Julie Miller - Military Grade Mistletoe

He could change a flat tire for her, or do some heavy lifting or pull something down off a high shelf. He owed the fantasy Daisy from his letters at least that much. But as Harry waited for the details, he read something more troubling than the awkwardness of this conversation in the blue eyes behind her glasses. She was scared.

Seventeen years of military training put him on instant alert.

“Show me.”

Stopping only to put on her coat and order the dogs to stay inside the mudroom, Daisy walked out onto the back deck, and Harry followed. She went to the railing and pointed down into the snow. “Those footprints. Something seems off to me.”

This was about something more than tracks through her backyard. Her cheeks should be turning pink with the dampness chilling the air. Unless the colored lights were playing tricks on him, her skin had gone pale. The buoyant energy that had overwhelmed him earlier had all but disappeared. Seemed he wasn’t the only one keeping secrets.

With a nod, he accepted the simple mission she charged him with and went down into the yard. Stepping farther out into the snow so as not to disturb the suspicious tracks, Harry switched his phone into flashlight mode and made a quick reconnaissance. This was an awful lot of traffic through the yard of a woman who lived alone. And all of these tracks were too big to be Daisy’s. His boots were digging into snow instead of sand, but the hackles at the back of Harry’s neck went up just as they had overseas when he sensed an enemy lurking somewhere beyond his line of sight.

Trusting suspicions he wasn’t sure he was equipped to deal with yet, he retraced his own path a second time, kneeling to inspect some of the deeper tracks. They’d frozen up inside after a bit of melting, meaning they’d been there long before the afternoon sun had reached them. He pushed to his feet and moved closer to the house to confirm that the deepest boot prints were facing the house, a good five feet beyond the gas and water meters. Harry looked up to a window with a shade drawn halfway down and curtains parted a slit to reveal the blackness of the room inside.

Harry glanced up at Daisy, who was watching his every move from the edge of the deck. She was hugging her arms around herself again. Something definitely had her spooked. “That’s not just a case of a new meter reader guy thinking he could get out on that side of the yard, is it?”

“I don’t think so. He’d only have to see that part of the fence once to know there’s no gate over there.” And yet her visitor had walked back and forth multiple times, then stopped here to look inside that window. “What room is this?”

She paused long enough that he looked up at her again. “My bedroom.”

Harry walked straight to the deck, braced one foot on the bottom planks and vaulted over the railing. The snow flinging off his boots hadn’t settled before he’d turned her toward the door to walk her back inside. “You need to call the police. You’ve got a Peeping Tom.”

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