Three Nights Before Christmas: A Holiday Romance Collection Read online

  It matters. “Her mom does this shit, too?”

  “Oh, no. Patricia is always trying to set her up, but with men our age, and all from good families. Trying to get her married off, I guess. And I honest-to-God don’t know if she’s doing it so that she can finally wash her hands of a daughter she never wanted in the first place, or to spite her husband and spoil his little honey trap, or to protect Mia from that shit—because she and Mia look a lot alike, and it’s hard to believe Bennet started that crap with his daughter and not his wife.”

  “Yeah, it is.” And might explain a hell of a lot about Mia’s mother. Still wouldn’t excuse the way she treats her.

  Her brother leans forward, bracing his forearms on the counter. “So that was Mia’s Thanksgiving. And you ask why I’m telling you, it’s because she knows they’re full of shit. Like, if she believed bringing that pie really was an insult, she wouldn’t have given it to you. And she knows what they’ve done to her.”

  “Cut her open every single day of her life.” No wonder she feels safer around dead people. They can’t hurt you.

  “Pretty much. She told you that she and I have been making up for lost time since we were eighteen. And that’s true…but the first two years after Mia found out about me, she spent most of the time terrified that I was going to decide she was a worthless piece of shit, just like her parents told her she was. It was a while before she trusted that I wouldn’t.” His mouth twists and his eyes remain steady on mine. “She’s been healing ever since, and she’s trusting you a hell of a lot more quickly than she did me. But she’s still easy to hurt. So if you can’t handle this shit, and can’t handle what’ll be coming at you when her parents find out she’s looking in your direction, let her know right away.”

  “I can handle it.” I’ll stand strong through anything she needs me to. “And in the meantime, I’ll find a way to blow their goddamn house down.”

  “Oh, well.” He suddenly grins. “No worries about that. Mia has a plan of her own, for after she takes control of the Bennet family’s assets and the foundation. So it’ll just be a few more years.”

  “And that sounds too fucking long.”

  Her brother shrugs. “She’ll be the first to tell you: She’s not in a rush.”

  9

  Cole

  Chief Jackson’s assistant finds me a few minutes on his schedule just after noon. Going directly to him isn’t something I’d usually do. If I have a problem, I take it to my lieutenant. But since this started with the chief, and was never an official part of my job, I take it straight there, instead.

  He knows I don’t jump up the chain of command, either. So he takes one look at me from behind his desk and says, “Is this about Mia?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Concern furrows his brow. “Is she in trouble?”

  “Getting out of it, I think, now that she’s away from her parents. But there might be a shit storm coming our direction.”

  He leans back in his chair, eyes narrowing. “What kind of shit storm?”

  “In the form of John Bennet. Because I’m going to marry Mia, sir.”

  Chief’s got one hell of a poker face. His brain must be racing but I can’t tell what he’s thinking. Slowly he rises from his desk, walks over to the window overlooking the courtyard. Finally he says evenly, “When?”

  “I don’t know yet. I haven’t asked her. Maybe I will next week, maybe five years from now. But I thought it best to give you a heads-up, considering the favor Bennet asked of me—and because you vouched for my character, and assured him I wouldn’t have any impure designs on his daughter. But I do.”

  He bows his head, and his voice sounds a little choked, as if holding back a laugh when he asks, “Does that mean you intend to have relations with Mia Bennet outside the sanctity of marriage, detective?”

  “Yes, sir.” As often as I can.

  Slowly he nods. “Well, you’re right. That’ll be a shit storm. But nothing this department can’t weather. And it sure as hell doesn’t hurt that you’re the cop who took down Lowery. Bennet will have a hard time finding anyone willing to throw dirt at you.”

  I didn’t need his approval to pursue Mia, but it feels damn good knowing he’ll have my back. “Thank you, sir.”

  “And good luck with the asking,” he says.

  “I’m sure I’ll need it.”

  Especially after last night. I haven’t had a chance to see her yet today. She was gone by the time I knocked on her door this morning, and the day after any holiday is a fucking circus at the station. Add in Black Friday, and I’m just thankful I’m not in uniform and on patrol anymore.

