Jingle All the Way Read online

  “What the hell do you mean, Snow’s a free man?” Mac asked his captain the next afternoon in his office at the BPD precinct. It was Christmas day. He always worked because spending the holiday alone was too depressing. His captain had joined him ever since his wife died. Mac shut the door behind him, tuning out the sounds of voices and phones and people milling about.

  Captain Scott sighed, rubbing his bald head. The man had been formidable in his day, but years of running a busy precinct had taken a toll on him. He looked tired, and suddenly much older than his middle-aged years. “Don’t start with me, Detective Johnson,” he finally said. “You and I both know you’ve been after the Snows since you joined the force. Hell, probably long before that.”

  “Yes, but I had just cause to finally lock up the old man. That shipment of cocaine was on his boat. And now you’re telling me he’s out? Just like that?” Mac paced back and forth, anger and frustration gnawing at his insides. Where the hell was the justice in that?

  “Sit down before you make me dizzy, son.” His captain waited until he complied. “Snow claims the employees involved forged his signature, signing off on that shipment. That he knew nothing about it and is willing to take a polygraph test to prove it.”

  “Don’t tell me you buy that load of crap?” Mac surged to his feet.

  “I said sit down,” his captain growled in a voice he rarely had to use on Mac, which prompted Mac to slowly lower himself into his chair and strive for a calm he didn’t feel. “What I’m telling you is that the matter is being looked into,” his captain finally responded.

  Mac clenched his jaw before asking in a neutral voice, “What does that mean exactly?”

  His captain hesitated. “That he’s out on bail for now.”

  “I see.” Mac scrubbed his buzz cut with his hand. “Must be nice to have money.”

  “Money, and a firecracker of an elf on your side.” His captain’s lips twisted into an amused grin.

  Mac narrowed his eyes. “Elf you say?”

  “Yeah, I’ve never seen anything like it.” Captain Scott chuckled. “This little bitty thing with fiery red hair and sparkling green eyes came charging in here this morning, and I swore I heard bells jingling. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, but that didn’t mean a blessed thing. I pity the man who tries to tame her. She stormed all over this place in a no-nonsense fashion until she got what she wanted.”

  Mac clenched his fists. “And that was?”

  “Alexander Snow on a silver platter. She posted his bail, and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do.”

  Mac cursed under his breath. He vaguely remembered someone of that description at Nathan Snow’s wedding reception. He remembered thinking she was attractive in a unique and interesting sort of way, but then he had pushed all thoughts other than taking Alexander Snow down out of his mind. Now he realized he should have paid more attention. Who was she?

  More importantly, what exactly was she up to?

  “Go. You’re not any use to me until you work out whatever this all is,” Captain Scott said, but then nailed Mac with a hard look. “Deal with it, Johnson. I want this finished once and for all.”

  “Oh, I’ll deal with it, Captain,” Mac said with a low grumble. “Count on it.”

  “Ellen, there’s someone here to see you,” Tina Warsaw said as she poked her head inside Ellen’s office, her shoulder-length, sandy blonde bob brushing her slender shoulders.

  Tina was a nice person but all business, with no time for a personal life. A young, energetic workaholic who wanted nothing more than to climb the proverbial ladder of success at Creative Creations just as fast as she could. That’s why she worked every Christmas. Ellen usually took Christmas off and spent it with her family, but this year she couldn’t handle listening to her mother lament that she was the only one of her babies who wasn’t married yet.

  “Thanks, Tina,” Ellen responded. “Send him right in.”

  Tina’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “How did you know it was a man?”

  Ellen’s lips tipped up into a small smile of satisfaction. McMuscles wasn’t the only one who had a few tricks up his sleeve. “Let’s just say I was expecting him.”

  Detective Johnson strode into her office in his snug jeans, tight T-shirt, and leather jacket, looking more like a hitman than a cop. God, he was hot. He had bad boy written over every delicious inch of him. Ellen loved bad boys, but this one threatened the happiness of her best friends. If Nathan was unhappy, then Samantha surely would be. Ellen wouldn’t let that happen, no matter how much MacKenzie’s wounded soul called to her.

