December 31^st

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10:35 p.m.

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Noah Daniels didn’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. You either did something or you didn’t. Making a list wouldn’t change a lifetime of bad habits.

One bad habit of his was forgiving Carson for his regular attempts to set Noah up. Guess when your childhood mate created New Zealand’s favorite hookup website, Kiwi Match, there was gonna be collateral damage if you were still single in your early thirties. Which Noah was. Happily single. Or, at least, satisfactorily single.

Something Carson King of the Nerds Knight failed to comprehend.

Slumped on his living room couch, Noah tapped Carson’s number and waited for him to pick up, reminding himself that as Stewart Island’s sole charge officer, he was often required to be more of a peacemaker than a cop. But if reasonable debate failed to ensure Carson had a come-to-Jesus moment, Noah would remind his mate he knew a dozen lowlifes in the Queenstown area who would happily break Carson’s perfect nose for less than a twenty.

“Pick up, asshole,” Noah ground out, then dialed his tone back to cool, calm, and not about to develop an eye tic when Carson answered with a distracted, “Yup?”

“That time Williams and Donahue cornered you in the gym? I should’ve let them shove that flute where the sun don’t shine.”

“Ah.” A weighty pause. “You got my email, then?”

“Yeah. The one I’m holding as evidence when I take you to court for being a cyber-hacker who won’t leave well enough alone.”

Carson chuckled, and in the background Noah heard the telltale rattle of his mate’s fingers dancing over a keyboard. Some people had identifying smells, like Scott, a fellow trainee in police college who chewed grape bubble gum in an attempt to break his addiction to cigarettes. Others had a catchphrase or style of clothing, or in Noah’s background experience, an unexplainable vibe that some people gave off that Scott dubbed cop scum-dar. To pick out Carson from a crowd, it was the rattle of a keyboard or the tap of his finger on one of his many electronic devices that gave him away.

“It’s not hacking when I programmed the website,” Carson said.

“It’s something illegal when you set up a fake profile and go catfishing for women.”

The email that had popped into his in-box a few moments ago had the subject line: Your New Year’s resolutions? Inside were links to the profiles of three women who Carson claimed were interested in getting together with Noah.

“Hey, I’m not a catfisher. Well, at least I was catfishing on your behalf. I used your photo and stuck to the facts. Thirty-something years old, never been married. No dependants. Steady job with responsibility. Has his own hair and all teeth accounted for. Not a douche. I was all about the honesty.”

Noah rolled his eyes so hard he nearly ruptured something in his eyeballs. “Uh-huh. Except I bet you omitted the part about me living on a remote island and, more importantly, how I’m not boyfriend material.”

“Actually, the words husband material might’ve been noted in your profile. Kidding,” Carson added quickly, correctly analyzing that Noah’s sudden silence probably meant homicidal intent. “Let’s be honest, mate. Have you got anyone lined up for a New Year’s Eve midnight snog?”

Noah ran through a mental list of the women he knew who could drop into Due South for tonight’s celebrations. Narrow that down to single women, as he had no enthusiasm for a platonic pity kiss on the cheek from one of his married friends, and it was a bloody short list.

“You think too much. I can hear your brain working overtime from here,” Carson said. “The answer’s no, isn’t it? And please tell me Mrs. Taylor isn’t an option tonight.”

Even though Carson lived in Queenstown and only occasionally flew over to the island to hang out with Noah, he knew of Mrs. T’s fearsome reputation.

“Betsy has a boyfriend now,” Noah said.

The keyboard rattling stopped abruptly. “You’re shitting me? The octogenarian is getting more sex than you?”

“Fuck off, Carson.” Sadly, his friend was probably right.

Noah pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed, slumping back against his couch and propping his feet on the coffee table. “I’m not doing the online thing with women. You know what happened to Ford Komeke, right?”

“Didn’t he get married to a super-hot chick not so long ago?” Carson asked acerbically. “I’m just trying to be your wingman, mate, so what’s your point?”

