The Twilight Before Christmas Read Free Page A

gentleman to point out to his brother that Kate was holding his hands. Looking down at her, he saw faint color steal under her skin. Reluctantly, he stepped away from her. The wind tugged at tendrils of her hair, but it only made her look more alluring. “Sorry, Kate. This is the first time in a while we’ve had an earthquake shake us up so hard.” He raked his fingers through his dark hair in agitation, searching for something brilliant to say to keep her there. His mind was blank. Totally blank. Kate turned back to her horse. He began to feel desperate. He was a grown man, hardworking, some said brilliant when it came to designing, and most women quite frankly threw themselves at him, but Kate calmly gathered the reins of her horse, no weak knees, completely unaffected by his presence. He wiped the sweat suddenly beading on his forehead, leaving a smear of dirt behind.
    “Kate.” It came out softly.
    Danny stuck his head out the window on the driver’s side. “Do you want a little help with the old mill, Kate? Matt actually is fairly decent at that sort of thing. He obviously can’t drive, and he can’t talk, but he’s hell on wheels with renovations.”
    Kate’s eyes lit up. “I would love that, Matthew, but I really wouldn’t want to presume on our friendship. It would have to be a business arrangement.”
    Matt hadn’t realized she thought of them as friends. Kate rarely spoke to him, other than their strange, brief conversations when they’d run into one another by chance during her high school years. He liked the idea of being friends with her. Every cell in his body went on alert when she was near him, it always happened that way, even when she’d been a teenager and he’d been in his first years of college. Kate had always brought out his protective instincts, but mostly he’d felt he had to protect her from his own attraction to her. That had been distasteful to a man like Matt. He had taken his secret fantasies of her to every foreign country he’d been sent to. She had shared his days and nights in the jungles and deserts, in the worst of situations, and the memory of her had gotten him home. Now, a full-grown man who had fought wars and had more than enough life experience to give him confidence, he found he could speak easily and naturally to any other woman. Only Kate made him tongue-tied. He’d take friendship with her. At least it was a start. “Tell me when you want me to take a look, Kate, and I’ll arrange my schedule accordingly. Being my own boss has its advantages.”
    “Then I’m going to take advantage of your generous offer and ask if you could go out there with me tomorrow afternoon. Do you think you can manage it that soon? I wouldn’t ask, but I’m trying to get this project off the ground as soon as possible.”
    “It sounds great. I’ll pick you up at the cliff house around four. You are staying there with your sisters, aren’t you?”
    Kate nodded and turned to watch the sheriff cruise up behind the pickup truck. Matt watched her face, mainly because he couldn’t tear his gaze away from her. Her smile was gracious, friendly even, but he was aware even before he turned his head that the man getting out of the sheriff’s cruiser was Jonas Harrington. It occurred to him that he knew Kate far too well, her every expression. And that meant he had spent too much time watching her. Kate was smiling, but she had stiffened just that little bit. She always did that around Jonas. All of her sisters did. For the first time he wondered why Kate reacted that way.
    “Well, Kate, I see you caused another accident,” Jonas said in greeting. He shook Matt’s hand and clapped him on the back. “The Drake sisters have a tendency to wreak havoc everywhere they go.” He winked at Matt.
    Kate simply lifted an eyebrow. “You’ve been saying that since we were children.”
    Jonas leaned over to brush a casual kiss along Kate’s cheek. Something black and lethal, whose existence