  When I get back to the bullpen, Huertas is up on his feet and hunched over his desk with his landline against his ear—I’ve seen him in that pose before. Barely waiting to hang up before he’s ready to run out the door.

  “What’s happened?”

  He puts down the phone and pulls on his jacket. “Word is, a certain autopsy technician eats her lunch in the courtyard every day. Even during winter.”

  Ah shit. “Don’t you fucking jump ahead of me—”

  “Sorry, brother.” He snatches up the box in which Mia’s serving dish and pie plate are nestled carefully against each other and padded by Sofia’s best tea towels. “But I’m under orders. If I don’t report back to my wife and tell her what kind of woman sends a two-thousand-dollar sterling silver serving plate to a stranger’s house in a grocery bag, I won’t ever be allowed to come home.”

  “I can tell you what kind of woman she is,” I growl and try to head him off, but the fucker’s nimble and my leg sure as hell isn’t going to cooperate in a chase. “She’s fucking perfect.”

  “That’s what you said last night.” Huertas spreads his arms helplessly, like this is all out of his control, and backs away. “You should have just brought her with you, let us have a look at her. Saved all this trouble. Now we get to see how fast you can run.”

  I can’t run at all, so his slowest jog gets him beyond reach in no time. Shaking my head, I don’t even try to catch him. Huertas won’t screw me over. He won’t ever do that. Still, by the time I’ve dragged on my coat, grabbed my lunch, and made my way down to the courtyard, he’ll have had time to share two or three stories about my early days on the force that will be mostly true, and all stupid.

  A gazebo sits in the center of the courtyard, which is probably why I missed seeing her here every damn day. From the second floor of the station, the only view is of the gazebo’s roof. And if you’re walking by the courtyard along the street, seeing in through the sides of the gazebo is no problem, except the same roof blocks most of the light. So you can see people sitting in there but they’re shadowed. You have to actually head into the courtyard to get a good look—but I don’t spend a lot of time wandering through the walkways and flowers.

  Right now those walkways are shoveled clear and salted, and the flowerbeds are covered in a thick blanket of snow. I make my way to the entrance of the gazebo. Wooden benches ring the circumference of the interior, with wrought-iron café tables pulled up to the benches to provide makeshift seating. Mia’s sitting on a bench with Huertas on her right, her pale blue eyes bright and full of interest as she listens to him. A squat Thermos soup container is sealed closed on the table in front of her, along with a coffee cup from the barista’s stand inside the county building.

  And she is perfect. And utterly fucking gorgeous. A red stocking cap covers her black hair, and her cheeks and nose are pink with cold. She looks over as I climb the gazebo stairs, my steps heavy on the wooden treads, and a smile curves those full pink lips. Amusement sparkles in her eyes, and she’s still listening to Huertas run his mouth as I make my way over to them.

  But there’s no anger when she looks at me. No accusation. So maybe she doesn’t mind me knowing all of what she told me last night. Or maybe she doesn’t remember telling me.

  I grab one of the outdoor chairs and swing it over in front of her table. There’s a break in
their conversation as I ease into the seat, and now there’s uncertainty and hesitancy in her smile as she regards me.

  “You all right?” I ask her gruffly. “You must have left early this morning.”

  The pink in her cheeks deepens. “Jason dragged me to a breakfast diner. Said the best cure for a hangover is a greasy plate of bacon and eggs, followed up by pancakes.”

  “We can attest to that.” Huertas waves a finger between him and me. “Especially in our younger days.”

  Yeah, she doesn’t need to hear any of those stories. “Is he filling your head with his usual bullshit? You shouldn’t believe anything he says.”

  “He was actually setting me straight.” She glances over at my partner with a grin. “He was so nice, I naturally assumed that when you two did your good cop/bad cop thing, that he must play the good cop.”

  “I can’t blame you for that assumption.” I pull out one of the sandwiches Sofia sent along with Huertas this morning and unwrap it. “It’s because I’m so big and strong, yeah? So I can intimidate a suspect easier than he can.”