“The point is my sex life, or lack of it, is my business. So from now on use your matchmaking skills for good, not evil. Got it?” Noah snapped his mouth shut before he implied that Carson could take a long, hard look at his own sex life next time he was tempted to interfere in Noah’s. “I don’t need a wingman and I’ve given up looking for the female equivalent of a unicorn years ago.”

A gruff hmmmph echoed down the line, cynicism in each stretched out syllable.

“And shut down my profile before I end up with a crazy woman on my doorstep.” Noah glared at the phone then disconnected when a text message popped up on the screen.

CAN YOU STOP BY ON THE WAY TO THE PUB? I HAVE AN EMERGENCY.

Mrs. Taylor herself, who still wouldn’t be deterred from typing all in capitals.

He hit reply. Actual emergency or a Betsy emergency? Remember our discussion?

DON’T BE CHEEKY, came thirty seconds later.

The woman was obviously getting more efficient at typing. Yet, capitals.

I’ll be there in 5.

And with any luck, he’d be out of Betsy’s claws in the same amount of time.

10:48 p.m.

---

Betsy opened her front door with a familiar carnivorous grin and her eyes full of devilish gleam.

“I timed you,” she said and edged out of the way so he could enter. “That was seven minutes.”

Maintaining some semblance of professionalism, Noah managed to keep from a tired facepalm. “This is an official callout, is it?”

“Not exactly,” Betsy admitted. “There’s a bloody great weta crawling around my bed. Be a dear and relocate it to the woodshed, would you?”

He hooked his thumbs into his belt loops. “And you couldn’t call your boyfriend to help?”

Betsy huffed impatiently and tottered down the hallway. “At this time of night? Walter would think I was making a booty call.”

“Uh-huh. Of course that’s what he’d think being tricked into your boudoir.”

She flashed him another smile as she pointed her cane in the direction of the bedroom door. “Officer Sexy-Britches, I don’t need to trick a man into my bedroom.”

Noah grimaced at the nickname, slid out of his belt holder the little flashlight that he carried everywhere, and gamely slipped into Betsy’s bedroom. Purple and lavender, well, everything, seared into his retinas by the light of a bedside lamp. At least an unwary brown-colored insect should be easy to spot.

But what he spotted was an open laptop in the center of the purple striped comforter. He frowned at the screen for a moment until a more alert part of his brain realized there was someone staring back at him. A female someone. A female someone with a red hair, bugged-open blue eyes, and pouty, parted lips.

“Oh my God, is that a gun?” shouted the red-haired woman. “What have you freaking done to my Auntie Betsy?”

And before Noah could explain, the woman shrieked her aunt’s name over and over, loud enough to cause a deafening racket through the laptop’s small speakers.

The bedroom door popped open and Betsy poked her head around it. “Alice! Alice! Calm down—Alice!”

Noah just folded his arms, closed his eyes to stop his head from exploding from female hysteria, and waited for the storm to pass. Eventually, the screeching stopped.

He cracked an eye open to see Betsy at the foot of the bed, staring up at him.

“Well, that certainly didn’t play out as I imagined it would,” she said, then shuffled around to face the laptop screen. “Alice, dearie, I don’t believe you’ve been formally introduced to Noah Daniels, our local constabulary. Noah, this is my lovely great-niece, Alice Robinson.”

Noah slitted open his other eye and checked out Mrs. Taylor’s onscreen niece, whose splotchy cheeks and still-a-little-hysterical eyes didn’t warrant the description of lovely. Pretty, no doubt, but currently she looked more like a thoroughly pissy marmalade cat who’d been threatened with a garden hose.

Alice huffed out a breath that almost sounded like a four-letter word. “You told me you were going to the bathroom and you’d be right back,” she said. “I was not expecting some strange, enormous man to creep into your room like a pervert.”

“I wasn’t creeping like a pervert,” Noah found himself saying somewhat defensively. “I was using stealth to capture the weta your auntie claimed was in her bedroom.”

