Chapter 9
It’d been a blessing in disguise, truth be told.
As much as she didn’t want to go on light duty and forfeit learning as much as she could in the field as a rookie cop, Krista was thankful for the reprieve.
Her hips were grateful, along with her feet, and she wasn’t nearly as tired come nightfall as she had been after twelve hours of being in the field handcuffing bad guys and keeping the streets safe from evildoers.
She quickly fell into an easy routine at her desk, getting her workload done in record time, and then spending the rest of her day digging into Myles’s past. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much there.
Either the guy was clean and just now starting to act like a predatory douche, or he’d managed to slip into the RCMP database and erase his files.
Krista’s money was on the latter. She just had to keep digging.
As Krista slung her bag over her shoulder and turned off her computer, she yawned and then yawned again.
Was there going to be a stir-fry waiting for her at home?
She hoped so. Brock had been up at the crack of dawn and out the door that morning, not even bothering to poke his head into her bedroom before he left, as he’d started doing, to ask how she was feeling and if she had felt “the little monkey” kick.
She missed seeing him. Missed the routine.
As stoic a man as he was, he seemed to be genuinely giddy about the idea of getting to feel the baby move.
They’d spent the night before decorating the Christmas tree they’d picked up over the weekend.
Apparently, in all his years of living in the house by himself, Brock had never put up a tree.
He said he always just went to his mother’s, so he had no decorations, not even a wreath for the door.
So, at Krista’s insistence, seeing as this was her first Christmas not spent in Tanner Ridge with her family, they filled the house with all the little hints of holiday cheer and festive delight that Krista had brought along with her from home.
But even after emptying her lone box marked “Christmas Crap,” the house and tree still seemed sparse.
So, munching on a gingerbread man and humming “Jingle Bells,” she ducked out to Walmart for more random baubles and doodads.
They spent a lovely evening building Santa’s Christmas Village and making the little elves and town people in her Christmas village do dirty and naughty things to each other.
It almost felt like they were a normal couple, preparing for their last Christmas before baby.
But she knew better.
He made it very clear whenever he shut down that they were just two people who fucked like bunnies and just happened to be having a child together.
But that didn’t stop her from making a second batch of big bulky gingerbread men, with muscly arms and pensive scowls on their faces, as she puttered away in the kitchen later that night after work.
She gooped the word “brOCK” into the center of one big gingerbread man’s chest, gave him gumdrop buttons and M big bulldozer bodies, Christmas ham hands, and dark caterpillars that bobbed and furrowed along the forehead.
Only where Brock’s hair was close-cut, this brother apparently preferred to shave it all off and was sporting a bald head beneath the ball cap.
She remembered asking Brock his brothers’ names before but couldn’t for the life of her remember them at the moment. Which one was this?
“I’m not following you,” he replied, managing a hangdog expression. But his glittering eyes betrayed him.
Krista rolled her eyes. “I’m not stupid. You’ve been following me for the last half hour. Now which brother are you, and why is Brock having me followed?”
Giant twin dimples flashed back at her, like someone had taken a nail gun to his face. “Ah, you got us.” He grinned.
Us?
She blinked and shook her head, planting her hands on her hips and hating that she had to crane her neck to look up at him. “Why is your brother having me followed?”
He scratched the back of his neck and removed his hat, revealing a very round and shapely bald head. If it weren’t for the dazzling smile and the soulful green eyes, one look at the man and you’d think “killing machine.”
“Brock said you’re having some trouble with a guy at work, so he asked us to keep an eye on you.
We don’t follow you while you’re at work …
” He looked down the aisle and then raised his eyebrows as a man of equal size with a very bald head, but no hat, came swaying toward them.
Another brother? “Well, at least not when you’re not partnered with Slade. ”