Christmas Hearts: In the Company of Snipers Read online

  Christmas Hearts

  In the Company of Snipers

  A Christmas Collection

  IRISH WINTERS

  COPYRIGHT

  Christmas Hearts

  In the Company of Snipers

  A Christmas Collection

  Copyright ©2016 by Irish Winters

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, dialogues, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Cover design and author photo by Kelli Ann Morgan,

  http://www.inspirecreativeservices.com

  Interior book design by Bob Houston, eBook Formatting

  Editor: Rocky Palmer, RVP the Man Editing, mailto:[email protected]

  ISBN Paperback: 978-1-942895-38-1

  ISBN eBook: 978-1-942895-37-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016914465

  Irish Winter’s websites: http://www.irishwinters.com

  and irishwinters.blogspot.com

  DEDICATION

  To those who truly believe…

  Table of Contents

  Puzzle Hearts

  Lost Hearts

  Warm Hearts

  Drunken Hearts

  Puppy Hearts

  Secret Hearts

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  The rest of The TEAM

  Puzzle Hearts

  Alex and Kelsey’s Christmas Story

  This story takes place the December after Alex and Kelsey survived Nick Durrant’s brutal attack in the deep forests of the Pacific Northwest. If you’d like to read how they met and fell in love, follow this link to the beginning book in the series, In the Company of Snipers: Alex, Book 1. You’ll be glad you did.

  Chapter One

  Alex Stewart, successful entrepreneur and ex-Marine (like there was such a thing), sat at his office desk staring out the window, his mind back home with his fiancée, Kelsey. The late December afternoon had turned dismal and gray. Shafts of pounding sleet hammered North Virginia, and Alexandria with it. Snow was imminent.

  The last surveillance contract of the year was date stamped, signed and filed in its appropriate folder and drawer. The final report had been properly amended and thoroughly discussed with the acting operator until Alex was certain it was above reproach. His company, The TEAM, had operated in the black all year despite a few problems. Everything was going fine—financially.

  School was officially out for the holiday. Kelsey had two week off from her kindergarten class, and at that very moment, she was probably busy baking cookies or melting up another batch of mouthwatering fudge—with walnuts, her own recipe. Maybe decorating their home with more lights for the holidays, brightening the place with seasonal cheer. Maybe a wreath. She liked Christmas. Alex didn’t.

  Humbug.

  His fingertips tapped absentmindedly at the glass top of his very organized desk. Until he’d met Kelsey, order was the way he’d lived his obsessive-compulsive life, from the five-minute shower he allowed himself in the morning to the one bottle of beer at night. Alex wasn’t one to waste time or words. He was a tidy man. A disciplined, get-to-the-point, get-it-done, or get-out-of-my-way man. A natural born team leader and hell raiser, he wasn’t afraid to lead men into battle. He never had been. He knew every last one of them would come home alive. He planned it that way. Even if it killed him.

  A hard worker and a dyed-in-the-wool patriot, he knew where he was going at the 4a.m. start of every day. Unlike most others, he planned his time on earth, because, damn it, a man never knew how many minutes he had coming.

  Alex had been given a few second chances in his thirty-some years, and he wasn’t about to waste them. He lived by hard, fast rules, the most fundamental: If you don’t plan your life, you don’t plan to do anything with it. So plan it. Live it. Do it!

  Only now…

  He didn’t have a plan. Worse, he hadn’t one solid idea of what to give the slip of a woman who’d stolen his life along with his heart. The one who’d helped him remember the gentle side of the man he used to be, the lover and protector of the most beautiful woman on earth. The one who had turned his orderly life upside down. Kelsey.

  She was literally, absolutely, his best and dearest friend, only…

  Christmas was coming, less than days away, but no, the goose was not getting fat like that stuffed bird in the Olde English carol. The stockings were not hung by the chimney with care, and there were no damned visions of sugar plums dancing in his head. God, no.

