Phoebe was so excited that her dad had finally made time to spend a holiday with her that she didn’t even care that it was in the middle of the woods. He had been so stressed out lately and he talked to her more than ever before, so when he asked her to join him, she couldn’t say no.

She wanted to forgive him for a lifetime of being a jerk more often than a father. He had put her and her mother aside for his career, and even in retirement the man was busier than ever. She grabbed one of the bags and her purse and headed inside. She was surprised he didn’t meet her at the door, come out and help with her bags, but he could be taking a nap for all she knew. He needed a nap. Phoebe yawned. Maybe she needed a nap. Her work ethic was a trait she definitely inherited from him. One reason why she knew he wouldn’t mind her working during this break. All she needed was a little internet access and life would be golden.

“Dad, I’m here!” Phoebe dropped her bags and began unfastening her coat. “The snow is really coming down. I’m glad I left early or I might not have made it. I don’t think we can get back down that mountain any time soon.”

“That’s a relief.” Her heart went from warm and joyful to cold and broken before turning over in her chest where it began beating hard and angry again. She let her hands grip the coat with full fury a moment then took in a deep breath before slowly letting go of the coat now on the entryway hook. She closed her eyes and tried to process what she knew was impossible. “Phoebe?”

Only it wasn’t impossible, it was real. She would not look directly at him. “Holi-Howard.” She knew that calling him Holiday was more personal than his first name and he hated his first name because he was named after his father, a man he barely knew and mostly hated. Satisfied he was glaring she continued, “What are you doing here? Where is my father?”

“Yeah, uh…about that…” She looked up at him then. He was never indecisive in the past. Her brows drew down in a scowl, but her angry heart was starting to play a different tune. He looked as good as ever, maybe even better. He lifted his arm and grabbed the back of his neck and then looked at the fire to avoid meeting her eyes. “He sent me.”

“Did he?” She practically growled. “Interesting choice of babysitter, don’t you think?”

“There’s a roast in the oven…” He still wouldn’t look at her. “It will be done soon.”

“Howard.” She had always called him by his last name because that is the name his friends were calling him when they met and it just stuck as a term of endearment, made her an insider. Later, when she learned that he hated his first name, she only used Howard when she was mad and Handsome as his pet name. He had called her Bee. Memories flooded her brain and she shook her head and the thoughts.

She started to say something else, but he looked directly at her and her words got caught in her throat along with her next breath. Intense deep blue eyes pinned her, communicated things his mouth would not say, and she gulped. “He’s in trouble?”

“I don’t know.” He let out a hard breath and looked away from her again. “He asked me to come here and to keep you safe for the next two weeks.”

“And you came.” She moved into the room and next to him. “Why?”

He looked at her again and the answer was too much. She could read him like a book, when no one else could. It was the reason they began talking that night. She had taken all his money in poker after he had taken everyone else’s. He learned that about her quickly and must have realized he was letting her in because he steeled that expression. It pissed her off so she decided to see if she could still piss him off too. “I’m with someone. You should know that. I just started dating him two months ago.”

Hurt flickered and then anger settled. She was glad he felt both of those emotions. She sure had when he broke up with her. “I’m not here to seduce you. I’m here to protect you.”

She smiled because that anger made her happy in so many ways and for more reasons than she could count. She was devastated by his rejection, his choice, and for the last five years she had punished any man around for it.

Then she met Steven and he was nothing like all the military people she had known her whole life. He cancelled meetings to have lunch with her, he adjusted his schedule to have dinner, and aside from having to split for the holiday to visit their respective parents, he had sacrificed everything to be with her. Unlike her father, and unlike Howard Holiday.

Still, watching this particular man stalk away from her in well-fitting jeans and a long sleeve shirt that emphasized all that was powerful and fit about him, made her toes and a few other places tingle a little.

“I still have a couple bags in the car.” She called after him.

“I suggest you go get them before the doors freeze shut.” He shut his bedroom door and she bit her lips to hold back the laughter. It bothered him that she had someone. She smiled wide and moved to put her coat on. She was at the last button when a thought wiped it from her face. Had he found someone else? Was he here to protect her and away from another woman, and that fact more than jealousy was what made him angry?

Suddenly, the coat was too hot. Her own anger was rolling through her in waves as she pulled out the last two of her bags and brought them inside the cabin. She didn’t stop until she was at the master bedroom. She knew he had claimed this room, but she was the one here to be protected, without her father, at Christmas, so yeah, he was going to take the smaller room, not her. She opened the door and said, “This is my room.”

“Yeah. I know it is. I was just putting these around the window sills to help block out any drafts.” He placed another long strip of something along the window and she glared at him. He had to turn sideways to get past her through the door and she refused to make that easier for him. “Excuse me.”