  “I think she’s saying you’re an asshole.”

  Mouth full of turkey and bread, I nod. That’s a fair reason to make that assumption, too.

  Mia reaches for her coffee, looking over the rim at me when she takes her sip. “So you’re the good cop?”

  “More like ‘sympathetic’ cop,” Huertas tells her, since I’m still chewing. “I’m the hardass, right? I play it like I don’t give a shit what their problems are, all I care about is nailing their balls to the wall. But this fucker here, he’ll soften up. He’ll tell them some story about his dying grandma or stealing bread to feed his little sister or some old girlfriend who just kept stringing him along—so they start thinking he understands them, that he’s just like them deep down inside, and they begin opening up. Doesn’t always work, but works often enough you’d be surprised. And you’d be shocked how many ways his old grandma has died.”

  She gives him a wry glance. “Probably not too surprised.”

  “That’s right,” Huertas says it like her working in the morgue had slipped his mind, and this wasn’t what he was hoping to know about her from the first. “You’re down there with all the grandmas. How’d you get started with that?”

  Though she provided a little more insight while she was straddling my thigh last night, I expect to hear that bit about her liking puzzles. Instead she breaks out with a laugh and says, “I was trying to scare away a date.”

  I stop with the second turkey sandwich halfway to my face. “What now?”

  “About three years ago,” she says. “My family’s charity foundation hosts a gala every New Year’s Eve. And my mother always sets me up with some guy. Usually they’re just boring, but this one was—” She screws up her face, sticks out her tongue, and shudders as if a toad just crawled into her mouth. “But Dr. Childers was at my table, and I knew who she was, so I deliberately started up a conversation about decomposition speed and maggot growth. And she picked up on what I was doing right away, trying to get rid of this guy, so she started telling us these stories… God, even I was grossed out. And my date had a weak stomach, so it didn’t take long before he was gone. So Joan and I spent the rest of the time talking, and by the end of the night I realized what I wanted to do.”

  Huertas is fucking delighted by that story. “Are you saying in that short time she convinced you to start helping her cut up dead bodies? That’s some cult-like powers there.”

  “Ha, no.” Though Mia’s smiling, there’s something distant and melancholy in her voice as she continues, “I was already interested in forensic pathology. What Joan told me was that she wished that she hadn’t tried to do it all at once—getting married, med school and then her residency, and having kids. Said it nearly broke her. And that if she had to do it again, she’d take a slower path. A steady job in the field—such as being an autopsy technician—until her kids were older. Then go back to school when she was thirty-five or forty, so she wouldn’t have missed so much of their lives.”

  “She’s not wrong,” Huertas says, suddenly solemn. “This job’s got some crazy hours, but I’m lucky. I’m home most nights and weekends, spend a lot of time with my girls and my wife. I know some guys, though…they aren’t ever getting those years back. Or their families back. And it’s not fucking worth it.”

  Mia nods. “It made sense to me. And I’m fortunate that I don’t have to worry about promotions or earnings, so…” She trails off with a shrug. “I don’t need to rush.”

  “Though it sounds like you want to start a family pretty early, and I guess you need help with that,” Huertas says with a subtle glance in my direction.

  Yeah, real subtle. Mia’s cheeks go red.

  I toss my wadded sandwich wrap at him. “Get the fuck out of here.”

  He takes his time doing it, thanking Mia for last night’s pie, saying he hopes to see her again soon. She’s gracious and sweet until he actually gets going, then she bites her lip, falling quiet while regarding me from across the table, as if waiting for me to say something first.

  So I do, spilling it out easily, as if the words aren’t as important or as true as they are. “You want babies, I’m willing. Though not currently able.”

  Her answer is just as breezy. “That’s okay. In vitro is an option.”

  And I can’t fucking pretend anymore. “So you’ll take a pass on having me inside you? You don’t want me fucking you so deep and hard that you’ll be feeling every inch of my cock for days? Are you in that much of a rush?”

