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on caring for pets and livestock. He also helped the 4-H kids on their projects for the county fair.
Frowning, she admitted this didn’t quite gibe with her image of him as an arrogant heartbreaker—
“Hey, Officer Bannock! Look at me! Look at me! I’m in the parade!”
Shannon grinned at the excited first-grader. When she called a greeting to a teacher, her breath appeared in long frosty plumes in front of her face.
Brrr, it was really cold tonight, below freezing according to the thermometer outside the drugstore on the corner. Storm clouds hung over the valley, capping the peaks around them. According to the weatherman, snow should be falling at this very moment. She stamped her feet and wiggled her cold toes in her boots.
“This is a night for warm slippers and hot chocolate,” Rory said unexpectedly.
Nodding, she met his gaze. His eyes, with laugh lines at the corners, weren’t arrogant at all. Instead, she saw something alluring…a speculative quality, an invitation to passion, mystery and forbidden pleasures.
Startled by this absurd fantasy, she nearly burst into laughter. Get real, she advised her heart, which had speeded up for some foolish reason. She turned sternly back to her duties. He truly was a handsome man, but so what? Handsome is as handsome does, as her aunt had once said.
Shannon knew that from firsthand experience. Her parents had divorced when she was ten. She and her mother had stayed in Wind River, close to their roots, while her father went off to find himself or something. For years, Shannon and he had only exchanged Christmas cards.
No, she definitely wasn’t attracted to the too-handsome-for-their-own-good types. Home and hearth, a man and woman building a secure future for their children—those were the important things in life.
Shaking her head, she wondered what had driven her thoughts in this direction. The season, she admitted…and for some odd reason, the man standing quietly beside her, watching the parade with a tiny smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
A single person—even one as attractive as Rory Daniels, she realized—was sort of an outsider in the midst of all the family-focused events in town.
Waving at the Christmas Queen, she felt the loneliness dip all the way down to her freezing toes. Oh, well, it was just the holiday doldrums. Everyone had them at times.
Odd, but the thought of Brad Sennet, the attorney she’d been dating for the past month, didn’t console her. Brad was smart, dedicated to his work and interesting. He didn’t make her heart pound like in songs and love poems, but so what?
Friendship, steadfastness and respect—those were the qualities she wanted from a relationship, not a delirious loss of reason to passion, emotion…or a pretty face.
“How about that cup of hot chocolate?” the handsome vet asked, gesturing toward the café where Christmas lights beckoned merrily through the deepening twilight.
One of the teachers, another old school chum, over-heard the invitation and waggled her eyebrows and clutched at her heart in a humorous display of awe.
Shannon suppressed a chuckle. An internal imp urged her to accept his offer. That would certainly set the gossip mill to turning in the small town. However, there was Brad to think of. She didn’t play games with people.
“Thanks, but I’m still on duty,” she told him.
“I’ll take a rain check,” he said equably and headed back to his truck. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas.”
Curiosity caused her to watch him return to his pickup. Her heart actually thumped a little, which surprised her. That organ was certainly acting up tonight.
Mmm, maybe she had been hasty, turning down hot chocolate with the heartthrob of the county. Maybe this was one of those turning points in a person’s destiny that, if allowed to slip away, was gone forever. Maybe the moment would have led to a great passion….
This time she did laugh. Come on, she chided her overactive imagination.
The fire engine went by, signaling the end of the parade. Shannon waved to the firefighters, removed the traffic barriers and stored them in the back of her four-wheel-drive SUV. Returning the barriers to the equipment garage, she mused on the encounter with Rory Daniels.
His eyes and that brilliant smile made a person feel special, as if his every thought was only for her. She wondered why she’d always considered him arrogant and distant. He hadn’t seemed that way tonight.
Putting aside her musing, she finished some overdue reports, said good-night to the clerk on duty and headed for the five-thousand-acre family ranch where her grandfather and two cousins waited for her.
Checking the gauge, she realized she’d better stop for gas. It would be really stupid to get stuck out on a country road at nine-thirty at night, two days before Christmas. She pulled into the gas station-convenience market outside of town, then frowned in irritation that the ATM/credit card machine was out of order. She’d have to go inside and pay for the gas first. So much for technology.
Pulling her collar up around her chin to keep out the cold wind blowing down the valley from the Wind River mountains west of them, she lowered her head and headed for the store. Snowflakes began to fall all at once.
Great. Now the snow began—just when she had to drive five miles on an icy road.
She yanked open the door and exclaimed in exasperation. Her glasses, a newly acquired nuisance, fogged over completely. She snatched them off with a gloved hand and headed for the counter, ATM card in hand.
At that moment, she realized two things: the man behind the counter looked terrified and the man in front of the counter was holding a gun on him. She reacted instinctively as the muzzle of the gun swung her way.
Ducking to one side, she dropped the ATM card and pulled the nine-millimeter semiautomatic from her holster.
“Police!” she snapped. “Hands up!”
The man uttered a curse.
In the next second—it was as if time had gone into slow motion—she saw the flash from the gun and realized he was shooting at her. Shooting at her! No one had ever shot at her in all her twenty-seven years. She was more outraged than frightened. Her police academy training kicked in and she took evasive action.
Darting behind a row of bread and pastries, she warned him a second time. “Put the gun down and your hands behind your head.”
The man answered with another shot.
“Charley, get down!” Shannon yelled at the store owner. When he dived behind the counter, she had a clear view and squeezed the trigger.
The robber screamed as a red spot blossomed on his left shoulder. He spun away and slumped over the counter. The sudden silence was shocking.
Shannon cautiously stepped from behind the stacks of bread. “Drop the gun on the floor. Put your hands above your head. Don’t turn around,” she ordered, surprised at how calm she sounded, considering that her heart was going like a jackhammer. She’d never shot a man before.
The man slowly straightened.
“Watch it!” the owner shouted, his white face appearing beyond the cash register.
An explosion of light, white-hot and brilliant, blinded her. It seared through her head with a loud ringing noise that drowned all other sound. Through a strange rosy haze, she squeezed off another round. Her last thought was that she couldn’t die. She had work to do, a future planned….
Rory Daniels clicked off the cell phone and muttered an expletive. His father and stepmother were coming to visit him sometime in January after spending Christmas with her mother in Phoenix.
Don’t do me any favors, he’d felt like saying.
But of course he hadn’t. As a dutiful