“I’ve been trying to do that for the past five years and yet here you are.” She glared and then regretted saying it as the effort to mask his emotions was apparent to her.

She moved aside and he walked out. She spent her time organizing her things in the room she would spend the next two weeks in. Once she got her laptop out, plugged in, and tried to connect to the internet, she groaned in frustration. Her stomach echoed that roar with a groan of its own. She realized that she had smelled the food, but he hadn’t called her to dinner.

Once in the kitchen area she propped her hands on her hips and looked at the man steadily eating. “Were you going to let me know dinner was ready?”

“Dinner’s ready.” He poked another potato with his fork and then ate it.

“Holiday, it is Christmas. Maybe we can come to some form of civilized compromise for the next two weeks.” She hadn’t realized until his lips tilted that she had called him Holiday. Ignoring that, she moved to the stove and realized all of the potatoes were gone. The roast had carrots and onions and a little bit of celery left, but not one potato. She looked at his plate and knew where they went. He knew those were her favorite. “Or maybe not since you took every potato and left me every onion.”

He licked his lips before tilting them in a devious smile. She wanted to remain mad at him, but looking at those lips reminded her of a time he smiled at her, against her lips, both pair, and suddenly all she wanted was to kiss him. She made her plate and sat across from him at the table. In a motion of pure male aggression, he put his arm on the table and in front of his plate to shield it from her.

She laughed and he glared. “Really? You’re acting like an animal now. You think I would try to steal potatoes off your plate just because you have all of them?”

She would and intended to, but he knew her well enough to know that. “Yes.”

“Why can’t you just share?” She was talking about potatoes, but when their gazes locked she knew he was not.

“Never, ever, in the history of time would I be willing to share…” He caught himself and ended with, “these…potatoes.”

He had to know what that was doing to her. Steven was at the furthest reaches of her mind, not even a thought now that she was sitting across from the man she had wanted for so long but couldn’t have. She hated him, she loved him, she hated that she loved him, but it was undeniable.

“So now you want potatoes? I remember a time when you decided that you could live without potatoes because….fuck it. I can’t do this metaphorically. Why are you here? Don’t say to protect me because anyone could have set up camp outside this cabin and my dad could have called me tonight and said he wasn’t coming or that he would be late or something and I would stay and wait like the idiot daughter I am and spend another holiday alone. You’re here this time. My mom and step-dad are in Italy where the Navy has him stationed, but I spent the summer with them so the fall holidays were set aside for my dad. I spent Thanksgiving in Florida, alone because he kept saying he would get there, but he didn’t. No one else was there to protect me. He could have sent me to Steven’s family for either holiday, but he asked me to come here alone, so what the fuck is going on?”

She hadn’t planned to dump all of that, but it was out now.

“Your dad knows Steven?” he asked and the way his brows shifted made her blood turn to ice in her veins. A feeling of uncertainty, suspicion, and something else settled into her bones. Of course, he noticed. “What is it?”

“Yeah. He knows him…sort of. I don’t really know how they know each other. Steven isn’t military; he’s a lawyer of some kind, maybe...I’m not actually sure.” She frowned in thought. She didn’t really know what he did for a living because he always turned it around to talk about her, what she did, how her day was and since her life was the last thing any other man had wanted to talk about it was easy to forget about his job. “This…no. I’m not doing this. I’m leaving.”

“You can’t leave.”

“Watch me.” She got up and went to the door a little upset he wasn’t bothering to get up and follow her to stop her. She tried to unlock it and open the door, but the lock was impossible to move and the handle was useless. “Howard?”

“You can’t leave.” He pushed his plate to the center of the table. “I’m under orders, but not from your dad. He sent me to keep you safe, but he didn’t tell me what from or why. He said to keep you here and off the grid by any means necessary and both your father and my employer believe that is the best idea for now.”

“I’m sure that didn’t involve making me your hostage.” She crossed her arms and looked at him.

“You want me to tie you up? Is that what you’re asking for? I have enough rope to do it.” He was still sitting in the chair and whether his calm was an act or real, she couldn’t tell because he was too far away for her to read his face.

It took her much longer than she would like to respond. She had never been tied up before, but all she could think about was him, doing just that, and the images, the thoughts, the desire it evoked shocked her. She stomped to the table, picked up his plate and rolled several potatoes onto hers, put his down, picked hers up. “You…you just…you!”

She stalked off to her bedroom with the sound of his chuckle at her back.

In the bedroom, she ate in silence, but her mind kept replaying the images the threat had invoked. Trust was a major issue in her life. Mostly because her family was nuts and her father unreliable. Holiday had been amazing as a partner when they were together. He cooked, he did chores, he read while she watched television, and while his focus was his work, when they went to the bedroom he placed that same attention to detail on her body. He practically lived with her until he was given orders to work for her father.

