B.J. Daniels - Classified Christmas

To make things even more awkward, his dark hair was wet and droplets of water beaded on his lashes as well as on the dark curls of his chest hair that formed a V to disappear into the towel wrapped around his slim hips.

“I’m sorry, the door was open,” she said quickly.

He smiled either at the fact that he had her flustered or because of her accent. “The shop isn’t open yet, but then again you don’t look like a fisherman,” he said eyeing her. “Nor do you sound local.”

“No, I’m neither,” she said, getting her composure back. He was even more handsome up close and personal.

He cocked a dark brow at her.

“I’m Miranda Blake. I left my business card and a note on your door last night? But I can wait while you dress.”

He’d looked friendly before. He didn’t now. “M. W. Blake, the new reporter over at the Examiner? ” He was shaking his head and moving toward her, clearly planning to show her out. “I don’t talk to reporters.”

“You’ll want to talk to me, ” she said standing her ground as she put her hand on her shoulder bag, easing the top open so she could get to her pepper spray.

He stopped in front of her and she caught a whiff of his soap. Yum. He stood a good head taller. She had to tilt her face up to look into his eyes. Eyes so dark they appeared black. Right now they were filled with impatience and irritation.

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken about that, Tex.”

“I have some information about your wife,” she said, determined not to let him intimidate her but it was difficult. The look in his eyes alone would frighten someone much larger than herself. She clutched the pepper spray can in her purse.

He was as big a man as she’d first thought, a few inches over six feet and broad at the shoulders. Solid looking, she thought. Not like a man who worked out. More like a man who worked. That surprised her given that selling bait and tackle couldn’t be all that strenuous.

He settled those dark eyes on her. Everything about him was dark. She tried to imagine someone like Starr Calhoun with this man. Starr with her wild, curly auburn hair and those pale blue eyes, as fair as this man was dark.

“You’re new here,” Cade Jackson said as if roping in his irritation. “You don’t know me. So I’m going to cut you some slack. I don’t want another story about my wife’s death. It’s Christmas and I don’t need any more reminders that she’s gone, all right?”

“I think you’d better look at this,” she said, slipping her hand from the pepper spray can to the copy of the photo taken from the bank’s surveillance camera. It had gone out to all news media six years ago, but she doubted it had made it as far as Whitehorse, Montana.

Cade didn’t take the photo she held out. He stood with his hands on his hips, dripping on the wood floor of the bait shop, the white towel barely wrapped around his hips showing way too much skin.

“Please. Just take a look and then I promise to leave,” she said.

With obvious reluctance he took the copy of the photograph. She watched his expressive dark eyes. Recognition then confusion flashed in them. “What the hell is this?”

“It’s your wife. Only her name wasn’t Grace Browning. It was Starr Calhoun. That photo was taken by a surveillance camera in the bank she robbed six years ago—not long before she showed up here in Whitehorse.”

“Get out,” he said. “I don’t know what your game is, Tex, but I’m not playing.”

“Neither am I,” she said as he reached for her arm. “Starr Calhoun was one of the infamous bank-robbing Calhouns from Texas,” she said, dodging his grasp, her hand again clutching the can of pepper spray in her purse. “The three million dollars she and her male accomplice stole was never recovered.”

“If you don’t get out of here right now, you’re going to be sorry,” he said through gritted teeth. “What the hell do you keep reaching in that purse for?” He grabbed her arm.

As he jerked her hand out of the shoulder bag, her finger hit the trigger on the pepper spray.

ON THE LAPTOP propped up in her kitchen, Arlene Evans studied the latest applicant on her Meet-A-Mate site with pride as she whipped up a batch of pancakes.

Since she’d started her rural online dating service she’d had a few good-looking men sign up but none who could match Jud Corbett, a former stuntman and actor, who liked long walks in the rain, horseback riding, dancing in the moonlight and was interested in finding a nice cowgirl to ride off into the sunset with.

Arlene had proven she was a great matchmaker when she’d gotten the Whitehorse deputy sheriff together with that Cavanaugh girl.

But that was nothing compared to who she had picked out for the handsome Jud Corbett.

Her very own daughter Charlotte. True, Charlotte wasn’t a cowgirl, so to speak, but she could ride a horse. And Jud Corbett was just what her daughter needed right now.

Charlotte had seemed a little down lately. But a man like Jud Corbett could bring her out of it quick!

The two would make beautiful children together, Arlene thought with longing as she broke a couple of eggs into the batter and stirred as she admired Jud Corbett’s good looks. If she were twenty years younger…

“Are the pancakes about ready?” her son Bo demanded. At twenty-one, Bo had gotten his looks and personality from his father, damn Floyd Evans to hell.

Floyd had up and left them a few months ago. The divorce papers were somewhere on the overflowing coffee table. The bastard had left her with their three children to finish raising.

Not that the three weren’t pretty much raised since the oldest, Violet, was in her thirties, unmarried and no longer under the roof, but that was another story. Bo was of legal age, although that didn’t seem to mean anything other than he drank beer in front of her now. Charlotte had just celebrated her eighteenth birthday, eating most of the cake all by herself before going out with her friends and getting high.

The phone rang before Arlene could come up with a proper retort for her son. It rang another time but neither of her offspring seemed to hear it.

“Let me get that, why don’t you?” Arlene said doubting they got her sarcasm, either, since neither seemed to hear anything over the blaring television.

“Mrs. Evans?” a woman said on the other end of the line.

Arlene didn’t correct her. “I’m not buying anything,” she snapped and started to hang up the phone.

“I’m calling about your daughter Violet.”

Arlene put the receiver back to her ear. “Yes?” she asked suspiciously. Calls about Violet were never good.

“My name is Myrna Lynch, I’m the media coordinator here at the state hospital. Your daughter Violet would like you all to come up for Family Day.”

“ Family Day?” Arlene Evans echoed into the phone. “You can’t be talking about my daughter. Violet is completely out of it and the last time I came up there to see her you guys wouldn’t even let me in.”

Arlene was still mad about that. As if she enjoyed driving clear up to the state mental hospital to be turned away.

“No one told you?” asked the woman whose name Arlene couldn’t remember. “Your daughter Violet has made remarkable progress. She’s no longer in a catatonic state.”

“What are you saying? She’s not nuts anymore?” How was that possible? “Did she tell you what she did to end up there?”

“Mental illness is a medical disorder that is treatable, Mrs. Evans. Your daughter is getting care that will let her be a responsible member of society again,” the woman said, clearly upset at Arlene’s use of the word “nuts.” “In order to do that, she needs to work through any issues she has with her family. So can I tell the doctor you and your family will be here Saturday?”