“You called the police to wrangle a weta?” Alice’s voice rose yet another half octave. “Why didn’t you get Walter to come over?”

Noah rocked back on his heels. “That’s what I said.”

Alice shook her head. “I apologize for my aunt—if you know her, you can guess what she’s up to.”

He shot a glance way down to Betsy’s lavender-shaded curls, her chin tucked down into her wattled neck like some sort of turtle.

“For Pete’s sake. Betsy?” he said.

An even guiltier look arrowed up at him. Guilty, but not repentant in the slightest.

“What? I knew Alice didn’t have a hot date tonight, and I knew you didn’t either, so I thought why not put you two in the same room together and see if you could liven things up?”

Then she showed Noah a row of her shiny white false teeth.

A choked snort came from the laptop. “How do you know I don’t have a hot date tonight?”

Betsy turned her attention back to the screen. “Because you’re still in your office, dressed in your boring beige business suit on New Year’s Eve.”

Alice muttered something that the laptop speakers didn’t pick up, but her aunt did.

“It is so boring, missy. You should be wearing a party dress and out having fun. Or at least in bed with some handsome young man, ringing in the New Year.”

That’s when Noah took a giant backward step toward the door. “And…I’m out,” he said. “Alice, I can’t say it was nice to meet you, under the circumstances. But good luck with your aunt matchmaking you with someone else.”

Betsy pouted. “But you would’ve looked so pretty together. Are you sure you don’t want me to arrange a naughty weekend away for you in my downstairs apartment? I’d throw in some strawberry flavored—”

Even from his giant step away from the laptop he could see Alice’s eyes bulge open again.

“No,” he and Alice said in unison.

Hell no. He was sure Alice was a nice lady—and God must’ve given her the patience of a saint to deal with her great-aunt—but there wasn’t the slightest flicker of attraction on his part. Or hers, if her thin-lipped grimace at him as she said goodbye was any indication.

The laptop screen went dark.

“Good night, Mrs. T,” Noah said and grinned at Betsy.

No harm, no foul. If being pranked by a mischievous octogenarian was the worst he had to deal with in his job—compared to the dangers he used to face in his old life—then he considered himself lucky.

Betsy sighed dramatically and followed him to the front door.

“Honestly, Noah,” she said as he opened it and stepped out under a million stars. “How on earth are you going to find the love of your life if you won’t even try? She’s not just going to show up on your doorstep one day, you know.”

Being a realist, the odds of love finding him at all were a million to one.

“Stranger things have happened on Stewart Island.”

Before she could argue or agree, Noah lifted a hand in silent farewell and walked away.

11:55 p.m.

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It’d been standing room only when Noah had arrived at the pub just after eleven. While a Due South New Year’s party was somewhat more subdued than, say, one of Wellington’s packed city bars, five minutes before midnight the noise level still filled the room and spilled out the open windows.

He leaned against the bar, sipping his first and only beer of the evening. While technically off duty, Noah preferred to keep a sober head on his shoulders. Part and parcel of the job when you were the only sheriff in town.

Another scan of the bar revealed three different locals whose keys he’d be forced to confiscate if they attempted to drive home, and tension brewing between a couple of young men who were about to hit the blustering stage. If they sorted their shit out without help—preferable—he’d let them be. If he judged the testosterone level was about to spike, Noah would calmly intervene. The thought didn’t raise his blood pressure in the slightest; he could do this sort of negotiation in his sleep. Petty crime was usually the worst he had to deal with here and he was grateful for it, compared to the unbelievable pressure and stresses of his life on the force back in the city.

Noah shook his head and took another sip of beer.

“Hey,” said a female voice by his side. “You thinking about knocking those two idiots’ heads together?”

He glanced down—way down—to Erin Donaldson, who looked scarily hopeful at the idea of some guy-on-guy action.

“Bloodthirsty little thing, aren’t you?” he said conversationally.

