Christmastime Courtship Read online

  Not that she was complaining. Christmas had always been her very favorite time of year. While others grumbled that the stores were putting up Christmas decorations way too soon, motivated by a desire to increase their already obscene profits, Miranda saw it as a way to stretch the spirit of Christmas a little further, thereby making the true meaning of the season last a little longer.

  But sometimes, like now, the pace became a little too hectic even for her. She had just put in a ten-hour day at the hospital, coming in way before her shift actually began in order to help decorate the oncology ward, where she worked. She felt particularly driven because she knew that for some of the children there it would be their last Christmas.

  As harsh and sad as that thought was to deal with, she chose to focus on the bright side: bringing the best possible Christmas she could to the children and their families.

  At times, she felt like a lone cheerleader, tirelessly attempting to drum up enthusiasm and support from the other nurses, doctors and orderlies on the floor until she had everyone finally pitching in, even if they weren’t all cheerful about it.

  She didn’t care if the rest of the staff was cheerful or not, as long as they helped out. And as was her habit, she worked harder than anyone to make sure that things were ultimately “just right.”

  If she were a normal person, about now she would be on her way home, having earned some serious bubble bath time.

  But soaking in a hot tub was not on this afternoon’s agenda. She didn’t have time for a bubble bath, as much as she longed for one. She had to get Lily’s birthday party ready.

  Lily Hayden was eight today. The little girl was one of the many children currently living with their moms at the Bedford Women’s Home, a shelter where Miranda volunteered four days a week after work.

  The other two or three days she spent at the city’s no-kill animal shelter, where she worked with dogs and cats—and the occasional rabbit—that were rescued from a possible bleak demise on the street. Miranda had an affinity for all things homeless, be they four-footed or two-footed. In her opinion there never seemed to be enough hours in the day for her to help all these deserving creatures.

  She had been working in all three areas for years now and felt she had barely been able to scratch the surface.

  Agitated, Miranda looked at the clock on her dashboard. The minutes were flying by.

  She was running the risk of being late.

  “And if you don’t get there with this cake, Lily is going to think you’ve forgotten all about her, just like her mom did,” Miranda muttered to herself.

  Lily’s mother had left the little girl at the shelter when she’d gone to look for work. That was two days ago. No one had heard from the woman since. Miranda was beginning to worry that Gina Hayden, overwhelmed with her circumstances, had bailed out, using the excuse that the little girl was better off at the shelter, without her.

  Stepping on the gas, Miranda made a sharp right turn at the next corner, reaching out to hold the cake box on the passenger seat in place.

  Focused on getting to the homeless shelter on time, Miranda wasn’t aware of the dancing red and blue lights behind her until she heard the siren, high-pitched, demanding and shrill, slicing through the air. The sound drew her attention to the lights, simultaneously making her stomach drop with a jarring thud.

  Oh damn, why today of all days? Miranda silently demanded as, resigned to her fate, she pulled her car over to the right. Even as she did so, something inside her wanted to push her foot down on the accelerator and just take off.

  But considering that her newfound nemesis was riding a motorcycle and her car was a fifteen-year-old asthmatic vehicle way past its glory days, a clean getaway was simply not in the cards.

  So she pulled over and waited for her inevitable ticket, fervently hoping the whole process was not going to take too long. She was already behind schedule. Miranda didn’t want to disappoint Lily, who had already been disappointed far too often in her short life.

  * * *

  This wasn’t his usual route. For some unknown reason, the desk sergeant had decided that today, he and Kaminski were going to trade routes.

  Sergeant Bailey had made the switch, saying something about “mixing things up and keeping them fresh”—whatever that was supposed to mean, Colin thought, grumbling under his breath.

  As far as he was concerned, one route was as good as another. At least here in Bedford the only thing people shot at him were dirty looks, instead of bullets from the muzzles of illegally gotten handguns. He had to admit that patrolling the streets of Bedford was a far cry from patrolling the barrio in Los Angeles, or driving on the roads in Afghanistan. In those situations, a man had to develop eyes in the back of his head to stay alive.

  Here in Bedford, those same eyes were in danger of shutting, but from boredom, not a fatal shot.

  He supposed, after everything he had been through in the last ten years, a little boredom was welcome—at least for a while.

  But he didn’t exactly like the idea of hiding on the far side of the underpass, waiting to issue a ticket to some unsuspecting Bedford resident.

  Yet those were the rules of the game here, and for now, he wasn’t about to rock the boat.

  First and foremost, he was here because of Aunt Lily. Because he owed her big-time. She had taken him in when no one else would, and to his discredit, he had repaid her by shutting her out and being surly. It wasn’t her fault he had behaved that way; the blame was his.

  In his defense—if he could call it that—he hadn’t wanted to risk forming another attachment, only to have to endure the pain that came if and when he lost her. Lost her the way he’d lost everyone else in his life that ever mattered. His mother. Some of the men in his platoon. And Owens, his last partner in LA.