  “What do you want?” he asked, his voice low and gruff, striking a chord deep within her. He stared at her with such dark, intense eyes, she swallowed hard. He had intimidation down to a science with his chiseled jawline and the scar above his eyes, but Ellen had never been one to back down easily.

  “What do you mean?” she asked nonchalantly, blinking up at him with the wide-eyed innocent look she’d perfected, hoping like hell he couldn’t tell how turned on she was by his mere presence.

  “You might have been in the wedding, but you’re not related to Snow. I did my homework. This has nothing to do with you, so I repeat, what do you want?”

  “This has everything to do with me,” she said, dropping the act and adding a certain amount of growl to her own voice. She surged to her feet and stepped around her desk, getting right in his face.

  His full lips parted as though he were taken aback, but then he stood his ground, staring down at her, hands fisted at his sides. “Why?” he ground out through clenched teeth.

  “Because you’re messing with my friends!” She poked him hard in the chest when what she really wanted to do was punch him.

  He moved faster than she’d ever seen anyone move and caught her hand in his much larger one. “So?”

  Ignoring the way he made her pulse pick up, she pulled her hand out of his before he could tell the effect he had on her and replied, “So friends are family, and I don’t take family lightly.”

  He grunted. “Well, I don’t take family at all.”

  “Apparently.” She snorted, crossing her arms and shaking her head in pity. “You obviously have issues.” She sighed in regret. “As much as I’d like to help you with them, you’ve created a conflict of interest for me.” She let her gaze wander the length of him appreciatively and then shrugged. “Your loss.” Looking him square in the eye, she finished with, “Make no mistake, Scrooge MacGruff…you hurt them, I hurt you back.”

  He arched a brow as though a war between interest and frustration battled inside him. She had that effect on most people. She fascinated them, but they had no idea what to do with her. Shrugging off his daze, he responded with an authoritative tone, “The law’s the law, sweetheart. Break it, you’re gonna pay. That’s exactly what Snow did.”

  “Says you. His attorneys say otherwise.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Prove it.”

  She smiled like the Cheshire cat. “We intend to.”

  “Again with the we.” He made a set of air quotes. “Stay out of my way, and we’ll get along just fine. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Oh, it’s clear that you hate your father,” she said with a knowing tone. “I can’t blame you for that. Mr. Snow doesn’t exactly give off the warm and fuzzies, but Nathan is nothing like him. Okay, so maybe he used to be like him, but that was only because he was bitter after having a hard life growing up.”

  Mac let out a harsh laugh.

  “Believe it or not, Nate probably grew up even more alone than you did. You had a loving mother until you were ten, and then you had the other kids in the orphanage. Nate didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and his parents bought him presents as companions because they were never around. Even his nanny wasn’t very friendly.”

  “I’m sure living in a mansion surrounded by expensive toys was rough,” Mac said sarcastically.

  “You might have had it rougher, but I’d bet Nat
e was lonelier.”

  “Whatever. That’s not my problem,” Mac said with a devil-may-care attitude, but Ellen saw the shadows lying just beneath the surface.

  She wanted to pounce and take advantage of his vulnerability, but she didn’t. Dammit, she was a softy. Her tone gentled against her will and she relented a hair, adding, “It’s not too late to get to know your brother. I know Nate wants to get to know you.”

  Mac looked startled for a minute, probably over having revealed anything, and then his face hardened. “I have no interest in having any kind of relationship with Nathan Snow. I don’t do relationships, period. I’m simply doing my job in putting his father behind bars. Or at least I was until you intervened.”

  “Oh, I can’t take all the credit for that. I just had a role in saving you from yourself.” She patted him on the chest. “You’ll thank me one day, MacGruff. Wait and see.”

  “Fraternizing with the enemy,” Jason Moore of Moore and Griswold Attorneys at Law said from the doorway of Ellen’s office. “Typical Ellen.”

