rather shrewd, logical man.

For now, she decided to reserve her final judgment, at least for a little while. She hadn’t gotten to the position of junior partner in her rather highly regarded, high-profile firm so quickly by making hasty decisions and snap judgments.

“About that APB,” she prodded.

“On it,” he assured her. With that, he turned on his heel and started for the door. When she followed him, shadowing him step for step to the door, he stopped short. “Are you coming with me?”

She smiled. “Can’t put anything over on you, can I?” she asked in what she hoped he’d take to be a teasing manner. She had to keep reminding herself not to get on his wrong side and that she needed him.

He glanced at Miss Joan. “I figured you’d be more comfortable staying here.” And he would be more comfortable going about his job without having her less than five feet away.

“Comfort isn’t my main priority,” she informed him, her voice growing more serious. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go with you, see what you do.”

Having a beautiful woman around was way down on his list of things he minded. But, in this case, he knew it wasn’t just to keep him company. “Don’t trust me to send out that APB?” He was sharp, she thought. He seemed a little too laid-back for her taste and she just wanted to make sure that he did everything he could to locate Tina. But she knew that admitting as much would be a tactical mistake, male egos being what they were, so she forced another smile to her lips, one that was a little sensual around the edges, and said, “No, I just like leaving myself open to new experiences.”

The amused smile that came to his lips told her that she could have phrased that considerably better.

She was tired, Olivia thought, and there was no denying that emotionally she’d been through the ringer these past forty-eight hours. That was the reason she wasn’t at the top of her game.

“Nice to know,” he responded.

She could have sworn a twinkle had entered those incredible green eyes.

Or what could have passed for one, she amended silently. Seeing as how she’d never encountered a “twinkle” before that wasn’t captured within an old-fashioned string of Christmas lights. Like the ones her father used to string up around the house during the holidays, she remembered fondly.

The next moment, Olivia felt a pang in the center of her chest. That she missed her parents went without saying, but she missed them the most around this time of year. Thanksgiving this year had been spent with her searching for Tina, an emptiness eating away at her as she stopped at one diner after another, encountering dead ends and pitying looks.

She didn’t even want to think about what Christmas might be like if she didn’t find Tina.

Decorations had started going up all over Dallas right after the pumpkins had been put away. That only prolonged her nostalgia and the sadness that inevitably overtook her. There was a very real chance that this year, she would wind up spending Christmas alone. Alone because she’d lost touch with all her friends in her drive to succeed, to give Tina a sense of stability and try to meet her every need. Alone because Tina wouldn’t be there.

Damn it, since when did you turn into this maudlin, self-pitying creature? Your life is what you make it, so make it good, Livy, make it good.

Besides, she wouldn’t be alone. If nothing else, Bobby would be there and Bobby needed her.

She hugged the baby to her a little tighter.

“Hey, aren’t you forgetting something?” Miss Joan called out after them.

Olivia turned around, reaching into her purse with her free hand. Obviously the woman had changed her mind about being generous. Just as well.

“I offered to pay you,” Olivia reminded the woman, crossing back to the counter.

Miss Joan merely shook her head, a patient, tolerant expression on her face.

“I was talking about the baby’s infant seat,” she said, pointedly holding it up. Olivia had left it on the counter after taking her nephew into her arms.

Rick was at her side in two steps, picking up the seat.

He nodded at Miss Joan. “Thanks.” With that, he was back at the front door in time to open it for Olivia and the baby. The latter began to rouse from his all-too-short nap.

“I think he might be hungry,” Miss Joan speculated, raising her voice so that they would hear her as they walked out of the diner.

Stopping again, Rick looked at Olivia. He hadn’t thought of that. For the most part, babies were beyond his realm of expertise. “She has a point. I could swing by the grocery store,” he volunteered. “Pick up some milk and a baby bottle—”

“Or we could go to the backseat of my car,” Olivia interjected, stopping him before he could go any further. “I packed a few bottles and some formula for Bobby before I left. Tina only took one bottle with her.” A smile that was equal parts affectionate and long-suffering resignation came over her lips. “Tina doesn’t exactly plan things out.”

But Olivia wasn’t like her sister, Rick observed. She came prepared. He found that to be an attractive quality in a woman.

“She’s not alone,” he told her. “I see that a lot as sheriff.”

