Her Christmas SEAL (When SEALs Come Home Book 7) (2 page)

And the two killer dimples that twinkled up at me made me think… things. Bad, filthy, never-to-be-admitted-to things. She was one of a kind, and I’d always stuck a little too close to her.

Shitfuckdamn. Holly was off-limits, and seeing her just reminded me of what I couldn’t have. I didn’t know what reasons had brought her to Strong and my mountain, but I knew one thing. I was in trouble.

“Jacks Benson,” she said, and I was pretty sure I’d never heard my name pronounced in quite that tone of disgust before. Today was definitely a day for firsts. Since I wasn’t currently going anywhere, I took my time answering.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know me,” she continued.

I couldn’t help but notice she wasn’t making any move toward the knife—or helping me down. Figured. Holly Clark never had liked me. Not one teeny, tiny, sweet little bit.

“You’re hard to forget, babe.” For instance, I had the memory of her accepting the marriage proposal of her dickwad boyfriend burned into my brain. While she’d let the guy stick his tongue down her throat and his hands up her shirt, I’d guaranteed the immediate end of my employment at the local drive-in theater by illuminating her R-rated kiss with the drive-in’s spotlights. Honestly, I wasn’t sure why I’d done it—except that she’d fascinated me and pissed me off from the first day we’d met as kids—but that kind of history probably explained the evil grin playing across her face. She’d spotted an opportunity for payback in my current stuck-in-a-tree predicament.

Still, I’d never put her in any danger. I’d looked out for her even. I’d kept an eye on her high school dates, made sure none of those boys went too far, too fast. She made another slow, leisurely snow angel, and my blood pressure—and my dick—shot up. Holly had always been pretty, and she’d only gotten more so since I’d last seen her eight years ago.

Even mummified in all that crazy flannel, she had gorgeous boobs. The edge of a baby-blue T-shirt peeked out from beneath the checks, and her faded jeans sported more tears than my chute. It was hard to miss the shadows under her eyes though, and her cheeks were all angles. Someone hadn’t done a good job of looking out for her, and kicking that someone’s ass was gonna be fun.

So it was too damned bad she was married.

“You gonna help?” I snapped. Being noble didn’t agree with me. Kind of made me pissy in fact. So what if I’d realized too late that her picking some other guy for her happily-ever-after was the
last
thing I’d been gunning for?

She stared at me, then leaned up on her elbows. Naturally, her fingers didn’t so much as twitch toward my knife. “Nope.”

Not the words I was expecting to hear come out of her mouth.

“That a categorical refusal to come near me, or can we negotiate?”

Her grin got wider, and she fished in her shirt pocket and came up with a phone. Bright pink flamingoes danced across the case, and the lens was cracked in a dozen places, but sure enough she pointed the thing at me.

“Say cheese.”

Guess that was my answer right there. I liked to think I was a good sport, but no way I handed her that kind of ammo.

“You take pics,” I warned her, “and I take them back.”

She shrugged, looking downright unconcerned. “You got to get down first, big guy.”

True enough.

My balls were halfway to frozen despite the heated incentive of staring at Holly. The wind had picked up, the clouds were moving in, and we’d have full-on dark in two hours.

“I need the knife,” I told her.

“Uh-huh.” She made another leisurely snow angel, like she had all the time in the world. “I can sure see that.”

“Would it kill you to help me out?” I twisted, trying to get a better look at how I’d hung up. At least one branch had torn through the back of my jumpsuit—I was probably lucky I wasn’t bleeding out on her. I had chute strings wrapped around one arm and—defying all laws of physics—part of the chute itself twisted around my ankles. I was like one enormous, messed-up Jenga puzzle.

She flashed me a grin. “Helping you out wouldn’t be as much fun.”

“Payback’s gonna be a bitch,” I warned.

Growing up, we’d always traded tricks. I did something. She answered with something a little bigger. And then I did something bigger and badder. Our whole relationship could be described in terms of an arms race and nuclear escalation, with detonation a regular occurrence. Not that I really minded the twinkle in her eyes, but it was the principle of the thing.

“Why is payback always female?”

I’d forgotten how Holly’s mind worked—or leaped and twirled from point to point like some kind of crack-smoking ballerina. I’m sure it all made sense inside her head, but most of the time she left me reeling. She wasn’t done dredging up my past sins either.

