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just how he felt.
    The top of the dog's head scraped the roof of the car. His big, powerful body looked cramped in the low-slung passenger seat and Jack told himself that was the problem. The dog only looked gigantic because he was sitting in a Mustang. If Jack had had a bigger car—like, say, a Greyhound bus—the dog would look normal.
    "Does he have to stare at me like that?" Jack asked, never breaking eye contact with the dog.
    "Like what?"
    He leaned farther away from the mutt and told himself it was caution, not fear. "Like I'm a Scooby Snack."
    Laughter bubbled from the back seat and the sound of

    it was ... good. He didn't want to think about why—so he added it to the already long list of things he wasn't going to think about.
    "Quinn, stop scaring the sheriff." "Who said anything about being scared?" "I'm sure you are, but it's not manly to admit it." "Even mountain men walked a wide path around a bear," he said tightly and ordered himself to ignore the dog still staring at him.
    Scowling, he flicked her a glance, while listening to the dog, whose grumbling sounded sort of like thunder from a cloud hovering three feet over your head. In the yellow glow of the fog lamps lining the street, the blond streaks in Carol's hair shone with a golden light.
    She was tall and he knew she couldn't have been too comfortable in the back seat of a Mustang. But she didn't seem to mind while sitting beside the baby. Jack could understand that. Babies tended to bring out the deepest emotions in people—good or, as he'd seen too often on the force, bad. She kept glancing at the baby, as if half-expecting it to disappear from the car seat. The whole time they'd wandered the aisles in the twenty-four-hour grocery store, she'd carried the little thing carefully—like you would a ticking time bomb. He couldn't decide if she was inexperienced with kids, worried about becoming too attached, or expecting the missing mother to come tearing into the store to reclaim her child.
    That last one probably wasn't an issue. In his experience, women who abandoned their babies didn't have a change of heart and instantly become Mother Teresa. They went on about their lives, trusting that strangers would give their child what they couldn't—or wouldn't. Jack couldn't quite figure Carol Baker out. Not many people would have reacted so emotionally to the situation.

    Most would have taken the baby to the hospital, or called the cops and then walked away—gone back to their own lives. But Carol had not only stayed with the child, but when push came to shove, she'd agreed to take the baby in.
    Why?
    Even as that one single word whispered through his mind, he told himself to back off. To put aside the old instinct to pry into motivations. He wasn't a cop any-more. He'd left that world behind—along with his old life. Now was what mattered. And now he had a temporary job in the town where he'd grown up, his old room at his mother's house, a woman with Santa on her shirt in his back seat, and an abandoned baby to investigate. Not to mention the bear.
    "So where do you live?" He practically growled the question and even he winced at his tone. She didn't seem to notice.
    "Off North Pole, left on Jingle Bell Way."
    Jack sighed.
    "I heard that," she said. "What's wrong?"
    "Just this town," he admitted as the light turned green and he stepped on the gas. "Christmas—everywhere you look Christmas in spring, summer, and fall." He shook his head and steered the car into a left-turn bay. "In LA, I'd always hear people complaining about how retailers started hawking Christmas earlier and earlier every year." He glanced at the blinking, electric Frosty the Snowman out in front of Elves' Hardware and choked out a laugh. "But here in la-la land, we get it day in and day out."
    "I like Christmas," she said.
    "Christmas is hard enough once a year. All year is a little much for anybody." Especially these days, he

    thought, and then instantly turned his mind away from