Erin shot him a knowing stare and tweaked her eyebrows up and down. Fine strands of her long blond hair had come loose from her usual French plait and curled waiflike around her face. She was as pretty as a pixie, but during their first and only ‘date’ after the embarrassing bachelor auction a few years ago, their chemistry proved to be merely an embarrassing fizzle on the fireworks scale. It hadn’t helped that they were both introverts who’d run out of things to talk about ten minutes into dinner, though once they’d agreed friends without benefits suited them better, they’d slipped into easier conversation.

“You have no idea,” she said, studying the bigger male of the duo who Noah guessed was kind of good-looking in a brutish way. “I do like a bad boy.”

Noah snorted. “Boy being the key word here. That one only looks to be about twenty-two.”

Erin hip checked him and giggled. “Guess that makes me a cougar, then.”

He’d be keeping an eye on Erin getting home tonight, too. “You’re a few years away from being cougar material,” he said.

She slitted a glance up at him and pursed her lips. “Well, you’re not. When are you going to find yourself a woman to settle down with?”

Noah’s gaze skipped restlessly around the pub again. The two guys had sorted out their shit by one of them moving to another table, he was glad to see. He spotted West giving some sort of instructions to Zach, his part-time barman who’d taken over while Kip and Carly were on vacation to the US. Conspicuously absent were West’s wife, Piper, and their little girl, no doubt tucked up and waiting for him at home. Ford was at the mic, tuning his guitar for the traditional chorus of “Auld Lang Syne” at midnight, while his wife, Holly, sat close by. Shaye and Del, finished in Due South’s kitchen for the night, were cuddled up at a corner table, momentarily ignoring everyone around them. The rest of Noah’s mates—Harley and Bree, Ben and Kezia—were at home with their kids.

With their families.

A sharp elbow prodded him, drawing his attention to his surroundings again. “No comment from tall, dark, and handsome?”

Keep it light, Noah, he instructed himself. She’s not asking for a written report on why you luck out with women. He smirked down at her. “Maybe a woman’ll have to find me.”

“Well, good luck with that.” Erin raised her glass at him in a silent toast then took a sip of her wine. “Got someone to kiss at midnight? Which is”—she checked her watch—“in less than two minutes’ time.”

“Sure.” Noah nodded toward Old Smitty leaning on the bar and yapping happily away to Zach, who appeared to be only listening with half an ear. “Smitty’s always up for it.”

Smitty looked over at the sound of his name, but not having heard the earlier part of their conversation, lifted a hand in a cheery wave and went back to bugging Zach.

Erin shook her head. “That’s just pathetic, mate.”

“I’ll just pretend I’m on duty.” Noah shrugged. “Nobody expects a cop to grab some unsuspecting woman in a public place and plant one on her.”

Erin giggled. “Maybe you should try that sometime. Make it a New Year’s resolution or something.”

They stood in amicable silence for a moment while Ford did a mic check. Soon enough, the pub roared out the countdown from ten to the New Year. Whistles, shouts, and bangs from party poppers exploded as they reached number one. Beside him, Erin whooped and tugged on his elbow. He bent to hear what she was saying, and jolted when her mouth brushed his cheek.

“Happy New Year, Officer Sexy-Britches.” With one last grin, she disappeared into the crowd, singing the first line of “Auld Lang Syne” with everyone else.

Noah held back, melting away to the rear of the pub while everyone’s attention was toward the little stage and their friends, ringing in the New Year.

One more three-hundred-and-sixty-five days down. One more year he’d lived while others…hadn’t.

He shook his head with a grimace, forcing his facial muscles to relax back into impartiality. This was not the time or place to let himself be dragged down into the pit again.

He leaned against a wall and lifted his chin, pasting an amused bystander smile on his face as he witnessed his little town celebrating. Maybe he should decide on a New Year’s resolution after all.

Resolution number one: find someone more attractive than Old Smitty to kiss this time next year.

Resolution number two: stop secretly hoping for a unicorn to appear.