  If he had his way, Alex would never listen to another carol as long as he lived. There’d be no annoying seasonal music from August through New Years Eve, no Black Friday the day after Thanksgiving, and no happy holiday sales in the middle of sweltering Julys, either. No wreath on his door. No pine tree in his front window. No blinking Christmas lights strung along his eaves. By hell, he’d only hung those glittering reds, greens, and golds for one reason. For her. For Kelsey.

  A deep sigh escaped the confines of what used to be his hard-as-nails heart, instantly mellowing the angst that came with this time of year, this—this season of cheer. Humbug.

  Kelsey and he had been together last Christmas, but things were different then. They’d only known each other six months. They were like two kids on a perpetual honeymoon a year ago, hungry for each other’s company, and content just to be together.

  This year was different. They’d survived one hell of a near death encounter with her ex, the now deceased and moldering-in-his-grave dirtbag, Nick Durrant. Alex’s fingers curled into an automatic fist. If there were a way, he’d dig the bastard up just to kill him again after what he’d done to Kelsey. He’d send Durrant to the eternal, unending-suffering he deserved, to the deepest, darkest pit in Hell.

  How could he not? The man had made Kelsey’s marriage to him a living nightmare, then killed her two tiny boys, Tommy and Jackie, out of some sick need to please his alcoholic mother. When Alex literally stumbled across Kelsey at his cabin a year and a half ago, she’d been beaten half to death, suffering from concussion and amnesia. The amnesia turned out to be a good thing, though. It gave her the temporary reprieve she’d needed to partially heal before dealing with the devastating loss of her boys.

  Alex and Kelsey had both nearly died the night Durrant had escaped jail and come back to reek vengeance a year later. Alex had spent too much time in the hospital on death’s doorstep, but worse, in the midst of his recovery, he’d lashed out at Kelsey and sent her packing. Not one of his brighter moves. He’d found out the hard way about living without her. It just plain and simply couldn’t be done. He might be a cold-blooded son-of-a-bitch when it came to combat, but he couldn’t fight what he had with Kelsey, and he sure as hell couldn’t lose it.

  Poor, sweet Kelsey. Despite the brutal hand life had dealt her, she still had a way about her, an unwavering depth of compassion that never failed to amaze Alex. How one woman could comprise the kind of resilience she embodied humbled him, still shamed him at some level into being better than he was. Of being more than he’d ever thought he could be. Just the sight of her mellowed his ragged edges, and he ha
d plenty.

  They were an unexpected, nearly an unholy coupling. Two polar opposites. Her with her sweet, soft curves, her backside no less than a handful, and her breasts the same. Her innocent, feminine soul always full of light and hope, all good things, despite what she’d suffered. Him with the scarred body of a warrior, the heart of a cold-blooded assassin brimmed with smoldering anger and unreasonably high expectations of the world and himself. His unrepentant rage at the unfairness of life, that he should’ve been there when his wife and child died in that car crash. That at some cosmic, elemental level, their deaths were a toll extracted from his soul in exchange for the lives he’d taken in war. That somehow everything was his fault.

  Alex stuck his chin to his fist, his elbow cocked to his desk, still amazed. What does she see in me? He was nothing without that woman in his life, and he’d be the first to admit it. Kelsey was the giver of life; he, the taker. The destroyer. She was the light to his darkness, the dawn to his night, and the soul to his existence. She was his favorite daydream. And those eyes…

  It might sound like a total line, but he had really noticed them first that day on his porch. They weren’t just chocolate the morning he’d found her barely alive; they were melted chocolate. Sad and lost, but incredibly tender, he couldn’t resist falling into them. Not then. Not now. Fringed with long, thick lashes that looked like butterfly wings, her eyes never failed to draw him into their depths of wonder. He’d fallen hard.

