Marie Ferrarella - Christmastime Courtship

Always alert when he was on the job, Colin tensed when he heard the driver honking. Seeing an arm come out of the driver’s window, waving to get his attention, he bit off a curse. Was the woman taunting him? Or did she actually want to get a ticket?

And then, as he looked closer, he realized that it was the same car he’d pulled over yesterday. The one driven by that petite blonde with the really deep blue eyes.

The one who had that birthday cake on the passenger seat.

What was she doing here? Was she deliberately trying to press her luck? Because if she was, she was in for a surprise.

Her luck had just run out, he thought.

Biting off a few choice words under his breath, Colin made a U-turn and took off after her.

Less than thirty seconds later, he realized that she wasn’t going anywhere. The woman with the soulful doe eyes had pulled over to the curb.

Something was definitely off, Colin thought as he brought his motorcycle to a halt behind her vehicle.

Training from his days on the force in Los Angeles had Colin approaching the car with caution. Every police officer knew that the first thirty seconds after a vehicle was pulled over were the most dangerous ones. If something bad was going to happen, it usually took place within that space of time.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the pulled-over driver was harmless. It was that one other time that turned out to be fatal.

Although he had volunteered for this detail, choosing to patrol the city streets on a motorcycle over riding around in a squad car with a partner, he was not unaware of the risk that came with the job. A risk that always had his adrenaline flowing and his breath backing up in his lungs for that short time that it took for him to dismount and approach the offending driver’s vehicle.

If he had a partner, there would be someone close by who had his back. However, Owens, his last partner, had been killed on the job, and although Colin never said anything to anyone about it, that had weighed really heavily on him, and still did. After that tragic incident, he operated alone. Patrolling alone meant he had to watch out only for himself. He liked it that way.

The second he peered into the passenger window and saw the driver, he knew that he was facing another kind of danger entirely.

No one was going to die today, but it was still a risk.

Miranda rolled down the passenger window and leaned toward him. “Hi. I wasn’t speeding this time,” she said, greeting him with a cheerful smile and a chipper demeanor he found almost annoyingly suspicious.

He scowled at her. “No, you were just executing a very strange turn.”

“I had to,” Miranda explained. “If I went straight and turned at the next light, by the time I came back, I was afraid that you’d be gone.”

Only if I’d been lucky, Colin thought.

Just what was this woman’s game? “And that would have been a problem because...?”

She never missed a beat. “Because I had to talk to you.”

The idea of just turning away and getting back on his motorcycle was exceedingly tempting, but for some reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on, Colin decided to hear this overly upbeat woman out.

“You are persistent, aren’t you?” he retorted.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Miranda did her best to try to get the officer to lighten up a little and smile.

His stoic expression never changed. “It is from where I’m standing.” He’d glimpsed her driver’s license yesterday and tried to recall the name he’d seen on it. Maybe if he made this personal, he’d succeed in scaring her off. “What do you want, Miriam?”

“Miranda,” she corrected, still sounding annoyingly cheerful. “That’s okay, a lot of people get my name wrong at first. It takes getting used to.”

“I have no intention of getting used to it,” he informed her. Or you.

As far as he was concerned, the woman was really pushing her luck.

“Look, I let you off with a warning yesterday,” he reminded her. “Would you like me to rescind that warning and give you a ticket?”

Colin was fairly confident that the threat of a ticket would be enough to make her back off.

“No. That was very nice of you yesterday. That’s the reason I came looking for you today.”

She wasn’t making any sense. And then he remembered what she’d said yesterday about asking him to pay a visit to some ward at the hospital.

That’s what this was about, he decided. Something about sick children. Well, he was not about to get roped into anything. Who knew what this woman’s ultimate game really was?

“Look, I already told you,” he retorted. “I’m not the type to come see kids in a hospital. I don’t like hospitals.”

Rather than look disappointed as he’d expected her to, the woman nodded. “A lot of people don’t,” she agreed.

Okay, she was obviously stalking him, and this was over. “Well then, have a nice day,” Colin told her curtly, and then turned to walk back to his motorcycle.

“I’m not here about the hospital,” Miranda called after him. “Although I’d like to revisit that subject at a later time.”

Colin stopped walking. The woman had to be one of the pushiest people he’d ever encountered, not to mention she had a hell of a lot of nerve.

Against his better judgment, he found himself turning around again to face her. “And just what are you ‘here’ about?” he asked.

There was absolutely nothing friendly in his voice that invited her to talk. But she did anyway.

“That little girl I told you about?” Miranda began, feeling as if she was picking her way through a minefield that could blow up on her at any moment. “The one with your aunt’s name,” she reminded him, hoping that would get the officer to listen, and buy her a little more time.

“Lily,” he repeated, all but growling the name. “What about her?” he asked grudgingly.

He wasn’t a curious man by any stretch of the imagination, but there was something about this overly eager woman that had him wondering just where she was taking this.

“Lily’s mother is missing,” she told him, never taking her eyes off his face.

Rather than show some sort of reaction to what she’d just said, his expression never changed. He looked, Miranda thought, as if she’d just given him a bland weather report.

She began to wonder what had damaged the man to this extent.

“So go to the precinct and report it,” Colin told her. “That’s the standard procedure.”

“The director at the shelter already did that,” Miranda answered.

“All right, then it’s taken care of.” What more did she expect him to do? Colin wondered irritably as he began to walk away again.

“No, it isn’t,” Miranda insisted, stepping out of her car and moving quickly between him and his motorcycle. “The officer who took down the information said that maybe Lily’s mother took off. He said a lot of women in her situation feel overwhelmed and just leave. He said that maybe she’d come to her senses in a few days and return for her daughter.”

“Okay, you have your answer,” Colin said, moving around this human roadblock.

Again Miranda shifted quickly so he couldn’t get to his motorcycle. She ignored the dark look he gave her. She wasn’t about to give up. This was important. Lily was depending on her to do everything she could to find her mother.

“But what if she doesn’t?” Miranda asked. “What if she didn’t take off? What if something’s happened to Lily’s mother and that’s why she never came back to the shelter?”

He felt as if this doe-eyed blonde was boxing him in. “That’s life,” he said, exasperated.

“There’s a little eight-year-old girl at the shelter waiting for her mommy to come back,” Miranda told him with feeling. “I can’t just tell her ‘that’s life.’”