  Colin’s method of preventing that sort of pain was to cut himself off from everyone. That way, the pain had no chance of ever taking root, no chance of slicing him off at the knees.

  At least that was what he told himself.

  Still, he reasoned, playing his own devil’s advocate, if there wasn’t some part of him that cared, that was still capable of forming some sort of an attachment, however minor, would he have uprooted himself the way he had in order to be here because Aunt Lily had asked him to?

  He didn’t know.

  Or maybe he did, and just didn’t want to admit it to himself.

  Either way, it wasn’t something that was going to be resolved today. Today he needed to focus on the small stuff.

  Right now he had a speeder to stop, he told himself, coming to life and increasing his own speed.

  Because the woman in the old sedan was obviously not looking into her rearview mirror, Colin turned on his siren.

  There, that got her attention. At least she wasn’t one of those foolhardy birdbrains who thought they could outrace his motorcycle, Colin observed, as the car began to decrease its speed.

  Watching the vehicle slow down and then come to a stop, Colin braced himself for what he knew was about to come. Either the driver was going to turn on the waterworks, attempting to cry her way out of a ticket by appealing to what she hoped was his chivalrous nature, or she was going to be belligerent, demanding to know if he had nothing better to do than to harass otherwise law-abiding citizens by issuing speeding tickets for offenses that were hardly noteworthy, instead of pursuing real criminals.

  After parking his motorcycle behind her vehicle, he got off, then took his time walking up to the offending driver. Because the street was a busy one, with three lanes going in each direction, Colin made his way to the passenger side, to avoid getting hit by any passing motorist.

  As he approached, he motioned for the driver to roll down her window.

  She looked nervous. Well, the woman should have thought about this before she’d started speeding.


  “Do you know why I pulled you over?” he asked gruffly.

  Miranda took a breath before answering. “Because I was speeding.”

  A little surprised at the simplicity of her reply, Colin waited for more.

  It didn’t come.

  The woman wasn’t trying to talk her way out of the ticket she obviously knew was coming. He found that rather unusual. In his experience, people he pulled over in Bedford weren’t normally this calm, or this seemingly polite.

  Colin remained on his guard, anticipating a sudden turn on the driver’s part.

  “Right,” he said, picking up on her answer. “You were speeding. Any particular reason why?”

  He was aware that he was giving her the perfect opportunity to attempt to play on his sympathies, with some sort of a sob story. Such as she’d just gotten a call from the hospital saying her mother or father or some other important person in her life had just had a heart attack, and she was rushing to their side before they died.

  He’d heard it all before. The excuses got pretty creative sometimes.

  He had to admit that, for some reason, he was mildly curious to hear what this driver had to offer as her excuse.

  “There’s this little girl at the homeless shelter. It’s her birthday today and I’m bringing the cake. The party starts in ten minutes and I got off my shift at the hospital later than I anticipated. I work at Children’s Hospital and we had an emergency,” she explained, inserting a sidebar.

  “Where at Children’s Hospital?” Colin asked, wondering just how far the woman was going to take this tale she was spinning.

  “The oncology ward,” she answered.

  He should have seen that one coming. “Really?” he challenged.

  Was he asking her for proof? That was simple enough, she thought. Because she’d been in such a rush, she was still wearing her uniform, and she had her hospital badge around her neck.

  Holding up her ID, she showed it to him. “Yes, really, Officer,” she answered politely. “Now if you’ll please write out the ticket and give it to me so I can be on my way, I can still make the party on time. I don’t want Lily to think I forgot about her, today of all days.”

  About to begin doing so, Colin looked up sharply. “Lily?” he questioned.

  “That’s her name,” Miranda answered. “Lily.”

  Colin stared at the woman, a stoic expression on his face as he tried to make up his mind if she was actually serious, or trying to con him.

  She couldn’t possibly know about his aunt, he decided.

  “My aunt’s name is Lily,” he told her, watching her face for some telltale sign that she was making all this up.

  “It’s a nice name,” Miranda responded, waiting for him to begin writing.

  Colin paused for a long moment, weighing the situation.

  And then he did something he didn’t ordinarily do. Actually, it was something he’d never done before. He closed his ticket book.

  “All right, I’m letting you off with a warning,” he told her. Then added an ominous “Watch yourself,” before he turned on his heel and walked back to his motorcycle.

  Chapter Two

  Miranda’s first impulse was to take off before the officer decided to change his mind about writing her that ticket. But as she thought about the fact that she had just dodged a bullet, an idea came to her. Rather than start her car and drive away under the police officer’s watchful eye, Miranda opened her door and got out of her beloved vehicle.

  “Officer?” she called, raising her voice.

  Colin had already gotten on his motorcycle. Surprised, he looked in her direction. After a beat, he sighed and then slowly dismounted.

  Now what? he silently demanded.

  “Something on your mind, miss?” he asked, his voice low and far from friendly.

  The officer sounded as if she was annoying him. But Miranda hadn’t gotten where she was by giving in to the nervous quiver that occasionally popped up in her stomach—as it did now.