  Despite what she’d lived through, Kelsey was not a complicated woman. Honest and gullible, she’d found a way to maintain that glass-half-full perspective of life despite her tragedy. With Alex, the glass was always empty, drained dry, and turned upside down on the bar, the next bitter serving of life refused with a hearty, ‘Hell, no.’

  But with Kelsey, he was intrinsically—more—from the moment they’d met. Those mundane put-the-garbage-out, ‘eek, a spider!’ kinds of moments of living with her, helped him remember the man he’d been before he’d sunk into depression after he’d lost his family. She’d restored him at an elemental level. She’d taught him to live again. To love again.

  When she’d smiled like a happy little girl at the simple act of his hanging strings of Christmas lights and doing it begrudgingly, well, damn it. As usual, she’d gotten through to him like no one else could. He would’ve wrapped his entire home in Christmas Vacation style lights if she’d asked, and he’d have sung ‘Jingle Bells’ while he did it.

  If there was a man who could resist the innocence sparkling in her beautiful browns, Alex didn’t know him. He surely couldn’t. Didn’t even try. Just hung the strings precisely where she’d wanted them. Made sure each bulb flickered as it should. Asked if there was anything else she needed and lived to make her happy every single day.

  Kelsey’d hugged him then, and wished him—him of all people—a very Merry Christmas. His heart hammered remembering her love spilling down on him like the first snow of winter. Like life and light. Like magic and the best of all his second chances. She turned him into a high school boy crushing on the prettiest girl in class. Yes, Alex Stewart was a better man because of her, and he knew it.

  But Christmas? That was something else all together. Who needed to celebrate it all year long? Why should he? Ridiculous. The simple one-day celebration had transformed into a treacherous capitalist scam to rescue lackluster profits in time for end-of-year consumer reports and to do it at the expense of childhood dreams. It was a trumped-up scheme to spoil every already spoiled-rotten and over-entitled kid in America with all their greedy little hearts desired. It was the one day he preferred to stay at home and lock his doors, draw his drapes, and shut the world out.

  Humbug.

  To be sure, there was a time not long past when he’d loved the day with all its secrets and surprises, but any more, the season was selfishness and greed gone wild. The twenty-fifth of December had nothing to do with the birth of any newborn babe in a manger, and certainly nothing to do with God, not that that would’ve changed his feelings of the day. Alex and God weren’t talking. Hadn’t been for years. Not since the crash that took his wife and child. Some days, he wasn’t sure the man upstairs even knew he was alive.

  He stretched the brooding, seasonal ache off his shoulder and out of his neck. But Kelsey believed, and that was the problem. Like it or not, the twenty-fifth was coming. A Christmas goose might not end up on his kitchen table, but there would be a turkey with all the fixings, in the center of it. Maybe a flaming plum pudding if Zack Lennox, one of his best operators, showed up with his butane torch like he did last year.

  A nativity scene already graced Alex’s mantle, right next to the three family portraits. The one of him with Sara and Abby. The second, an enlarged shot of Kelsey with Tommy and Jackie. The third, Alex with his arm around Kelsey.

  Alex grunted. He’d gone to Kelsey’s sister, Louise, for that one-of-a-kind Durrant family photo, a sad commentary on Kelsey’s first marriage. She looked younger then, happier, despite the monster she’d lived with. The photo of those two boys cuddled in their mama’s arms, still brought tears to her eyes when she thought Alex wasn’t looking. When he caught her remembering.

  Sweet Kelsey’s marriage to Durrant hadn’t allowed for something so simple as a family portrait. Probably a good thing, too. Alex would’ve never allowed a photo with Kelsey’s deranged ex in their house. Hell no.

  But that shot of Alex and Kelsey? She’d meant the sitting for them as a couple, but man, the photographer was slick. By the time he was through, Kelsey had bought three eleven-by-fourteen portraits, one of them as a couple, then two more of individual sittings. And Alex was glad she had.

