Three Nights before Christmas by Kat Latham

it tip over into the snow with a soft pffft .
    A movement at the edge of the area they were clearing caught her eye. A man in a thick blue jacket, jeans, and snow boots made his way to her.
    She tried to hide her dismay from her face, but it got tougher every day. Austin trudged over the snow until he stood a few feet away, eying the chainsaw in a way that showed he knew exactly what she could do with it if she were angry enough.
    She was angry enough.
    But she wasn’t stupid enough—despite what he’d once said about her in court.
    Criminally stupid.
    She set the chainsaw on the fallen tree, clenched her fists and tried to take deep breaths to calm her rage. But she couldn’t fill her lungs deeply enough to get at the source of that rage. She couldn’t catch enough breath to cool the fire in her belly.
    Her impotence made her eyes sting and blur, which pissed her off even more because she didn’t want Austin to think he’d made her cry. And she wasn’t crying, exactly. These tears weren’t from pain or sorrow. They sprang from somewhere far deeper, an abyss that had opened up at the moment of her arrest and grown larger after it.
    “Nice work,” Austin said calmly, gesturing at the tree.
    “Fuck you.”
    He blinked and so did she. She hadn’t intended the words to come out. In her head rang Thank you, Officer. What can I do for you today? Yet it seemed her heart was doing the talking, not her head. And now that she started, she couldn’t stop. She cleared the distance between them in two steps, her finger pointing at the middle of his chest but being careful not to touch him. She’d been too well conditioned never to touch an officer of the law. That was how body parts got yanked from their sockets and time inside got extended.
    “I said fuck you,” she repeated, even though he hadn’t asked her to. It just felt good, and she’d needed to underline it. “Every time you come here, I have to call my parole officer and tell him I’ve had another brush with the law, and I’m sick of it. If you want to search the place, search it. If you want to search me, search me.”
    The words cost her a hell of a lot. She desperately wanted to say get a warrant , but she no longer had the right to that kind of physical security. He didn’t need probable cause or reasonable suspicion or anything else. The fact she was a parolee was the only cause he needed to treat her like a suspect.
    “Whatever you’re here for, whatever you’re looking for, just do it already and leave me to get on with my life. That’s all I want to do. Just get on with my life !”
    The few birds that hadn’t made it farther south shot from the trees as her shout shook the air. Austin’s jaw tensed, but for once he wasn’t wearing those dark glasses and his eyes didn’t show the anger she expected to see, given the stiffness of his stance. In fact, now that she took a second to look at him, she realized something her brain had been slow to pick up on.
    He wasn’t in uniform.
    Her brows drew together in confusion. “Please tell me you’re not here to buy a tree.”
    A corner of his mouth twitched. “I’m not.”
    “Okay, then please tell me you’re not here to arrest me.”
    “Have you done something I should—” He shook his head. “Sorry, force of habit. I’m not here to arrest you.”
    Sorry . He’d said sorry—just in passing, in the conversational way of people who didn’t think they had anything to apologize for except impoliteness. But still, Officer Austin Wilder had said sorry.
    That took some of the fire out of her.
    “You don’t want a tree and you’re not going to arrest me.” She lifted her arms and let them fall in bafflement. “I’m stumped. Why are you here?”
    His throat worked as he swallowed. “I need a favor.”
    Her brows shot up and her jaw unhinged. Sounds ground out from the back of her throat, but they weren’t word-like at all.
    “A big favor.”
    She tried to shake herself from her stupor,