  Her pale blue eyes lock on mine, full of all the fire and need that must be burning in my own. Her response is a breathless, “I’m not in any rush.”

  “Good. Because if we’re doing that part of it right, there shouldn’t be any rushing at all.” And getting pushy sure as hell didn’t work out so well before. I force myself to ease up. “We’ll take this thing between us one day at a time, yeah?”

  Not that I can take it much faster. My cock has no trouble getting hard—it’s a goddamn stone right this instant—but I can’t do much with it yet, not without a lot of pain and being a hell of a disappointment. And I’d be lying if I said that didn’t bother the shit out of me. But this time I won’t take that out on her. I’ll heal soon enough, and there’s plenty of ways to make sure she’s satisfied in the meantime.

  “All right.” Despite that agreement, she bites her lip again, and the sudden wary light in her eyes gets my back up. Her fingers play nervously with her soup spoon as she says, “Last night, what you said to me about your first Christmas away from your father... Was that all true?”

  “Because I told you I wanted into your head, you’re worried I did that sympathetic good cop thing?” My gaze is rock-steady on hers as she nods, her cheeks coloring guiltily. “I’ll never play that shit with you, Mia. Everything you get from me, it’s real.”

  “Sorry. I just—”

  “Don’t be sorry.” Trusting people can’t be easy for her. But even the most trusting person might wonder, considering who I am and what I do. “Anyway, I wouldn’t need to. I’ve known some talkative drunks, but you’re in a class of your own.”

  Blushing and laughing, she nods again. “I really am.”

  Not that she told me everything. She left plenty of holes. And thinking back to what her brother filled in for me last night, tension tightens the muscles along the back of my neck. “You said you weren’t going to any more of your parents’ dinners. What about that New Year’s gala shit? Are you stuck doing that?”

  She waves that away. “That’s different. It’s for the foundation, and I’ll be at the head of it in a few years. So attending is part of being a Bennet. But I barely have to talk to my parents there—and I like knowing who our donors are.”

  Including rich donors with sons near her age? “Did your mom set you up with another useless fucker?”

  “She tried to, but...” She trails off and a funny expression rolls over her face. “
Remember last night, when I said you saved my life and you said I had it backwards?”

  Since I was holding her close, I’m not likely to forget it. And I suppose that settles the question of whether she remembers everything we talked about. “Yeah.”

  Her chest lifts on a deep breath, as if she’s gathering the courage to tell me what comes next. “That morning—the day Lowery showed up—that morning during breakfast, my mother asked me to confirm her plan for me to attend the gala with a date she’d picked out. I told her that I’d find my own date, instead. And she said…well, it doesn’t matter what she said.”

  But I can imagine what it must have been. Not just sticking in the knife. Twisting it.

  She continues, “So I was sitting right here eating my lunch, like I always am, and I saw you coming out of the courthouse.” Her gaze turns toward the street where I’d been that day, then she glances back at me. “I think you had just finished up in court?”

  “It was my turn in the box for the Chalmers’ trial, yeah.” Then while walking back to the station, I saw Lowery getting out of his truck with an assault rifle. But I hadn’t seen Mia sitting here.

  I don’t like thinking about how many times I probably walked by with her sitting here. Without any clue that everything I’ve ever wanted was so damn close.

  “And I said to myself, I’m going to ask Detective Matthews to be my date at the gala. So I stood up”—she does now, taking a step toward me—“and Lowery started shooting.”

  The bottom drops out of my stomach. Because now that she’s out of her seat, I see what her body was hiding—a splintered hole through the side of the gazebo wall, where a bullet had passed through. Right where her heart would have been if she’d been sitting.

  Everything I’d ever wanted was so damn close…and I almost lost her before I even knew she existed.

  My breath explodes from my lungs on a harsh curse. My hand snags the belt of her coat and I haul her closer, my head tipping back as I drag her mouth down to mine. She gives a welcoming assent through parted lips, her hands burying themselves in my hair, her knee braced on the seat between my legs as she bends over me, kissing me as if there’s nothing else she ever wants to do.