  Raising her head so that her eyes met his—or where she assumed his eyes were, because he’d lowered the visor on his helmet, she stated, “I wanted to say thank you.”

  Colin grunted in response, because in his opinion, this wasn’t the sort of situation where “you’re welcome” suited the occasion. As far as he was concerned, she wasn’t welcome. He’d just given in to an impulse that had come out of nowhere, and if he thought about it now, he was rather bewildered by his own actions.

  “Do you have a card?” she asked him.

  “A card?” Colin repeated, clearly perplexed by her question.

  Miranda didn’t think she was asking for anything out of the ordinary. “Yes, like a business card. The police department issues those to you, right?”

  Instead of answering her question, or giving her one of the cards he carried in his pocket, Colin asked, “Why do you want it? You don’t have anything to report me for,” he pointed out gruffly.

  It took Miranda a second to absorb what he was saying. Talk about being defensive. But then, maybe he had a reason. Some people were belligerent when dealing with the police.

  “I don’t want to report you,” she assured him with feeling. “I just want to be able to call you.”

  So that was it, Colin thought. The woman was a groupie. He knew that there were people—mostly women—who were attracted to the uniform, some to the point of obsession. He had no patience when it came to groupies.

  Colin got back on his motorcycle, ready to take off. “That’s not a good idea,” he told her in a voice that left no room for argument.

  Or at least he thought it didn’t.

  “But the kids at the hospital would get such a big kick out of meeting a real live motorcycle cop,” she said, hoping to change his mind.

  She caught him completely off guard. He definitely hadn’t been expecting that.

  Now that he had transferred to Bedford, he didn’t find himself interacting with any children. The ones back in the LA neighborhood he used to patrol saw police officers as the enemy, and either scattered whenever they saw him coming, or would throw things at him and then run.

  “Look, I don’t think—” Colin got no further than that.

  Determined to convince him, Miranda attempted to submerge the police officer in a tidal wave of rhetoric. “A lot of the kids in that ward haven’t been out of the hospital in months. I think meeting you would go a long way in cheering them up.”

  There had to be some sort of an ulterior motive at work here, Colin thought, and he wasn’t about to fall for whatever trap she was trying to set for him.

  “I really doubt that,” he told her as he revved his motorcycle.

  “I don’t,” Miranda countered cheerfully, refusing to be put off. “Why don’t you come by the hospital and we’ll see which one of us is right?” Mindful of procedure, she told him, “I’d have to clear it with my supervisor, but I don’t see why she would say no.”

  “She might not, but I will.” Then, just in case the woman still had any doubt about what he was telling her, Colin said, “No.”

  “But, Officer—” Rebounding quickly, Miranda tried again “—it’s Christmas.”

  Colin’s eyes narrowed. “It’s November,” he corrected.

  “Almost Christmas,” she amended.

  The woman just wouldn’t give up, he thought, his irritation growing to astounding levels.

  “Look, why don’t you get back into your car and drive off before I decide to change my mind about issuing you that ticket?” Colin suggested tersely. “You said something about a birthday party for a little girl named Lily,” he reminded her.

  “Oh my goodness! Lily!” Miranda cried, genuinely upset. She’d gotten so caught up with her idea about having the police officer visit the
children in the oncology ward that she’d forgotten the mission she was on right now. “The poor thing’s going to really be upset if I don’t turn up on time.”

  Whirling around, Miranda hurried back to her car and got in. She was starting the vehicle before she even closed the door.

  Raising his voice, Colin called after her, “Remember the speed limit!”

  There was next to no traffic at the moment.

  Reining herself in, knowing that the officer would be watching her pull away from the curb, Miranda gripped the steering wheel and drove off at a respectable speed, all the while wishing herself already at her destination.

  Despite her hurry to get to the women’s shelter, she made a mental note to track down the officer and get his name and number from his precinct the first chance she got. This wasn’t over yet, she promised herself.

  Miranda managed to catch all the lights and breeze through them, arriving at the women’s shelter fifteen minutes later.

  Rather than wasting time driving around and looking for a parking spot near the gray, two-story building’s front door, she pulled into the first space she came to.

  Grabbing the cake, she hurried into the building—and nearly collided with the blonde little girl who was anxiously waiting for her at the door.

  “You came!” Lily cried happily, her furrowed brow smoothing out the second she saw Miranda.

  “Of course I came,” she said, pausing to kiss the top of Lily’s head as she balanced the large cake box in her arms. “I told you I would. It’s your birthday and I wouldn’t miss that for the world.”

  Lily was all but dancing on her toes, eagerly looking at the rectangular box in Miranda’s arms. “Is that a cake?”

  “Aw, you guessed,” Miranda said, pretending to be disappointed that her secret had been uncovered. “What gave it away?”

  “The box,” Lily answered solemnly, as if she’d been asked a legitimate question. And then she giggled as she added, “And I can smell cake.”

  “Well, since you guessed what it is, I guess you get to keep it,” Miranda told her.