She considered her predicament and reasoned that was his hostage in some ways. She had never been free of him. Even when she met Steven, she compared everything about them. The more she thought about it, the more disappointed with herself and Steven she became. Maybe the reason she couldn’t read Steven is because she didn’t really know him. Everything was picture perfect. He was too perfect, like he knew everything she wanted from a man.

Sex with Steven, the one time they had it, was…okay. Nothing spectacular, which surprised her because a man as unselfish as he was outside of the bedroom had turned into a single-minded, self-pleasure seeking male the moment she consented. It was over before she began. She had initiated it because he never tried to and she felt as though five years was long enough, she needed to have sex with someone. He never pressed her for another round and she didn’t offer again. All of this made the man less appealing and more suspicious now. Had he even wanted her to begin with? Who was he?

She considered the man she shared this cabin with. In a lot of ways Holiday had been single minded in his objectives, but he was at his best when his mission was to please her in her bedroom, or the car, or the movie theatre, or…she sighed heavily and got up from the desk. She put on her pajamas before taking the plate back to the kitchen.

He had already cleaned it up and put the leftover pot roast in the refrigerator. She looked at the contents in the ice box and contemplated making some hot chocolate.

Hot chocolate just brought back a fresh wave of memories. They had six months together before he was assigned the new location that landed him in her father’s chain of command. She thought he was going to propose, but within three weeks he broke up with her.

“Are you getting something out of there or just wasting electricity?” Holiday’s voice startled her. She closed the refrigerator door and turned to look at him. He was in pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. Bare feet made her think of bare everything and the next thing she knew she was closing the door and the distance between them.

He was stunned, she could tell because he took two steps backward before his arm wrapped around her and his hand settled on the small of her back. She continued her assault on his lips until he relented and began to kiss her back. The relief of his surrender made her body heat up and her hands bolder. She slid her hand up the back of his neck and into his hair. It was still short, but not in the same way he used to keep it.

She pulled back and looked at him with a new sense of realization. “You said current employer.”

“I’m out.” He studied her face, let his grip loosen and stepped back once more without her attached to him this time.

“When?” She was trying to process it all. Her father being in trouble, up to something, into something was not a surprise to her. Holiday, on the other hand, was shocking. “What happened?”

He stepped sideways around her and then went to the living room area and the couch where he took a seat. She followed and sat next to him. He shrugged his left shoulder. “I decided that I wanted more than the military. I didn’t want to turn into your father. I want to be a father. I want a family. I’ve never really had one, you know that.”

“So you get a job doing this?” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine a woman thinking it would be okay for you to spend two weeks in a cabin with me.”

“I hadn’t considered that. Honestly, I just wanted to be a part of the Omega Team. I wasn’t planning to do one-on-one security, more along the lines of tech.” He looked away from her and at the fireplace. The cabin had central heat and air, so it was more decorative than functional. “You still working for that same contractor?”

“They just lost the renewal, so as of the end of November, no. Lately, I’ve actually been looking for jobs that have nothing to do with the military. I’ve been doing some consulting on the side, but nothing permanent or stable.” She relaxed against the sofa and stared at the pretty flames of the electric fireplace. “I might start teaching in January. The principle at the high school thought I would make a great math teacher and he said he could give me time to get the tests and certifications through some program the state offers. I was hoping to put together some lesson plans over this break. He has a teacher about to go on maternity leave so it’s just a matter of timing.”

“Sounds like you’re on your way to having everything you want.” He tilted his head, looked at his wrist, and then held up a hand to her while putting a finger up to his lips in a shushing motion.

Phoebe could feel every muscle in her body tighten and fear surged through her as she followed him, wordlessly to her bedroom where he shut the door and left her there alone. She couldn’t hear him.

“It’s okay, Phoebe. Just a family of deer passing through.” He opened the door.

She was a nervous wreck. “A family of deer? Are you kidding me?”

“I knew the sensor was tripped, I couldn’t see what it was on my watch.” Then he realized she was freaking out. He moved in to hug her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. We need to come up with a system here.”

“How about our system is you don’t leave me like that again, ever.” She gripped him tight and fought back the tears threatening to spill over. “I’m never going to get to sleep now.”

“Hey, sure you will. I’ll go make some tea and then I’ll tuck you in, read you a bedtime story. It will be like old times.” He placed a kiss on her forehead.

“In old times you didn’t sleep in the room next door.” She sniffed. He gulped. He nodded. “So you’ll stay with me?”

He nodded again.

“Okay.”