Читать книгу His For Christmas - Michelle Douglas, Cara Colter - Страница 10

HE NEVER WANTED TO see her again.

Morgan McGuire was stirring things up in Nate Hathoway that did not need stirring.

That impulse to kiss her cheek was the last impulse he intended to follow. It had been like kissing the petals of a rose, so soft, so yielding. Touching the exquisite softness of her with his lips had made him acutely aware of a vast empty spot in his life.

As had spending a day with her, her laughter, her enthusiasm, contagious.

So, it was an easy decision. No more Morgan McGuire.

Nate, alone in his workshop, vowed it out loud. “I won’t see her again. Won’t have anything to do with her.”

There. His and Ace’s lives felt complicated enough without adding the potential messiness of a relationship with the teacher.

Relationship? That was exactly why he wasn’t seeing her again. A day—shopping of all things—made him think of the sassy schoolteacher in terms of a relationship?

No. He was setting his mind against it, and that was that.

One thing every single person in this town knew about Nate Hathoway: his discipline was legendary. When he said something, it happened.

It was that kind of discipline that had allowed him to take a forge—a relic from a past age that had not provided a decent living for the past two generations of Hathoway blacksmiths—and bend it to his vision for its future.

His own father had been skeptical, but then he was a Hathoway, and skepticism ran deep through the men in this family. So did hard work and hell-raising.

Cindy and David had been raised in the same kind of families as his. Solidly blue-collar, poor, proud. The three of them had been the musketeers, their friendship shielding them from the scorn of their wealthier classmates.

While his solution to the grinding poverty of his childhood had been the forge, David’s had been the army. He felt the military would be his ticket to an education, to being able to provide for Cindy after he married her.

Instead, he’d come home in a flag-draped box.

You look after her if anything happens to me.

And so Nate had.

She’d never been quite the same, some laughter gone from her forever, but the baby had helped. Still, they had had a good relationship, a strong partnership, loyalty to each other and commitment to family.

Her loss had plunged him into an abyss that he had been able to avoid when David had died. Now he walked with an ever present and terrifying awareness that all a man’s strength could not protect those he loved entirely. A man’s certainty in his ability to control his world was an illusion. A man could no more hold back tragedy than he could hold back waves crashing onto a shore.

Nate felt Cindy’s loss sharply. But at the same time he felt some loss of himself.

Still, thinking of her now, Nate was aware Cindy would never have flinched from such a mild curse as damn.

And he was almost guiltily aware Cindy’s scent per-meating the interior of a vehicle had never filled him with such an intense sense of longing. For things he couldn’t have.

Someone like Morgan McGuire could never fit into his world. His was a world without delicacy, since Cindy’s death it had become even more a man’s world.

“So, no more.”

What about Ace in this world that was so without soft edges?

Well, he told himself, it had changed from the world of his childhood. It wasn’t hardscrabble anymore. It wasn’t the grinding poverty he had grown up with. The merciless teasing from his childhood—about his worn shoes, faded shirts, near-empty lunchbox—sat with him still. And made him proud.

And mean if need be.

Not that there had been even a hint of anyone looking down their noses at him for a long, long time.

Partly in respect for his fists.

Mostly because within two years of Nate taking over the forge—pouring his blood and his grit and his pure will into it—it had turned around.

The success of the forge was beyond anything he could have imagined for himself. He did commissions. He had custom orders well into next year. He sold his stock items as fast as he could make them.

Nate’s success had paid off the mortgages on this property, financed his parents’ retirement to Florida, allowed him things that a few years ago he would have considered unattainable luxuries. He could have any one of those antique cars he liked when he decided which one he wanted. He even had a college fund for Ace.

Still, there was no room for a woman like Morgan McGuire in his world.

Because he had success. And stuff.

And those things could satisfy without threatening, without coming close to that place inside of him he did not want touched.

But she could touch it. Morgan McGuire could not only touch it, but fill it. Make him aware of empty spaces he had been just as happy not knowing about.

He was suddenly aware she was there, in the forge, as if thinking about her alone could conjure her.

How did he know it was her?

A scent on the air, a feeling on the back of his neck as the door had opened almost silently and then closed again?

No. She was the only one who had ever ignored that Go Away sign.

Now, based on the strength of their shared shopping trip—and probably on that kiss he so regretted—she came right up to the hearth, stood beside him, watching intently as he worked.

Her perfume filled his space, filled him with that same intense longing he had become aware of in the truck. What was it, exactly? A promise of softness? He steeled himself against it, squinted into the fire, used the bellows to raise the heat and the flames yet higher.

Only then did he steal a glance at her. Nate willed himself to tell her to go away, and was astonished that his legendary discipline failed him. Completely.

