A Soldier for Christmas. Jillian Hart

hit the concrete sidewalk, jarring her back into reality. Mitch let go, and shut the door with a thump. This gave her the opportunity to step away from him.

      That rare, warm peace ebbed away like a tide rolling back out to sea. Although the sun blazed already hot on her shoulders, she shivered, as if with cold.

      “I can see the campus from here, just down the street.” Mitch pocketed his keys, his movements confident and relaxed as if he hadn’t felt a thing. As if this hadn’t affected him this way. “Do you live in the dorms?”

      Somehow she managed to make her feet carry her forward as though nothing had happened, as though she were perfectly fine. Her voice came as if from far away. “No, the dorms are too expensive. I have a little apartment three blocks from here.”

      “Any roommates?”

      “Just one.”

      “An apartment sounds good to me. Right now I have the luxury of living in the barracks.”

      “The luxury?”

      “And so much privacy. Not. I’m happier in a hootch—”

      “A hootch?”

      “A tent—” he supplied, “in a camp somewhere overseas with my team. Give me a cot and I’m home. Better yet, I’d rather be sleeping out in the bush.”

      “Really, on the ground? You like that?”

      “Sure. It’s like camping, except for the grenades and C4 explosives. I grew up in these mountains.”

      “Really? The math whiz I remember from high school didn’t look like the outdoors type.”

      “Looks are deceiving, and I was at an awkward age. Okay, a very awkward age. My dad is a forest ranger. We’re gonna take one of these weekends I have free—if I get a whole one free—and hike up into the Bridger Mountains. Spend the night. Camp. Cook river trout over a fire.”

      “Sounds very rugged. I’m more of a stay-away-from-the-mountains kind of girl.”

      “You just haven’t been properly exposed to the wilderness.”

      “Where there’s no hot water, no plumbing and no electric blankets?”

      “Those luxuries are highly overrated. Trust me.”

      “I’m a little afraid to, with an attitude like that.”

      When she smiled, sweet as candy, his emotions jumbled into a wedge in his throat. The palm of his left hand still glowed from where he’d taken hold of her arm to help her from the Jeep, and the brightness of her touch remained, calming and terrifying all at once.

      Heaven was on his side, because Kelly chose that moment to pause in front of a store window. A striped yellow-and-white awning stretched overhead and he studied the way the hem ruffled in the breeze instead of figuring out what was happening to him.

      At the back of his mind, he knew. He had a life, he had a calling, and he had eighteen months left on his contract. So how was this going to work?

      “The lady who owns this shop is a good friend of the family—well, of Joe’s family.” Her voice broke on the sound of Joe’s name. “She takes antique gems and resets them in the most beautiful jewelry you’ve ever seen. I don’t know if you’d be interested in something like that for your mom, but Holly’s work is so beautiful, it’s like giving a little piece of love.”

      Okay, that was the word he was trying to avoid.

      “Do you want to go in and look? Or I have other suggestions. We can just go down the block and there’s—”

      “No, let’s start here.” It felt like a definite step on an unknown path in the dark, when there was no light to see by. But he wasn’t bothered by the dark.

      When he opened the door, he wanted to take her by the hand. But he figured she wasn’t ready for that. She breezed past him with a rustle of her cotton dress and the tap of her shoes, and he caught again the scent of vanilla and sweetness.

      Impossibly, his heart tightened even more.