“You weren’t nice to me before,” she continued, like thoughts A and B were clearly connected. Maybe they were in her universe.

“We met when I was twelve. I enlisted when I was eighteen. You gonna hold six teenage years against me forever?” Staring down at her baby browns, that suddenly seemed like a lame excuse. I could have been nicer. Fuck. That was probably why she’d ended up wearing Mr. Dick’s wedding ring and there hadn’t been any room left for me.

“You pranked me every day,” she accused me and then proceeded to rattle off a list of my misdemeanors. She’d all but alphabetized my shit. Her tirade included multiple water-balloon attacks, lockers glued shut, and my replacing her hairspray with blue hair color. That last one had been pretty funny.

In my defense, she’d tied me in knots. Apparently I hadn’t realized just how much—or how tight—until now. The branch creaked again, reminding me that I was on a deadline here. An uncontrolled fall to the ground via about four thousand spiky ponderosa branches wouldn’t do me any favors. I needed to get down.

Time to go on the offensive. “We went to school in Concord.” And since Concord—and our trailer park—was miles away, Holly was the last person I’d expected to see in the middle of the forest. “What are you doing here?”

She shrugged. “I work here.”

I made a production out of looking around. “I don’t see an art gallery.”

She’d been dead set on owning her own art gallery. She’d collected all the crap we drew in school and set it up when she was younger. I’d been roped into “viewings” on more than one occasion and had dutifully shuffled past the pictures. Since Holly was nothing if not determined, I figured she probably had at least a half dozen galleries by now. But as galleries were city material—rather than mountain material—her presence
here
remained a mystery.

She gave me a look I couldn’t interpret, but that was nothing new. “I work on a Christmas tree farm.”

Definitely not an art gallery, but maybe she enjoyed the work? I jumped out of planes for a living, so I wasn’t gonna judge her.

“So where’s Mr. Holly?” Wherever the fuck he was, he wasn’t glued to her side, and he damned certain wasn’t looking after her. I might be stuck halfway up a tree, but certain things were clear. She looked tired. She was alone. It was starting to get dark.

I couldn’t make out a ring beneath those ridiculous pink and green gloves she wore. She needed something tougher to go tipping.

She bit her lip, then glared up at me with the stubborn look I recognized. Usually it preceded her doing something particularly foul in the interests of
evening the score
or
paying me back
. Wasn’t like I had anywhere to be though. I was stranded in the ponderosa, facing a two-mile hike in the dusk. I’d far rather be here with her, so I could wait all night for her answer.

“I’m a failure,” she tossed off finally.

I didn’t believe that for a moment. Sure there was no such thing as insta-success, although I kinda would have liked that for her, but Holly didn’t know how to give up. She went after what she wanted, and I’d always liked that about her even if it had led her straight to Mr. Dick.

“There’s no more Mr. Holly,” she said, after the silence had stretched on for too long. “We got a divorce.”

Jesus.

Christ.

I still had it bad for her, didn’t I? One of the last times I’d seen Holly, she’d been glued to the side of her new fiancé. She’d flashed a teeny-tiny rock at me and then demanded I congratulate her. The reality of the stone had sunk in as I’d taken in the guy’s arm wrapped around her waist. Yeah. Fucker knew he’d lucked into the best thing ever to happen to him. I’d realized—too little, too late—that I wanted to be her man. I’d never made a move on her, hadn’t said a word. She wasn’t a mind reader, and she’d gone guy shopping and picked out a happily-ever-after that didn’t include me. Truth was, that hurt worse than crash-landing in any ponderosa pine.

So if Holly had ditched her mister, I had a second chance.

But first I had to get down out of this goddamned tree. Reaching up, I started to unlace my boots.

“What are you doing?” I hadn’t known her eyes could get that wide—and she hadn’t even seen my best parts yet.

“I’m getting naked,” I told her. “Which means I’m gonna shuck my clothes so I can shimmy out of my current predicament. That’s step one in my plan. Step two involves me climbing down this tree, collecting my knife, climbing
back
up, and cutting my clothes free.”

I kept step three to myself, because that was the part where I either kissed her senseless or convinced her she wanted to go out on a date with a slightly banged-up smoke jumper and former SEAL.