  He was a handsome enough man, impeccably dressed with light brown eyes and hair perfectly styled, yet ninety percent of the time his face was buried in his smartphone. She’d dubbed him McBoring and had moved on. End of story. Except once again Nathan had paired them together. If it wasn’t for Sam, Ellen might have had a mind to side with Mac and sink Jason’s battleship, but she couldn’t do that. She had to prove to her friends that she had their backs this time, even if it meant playing nice in the sandbox with a bottom feeder.

  “Jason Moore,” Ellen said with a stiff smile plastered on her face, dropping her hand regrettably from Mac’s chest. “I have to say I’m surprised to see you working on Christmas.”

  “Yes, well, some of us take our obligations seriously.”

  There was the man she’d grown to know and loathe. “You mean like you did to Nathan as one of his groomsmen?” she asked with a sarcastic smirk.

  “I know it’s easy for that little brain of yours to forget, given how many cells you killed with alcohol recently, but let me remind you I did officiate their wedding.”

  “And yet I don’t recall seeing you at the reception much. Gee, I wonder why.”

  “I’m surprised you could see clearly at all. Let’s just say I was in therapy.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Mac said. “Not sure what you two have going on here, but I’m out.” He headed toward the door.

  “And down for the count by the time my law firm gets through with you,” Jason responded in a quiet but deadly voice, surprising Ellen. She’d never seen him in action and quite frankly hadn’t thought he’d had it in him.

  Mac paused and sent an amused look in Jason’s direction. “Down for the count by the likes of you?” He shot a parting look full of something she couldn’t quite identify at Ellen, but then his forehead creased. “Her, maybe,” he said before glancing back at Jason and adding, “You? Not likely.” Then he headed out the door, calling over his shoulder, “This isn’t over, sweetheart.”

  “I never said it was,” she shouted back, then scowled at a gloating Jason as she thought, Yippee ki-yay, what the hell did I get myself into?

  Later that night Mac sat in his unmarked car outside of an old brownstone house on a side street in downtown Boston. Ellen’s house. He might have left her office, but he hadn’t gone anywhere. Snow was out of jail, and while Mac couldn’t do anything about it, he wouldn’t stop trying to find a loophole.

  Ellen Patterson was the key.

  She might have said she didn’t want anything except to protect her friends, her family. But he wasn’t buying it. She was up to something, and he aimed to find out what. She’d walked that Jason Moore guy out of her office to his car and argued with him for a while, until the weasel threw his hands in the air and drove off. Mac didn’t like the guy. He seemed way too self-assured and a bit cocky, but that didn’t mean Mac couldn’t empathize with the dude.

  The damned woman was a thorn in his side.

  He had to admit he’d never wanted to strangle a woman yet kiss the sense out of her at the same time. She intrigued the hell out of him and infuriated him to the point of wanting to punch something. How could so much dynamite be packed into a body that small? An elf was a good name for her, only she wasn’t Santa’s helper. He knew trouble when he saw it, but her eyes would be the death of him. A mesmerizing, sparkling green that drew him in and then sucker punched him when he least expected it.

  Sinful temptation.

  A temptation he would ignore. He didn’t need anyone, and he sure as hell didn’t need the headache that would undoubtedly accompany getting involved with her. People were overrated. He liked being on his own. Not relying on anyone except himself. It was safer that way. Besides, it didn’t matter how the sexy imp made him feel. He could ignore the physical response she stirred within him and focus on the reason he was here.

  Revenge.

  Picking up his binoculars, he looked through her living room window for the umpteenth time that night. She’d changed into a pair of black yoga pants and a T-shirt with—Christ almighty—no bra. He ground his teeth and reminded himself to stay strong, which was damned hard given the fact that she had the compact body of a gymnast.

  She looped a cat with no tail around her shoulders as she disappeared into the kitchen. Then moments later, she reappeared alone to throw on a coat and step outside, carrying a dog with only three legs. Mac ducked down in his seat, peaking just over the edge of the window. She stood there holding the dog’s leash until he finished his business, and then she disappeared back inside. Taking off her coat, she curled up in a chair in front of the fireplace and a Christmas tree, then opened a book. She was a people person, who obviously loved the underdog, and she had admitted family meant the world to her.