  Yes, the photographer saw her coming, and he’d made a few more bucks than he would’ve if he’d dealt with Alex, but Alex didn’t mind. He loved that single shot of Kelsey sitting on his desk. Her face was still a little drawn in the picture, her hair short. The photographer couldn’t disguise all she’d suffered at Durrant’s cruel hand. Alex missed the silky, chocolate spirals her ex had chopped off, but little by little, it was growing back. It wouldn’t take long before it dipped lovingly over her breasts like it used to, before Alex could grab a handful to hold her pretty head in place while he smothered her in kisses.

  He wasn’t a smooth talker and, truth be known, he hadn’t known the first thing about romance during his first marriage. His second and third marriages were driven more by lust and a wrenching need to find peace again. Then along came Kelsey and all he had was his body to show her how much he loved her. So he showed her. Every chance he got.

  That was the magic of Kelsey. She wasn’t a quitter. She might look all of a hundred pounds soaking wet, but there was a different kind of fire inside that diminutive, gentle woman, the kind of fire that could melt steel. All of five foot nothing, she’d certainly had Alex wrapped and whipped at first sight. With one glance up from his busy workday, there she was again, smiling, always believing in him, and faithfully waiting for him to come home to her. Filling him with love and light he didn’t deserve. With joy. With all good things…

  God, he wished he could go back in time and save her from the mistake she’d married. From having to learn the hard way that not all men could be changed or saved. That some people were nothing more than born predators, not worth the skin they walked around in.

  Christmas is coming. What. Would. She. Like?

  Alex hadn’t a clue.

  Tap, tap, tap went his trimmed fingernails on his immaculate desk top, the extravagantly large one constructed of black granite and polished steel, the one he’d had designed for his office when he’d first started his business. The one that he, as CEO and owner of The TEAM, demanded shout “Power!” to all upon first introduction. To leave no doubt in anyone’s mind who was Boss of this ragtag outfit of ex-military snipers.

  Tap. Tap. Tap. The tiny baby wasn’t in the manger, but it would be before midnight on Christmas Eve, and damn it. There’d be a thoughtfully wrapped gift with his name on it und
er that skimpy Charlie Brown tree she’d insisted on buying, too. He had to come up with something. Quick.

  A growl scraped up his throat. So yeah. Christmas. The holiday was impossibly difficult, but now it loomed an unsolvable nightmare that had to be handled with finesse and all because of Kelsey. Her gift had to be perfect. Nothing but the best.

  He couldn’t stop daydreaming. It was odd how her broken heart had healed around his, odder still how his heart had only begun healing when he’d unexpectedly run into her. She was pretty broken up back then. She’d just lost her boys. Alex thought he was being the hero by bringing her into his pitiful excuse of a home, but the truth turned out to be the exact opposite. He hadn’t saved her as much as she’d saved him.

  If he’d still been talking with God, he’d ask the guy why the hell He’d brought two such busted-up people together? What was He thinking? Was this one of His damned miracles?

  Well, yeah.

  Alex snorted, still mad at God. Still searching for a way forward, but damn. He couldn’t deny it. That was precisely what he’d gotten out of the trade—a miracle. He’d gotten Kelsey.

  From that first meeting at his cabin, his broken heart wasn’t so raw or so bloody. He’d discovered he wasn’t angry every second of every day. He’d found he could draw in full, deep breaths that didn’t hurt like a mother. The sucking chest wound he’d lived with since he’d gotten the news in far off Iraq of the fatal crash no longer ruled his soul. That first dark night in his cabin, with Kelsey in one room and him in the other, was the first in four long years he’d gotten a decent, uninterrupted sleep. He’d dreamt of his little girl. The dream had actually felt—good.

  It was the strangest thing. Kelsey had needed him so desperately those first few days, and she’d been badly hurt and confused, but God—yes, God—must’ve known what He was doing after all. Alex could accept that much. He wasn’t ready to go back to church, but he could admit to the hand of a loving God in his life.