Olivia unlocked her car. “You can put the seat in the back,” she told him.

Seeing as how the diner was barely five feet away, he found the fact that she’d locked her vehicle before leaving it amusing. People didn’t lock their doors in Forever, much less their cars. In part that was because people trusted one another around here. In part it was because there wasn’t all that much worth taking. It all worked out in the end.

And all that did was remind him that his job was superfluous. A halfway intelligent monkey could handle it. He needed something more challenging.

No sooner had he deposited the seat into the back than Rick found himself on the receiving end of Olivia’s nephew, who was now fully awake and not in the best of moods.

“Hold him for a second,” she said after the fact.

He cradled the infant in the crook of his arm. “You asking me or telling me?”

“Whichever works,” she answered glibly, then inclined her head in a semiapology as her tone replayed itself in her head. He undoubtedly thought she was being too bossy. God knew Tina had accused her of that often enough. “I’m sorry. I have a habit of issuing orders. Comes from taking charge so much, I guess. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

Secure in his manhood and comfortable in his own skin, it would take a great deal more than a petite blonde in expensive high heels and a designer suit to rattle his confidence. Her apology, however, did surprise him. He would have put money on her never actually apologizing for anything she did. Maybe you couldn’t always tell a book by its cover. “No offense taken,” he answered. “I was just being curious.”

Shifting the baby to his other arm, Rick peered over Olivia’s shoulder into her vehicle. He was about to ask if she wasn’t worried that the formula might have spoiled in the car, but he had his answer before he got to ask the question. She’d brought along a large cooler filled with ice and baby formula. He noticed that she’d also brought along several packages of disposable diapers. They were piled up on one side.

Rick laughed to himself. Olivia Blayne struck him as the kind of person others gravitated to during a natural disaster. She obviously knew how to think on her feet and was prepared for anything.

Except a runaway sister.

But then, if he was being honest with himself, he still wasn’t a hundred percent convinced that her sister hadn’t opted to run off rather than have every moment of her life planned out by a well-intentioned but highly dictatorial older sister.

Or at least that was what he would have surmised Tina’s feelings to be on the matter.

If it wasn’t for the fact that the baby had been left on his doorstep, Rick had to admit that he would have been inclined to just let the whole matter go, even if the woman making the charge was, hands down, the most gut-tightening attractive woman he’d laid eyes on in a very long time.

Beauty-contest-winner pretty or not, though, that still didn’t make Olivia Blayne right, he thought.

Bottle in hand, Olivia straightened up, hit the lock on the rear door and closed it.

“Do you have a microwave or a stove where I could warm this up?” she asked, indicating the chilled bottle in her hand.

“We have a microwave,” he assured her. There was one in the small room where he and the others took their lunch and occasionally, when he had someone sleeping it off in their only cell, their dinner. “We got it just after we learned how to make fire by rubbing two sticks together,” he couldn’t resist adding.

Olivia opened her mouth to respond, then shut it again. She would have to be more careful how she phrased things around this small-town sheriff, she chided herself. There was obviously a vein of sensitivity beneath the rock-solid pectorals.

Taking her nephew back from his arms, she flushed slightly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound as if I thought you were backward in Forever.”

“But you do, don’t you?” he asked knowingly. There was no indication that he took offense at that, or even that he found it irritating. “Think it,” he added when she looked at him quizzically.

“No,” Olivia denied with feeling, then, as he continued to look at her knowingly, she relented. “Well, maybe just a little. This is a small town,” she said by way of what she hoped he’d accept as an explanation.

“Little or not, progress finds us all,” he assured her, then confided in a conspiratorial whisper, “We’ve even got one of them there newfangled com-pew-ters. Now if we could only figure out how to make it work.”

“All right, all right,” she surrendered, “point taken. I’m sorry. I’m really not trying to be condescending. Having to track down my sister and Bobby has thrown me off track. I’m usually a lot better than this.”

“Looking forward to seeing that,” he told her with a wide smile that somehow found its way into her belly a moment before it unfurled.

The next moment, she quickly blocked the feeling that flowed out through her. Olivia deliberately shifted her eyes away from him and wound up looking at the single-story building that housed Forever’s police department.

The only thing that mattered, she told herself as she followed the sheriff inside, was finding Tina and taking her home.

She didn’t have time to think about anything else.

At least, not now.

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