  What the hell was she doing alone on Christmas?

  An hour later, a little boy from next door came outside and walked straight toward Mac’s car, carrying a mug. The boy looked both ways and then crossed the street, coming to a stop right beside the car. Mac rubbed a hand over his face and sighed, then rolled down his window. The boy didn’t say a word, just handed him the mug and then ran back to his house, giggling all the way. How had she spotted him? He must be slipping, but that wasn’t surprising, given the effect she had on him.

  Mac read the note attached to the Mug.

  * * *

  Hey, MacGruff…

  Why don’t you put us both out of our misery and come inside? If not, your loss. Here’s something to warm those hunky bones of yours.

  Elfish Ellen

  * * *

  What the hell did that mean? Mac sat there, staring at his mug of black coffee. More importantly, what in the world was he going to do about it?

  CHAPTER 3

  Ellen answered the knock on her door with a grin of satisfaction on her face. She’d hoped the pain-in-the-ass-but-undeniably-gorgeous cop would take the bait. Spending Christmas alone was a lot harder than she’d thought it would be. She didn’t know how he did it every year. She’d decided to put her promise to her friends aside for one night and invite Mac inside so she wouldn’t be alone.

  She’d spotted him earlier, probably because a part of her had been secretly hoping he’d seek her out, then she’d ignored him for most of the evening. It had been thrilling knowing he was out there, watching, waiting. That’s why she’d opted to go without a bra. She was bored and lonely and a small part of her had to admit it was fun messing with McMuscles. Not to mention, no matter who he was or what her mission was, she couldn’t deny he was hot enough to melt the snow off the North Pole.

  “You can’t write me a note like that and send it with coffee,” Mac said, thrusting the cup back into her hands with a scowl on his ruggedly handsome face. “I’m gonna need something a bit stronger than this.”

  Ellen laughed. “Don’t mind me. That’s just the way I talk.” She shrugged. “You’ll get used to it.” Stepping back and opening the door wide, she said, “Come on in, Mac
Gruff, and take a load off.”

  “You’re killing me, you know.” He pulled his gaze up from the front of her shirt and stepped inside. Kicking off his boots and coat, he made a beeline for the fire, rubbing his hands in front of the warmth. It was freezing out, yet he’d sat there for hours with his car off, spying on her. He had to be cold.

  “Making you suffer was the point.” She headed for the kitchen, set the cup in the sink, and then grabbed the bottle of honey Jack Daniels and two glasses. Coming to a stop behind him, she said, “Sit.”

  He turned around and eyed her warily then took a seat on the couch. “Nice place. It suits you. Small yet oddly intriguing.”

  “Thanks, I think.” She laughed. “Will this do?”

  “Whiskey, neat,” his voice rumbled. “You’re an enigma, woman.”

  “It’s my job to keep you guessing. Call it payback because you certainly are a pro at making people wonder what you’re all about.”

  “And that would be my job.”

  “I take it you’re off duty?” She poured them both a drink, set the bottle on the coffee table, and curled up on the couch beside him.

  He took one look at her, tossed back his drink in a big gulp, and then responded, “Yeah. Considering I worked all day, I’d say the evening’s mine.”

  “Good,” she said, then threw back her own drink without so much as a wince.

  His eyelids closed halfway as he eyed her curiously. “You baffle me.”

  “Isn’t that the point of a woman?”

  “What’s this about, Patterson?”

  Deciding she was through playing games, she answered him. “A truce, for tonight anyway.” She winked. “And not wanting to be alone on Christmas, Johnson.” She held up her glass, and he poured them both another and then clinked his to hers in silent understanding.

  This time they both sipped rather than chugged. For the next hour, they drank whiskey and talked about anything and everything. The holidays had a way of doing that to people. They discussed their careers, their hobbies, movies and books they liked…anything except the personal stuff, which was what Ellen truly wanted to know. She suspected he did as well, even though he probably wouldn’t admit it. He was just as much an enigma to her. Getting to know him better probably wasn’t a good idea, given they were on opposite sides. Yet no matter how hard she tried to keep her distance, there was something about him that drew her in.