A pink blush tinged her cheeks. It was kinda cute. “That’s a complicated plan.”

And she was a complicated woman, I was cold, and my branch was about to break and plant my sorry ass on the ground. “You got a better one?”

I set to work on the second boot. In another thirty seconds, I was going to be freezing my ass off, and she was going to get her own personal Chippendales show. If I was lucky, that would jumpstart step three of the plan. If I wasn’t lucky? She’d either run down the mountain screaming or whip out that camera of hers again. I’d deal with it when it happened.

“You could ask. Nicely.” She shrugged. “I’d bet the word
please
wouldn’t even kill you. And you can add a promise to that. I want to hear you say you’re going to behave yourself.”

I shook my head, frustrated but out of options. “Please.”

The word came out more growl than not, but her face lit up. Who knew six letters were the key to winning her over? I made a mental note to say the word a whole lot more around her. I’d be happy to
please
her in bed. For instance.

It took three tries for her to lob the blade high enough for me to catch it. I didn’t like her tossing knives around, but I also didn’t like her being alone on the mountain. She didn’t have the right boots, she wasn’t wearing enough clothing, and I was pretty sure she’d cut her fingers on those damned pine tips. She was supposed to be happy and safe—that was the principle behind why I’d joined the SEALs. Guys like me fought so girls like her could enjoy the right kind of life. No one got to her on my watch or tried to tell her how to be. She even got to marry Mr. Douche Bag. So why was she out in the woods by herself?

JACKS

Lucky
Paws Christmas Tree Farm was located twenty miles outside of Strong. I hadn’t had much call to go out there in the two years I’d been living in Strong and working for Donovan Brothers as a smoke jumper, but local gossip claimed that Lucky, the owner, had gone into Christmas tree farming some twenty years ago, determined to make a quick buck growing trees. The Christmas business had turned out to be anything but quick since the trees took a good ten years to mature, but Lucky had hung in there. Somewhere along the line, the man had expanded. The billboard—sporting an animated reindeer head—announced sixty acres of cut-your-own trees, a Santa’s village, a sleigh ride, Ye Olde Christmas Shoppe, and ice skating. I’d rather have stormed an insurgent stronghold with my bare hands than gone Christmas shopping, but there you had it. My Holly was in there. A guy did what he had to do.

When I pulled my truck into the lot, the place was already bustling. Kids were running around, shrieking, and climbing on everything that didn’t blink, whir, or chime out Christmas carols. A fat guy in a red suit shoved a candy cane at me and pointed in the general direction of the trees. I fell in with the crowd, looking for Holly.

Finding her turned out to be surprisingly easy. She met me at the entrance of the tree lot, although I doubted it was on purpose. She kind of did a double take when she saw me, like only the Easter Bunny would have been less expected. She was just going to have to get used to having me around, I decided.

I liked today’s outfit way better than yesterday’s lumberjack look, but maybe that was because she was mostly naked. She was dressed as an elf in a short green skirt that barely skimmed the top of her thighs. A matching green jacket hugged her boobs, and even though her “fur” cuffs appeared to be mid molt, I was a happy man. As an added bonus, the red-and-white-striped stockings had me wondering if they went all the way up—or stopped just under her hem. And if she’d let me find out or kick me with her steel-toed boots. Those boots were the only practical thing about her employee uniform.

“Put your tongue back in your mouth,” she snapped. That’s my Holly. She’d always called me on my shit.

I grinned at her. “Just appreciating the view, babe.”

Fortunately for me, I was wearing steel toes too. Barely felt it when she took a shortcut across my foot.

She mumbled something that sure sounded like it would put her on Santa’s naughty list. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t look like the kind of guy who gets his Christmas shopping done early?”

She snorted. “How long have we known each other?”

Twelve years and nowhere near long enough. “I want to pick out a tree.” I pointed to the pin fixed on her right boob. “According to that, you’re gonna bring the ax and help me find the tree of my dreams.”

“You don’t really want a tree.” She folded her arms over her chest as if that could erase the perky claim of her nametag.

“You telling a paying customer what he does or doesn’t want?” We’d had this conversation once back in high school, when she’d been working at the local Dairy Queen. Then we’d squabbled over ice cream, but I’d learned that I had an important ally in her boss. Money talked.