Morgan’s luscious auburn hair was scooped back in a ponytail that was falling out. The light from the flame made the strands of red shine with a life of their own.

The schoolteacher had on no makeup, but even without it her eyes shimmered a shade of green so pure that it put emeralds to shame. She did have something on her lips that gave them the most enticing little shine. She watched what he was doing without interrupting, and somehow his space did not feel compromised at all by her being here.

“Hi,” he heard himself saying. Not exactly friendly, but not go away, either.

“Hi. What are you making?”

“It’s part of a wrought iron gate for the entrance of a historic estate in Savannah, Georgia. A commission.”

“It’s fantastic.” She had moved over to parts he had laid out on his worktable, piecing it together like a puzzle before assembling it.

He glanced at her again, saw she must have walked here. She was bundled up against the cold in a pink jacket and mittens that one of her students could have worn. Her cheeks glowed from being outside.

Nate saw how deeply she meant it about his work. His work had been praised by both artists and smithies around the world.

It grated that her praise meant so much. No wonder she had all those first graders eating out of the palm of her hand.

“I just wanted to drop by and let you know what a good week it’s been for Cecilia.”

“Because of the clothes?” he asked, and then snorted with disdain. “We live in a superficial world when six-year-olds are being judged by their fashion statements, Miss Morgan.”

He was aware, since he hadn’t just told her out and out to go away, of wanting to bicker with her, to get her out that door one way or another.

Because despite his legendary discipline, being around her made that yearning nip at him, like a small aggravating dog that wouldn’t be quiet.

But she didn’t look any more perturbed by his deliberate cynicism than she had when she told him not to cuss. “It’s not just because of the clothes, but because she feels different. Like she fits in. It’s given her confidence.”

“I have confidence. I never had nice clothes growing up.”

Now why had he gone and said that? He glanced at her. Her eyes were on him, soft, inviting him to say more.

Which he wasn’t going to!

“Thanks for dropping by. And the Ace update. You could have sent a note.”

She still looked unoffended. In fact, she smiled. He wished she wouldn’t do that. Smile.

It made him want to lay every hurt he had ever felt at her feet.

“We both know you don’t read my notes.”

If he promised he would read them from now on would she go away? He doubted it.

“I actually needed to see you. I need you to sign this permission slip for Cecilia to participate in The Christmas Angel. Rehearsals will be starting next week.”

“I’m sick of hearing about The Christmas Angel,” he said gruffly. “The whole town has gone nuts. I don’t like Christmas. I don’t like Wesley Wellhaven. And I really don’t like The Christmas Angel.”

She was silent for a moment. A sane person would have backed out the door and away from his show of ire. She didn’t.

“Perhaps you should post a Grinch Lives Here sign above your Go Away sign.”

“My wife was in an accident on Christmas Eve. She died on Christmas Day. It will be two years this year. Somehow that takes the ho-ho-ho out of the season.”

He said it flatly, but he knew, somehow, despite his resolve to be indifferent to Morgan, he wasn’t.

He didn’t want her sympathy. He hated sympathy.

It was something else he wanted from her. When he put his finger on it, it astonished him. To not be so alone with it anymore.

To be able to tell someone that he had not been able to stop Cindy’s excruciating pain. That he had been relieved when she died because she didn’t have to be in pain anymore.

That through all that pain, she had looked pleased somehow, going to be with the one she truly loved. And through all that pain, she had looked at him and said finally, seconds before she died, with absolute calm and absolute certainty, You’ve been my angel, Hath. Now I’ll be yours.

And he hated that he wanted to tell Morgan McGuire that, as if it was any of her business. He hated that he wanted to tell her if Cindy was his angel, he’d seen no evidence of it, as if she, the know-it-all teacher, should be able to explain that to him. Wanting to tell her felt like a terrible weakness in a world built on pure strength.

Morgan moved back over to him until she stood way too close, gazing up at him with solemn green eyes that looked as if she could explain the impossible to him.

“I’m so sorry about your wife.”

If she added a but as in but it’s time to get over it, or for Ace’s sake he would have the excuse he needed to really, really dislike her. He waited, aware he was hoping.

She said nothing.

Instead, without taking her eyes from him, she laid her hand on his wrist, something in that touch so tender it felt as if it would melt him, as surely as his firetempered steel.

She seemed to realize she was touching him, and that it might not be appropriate at the same time he jerked his arm away from her.

Brusquely, Nate said, “We won’t be here for Christmas. So there’s no sense Ace getting involved in the Christmas-production thing. I’m taking her to Disneyland.”

He made it sound as if he had been planning it forever, not as if he had just pulled it from the air, right this very moment, a plot to thwart her.

She didn’t seem fooled.

“You know,” she said softly, after a time, “this town is really suffering as a result of the downturn in the economy. Last year’s concert, The Christmas Miracle, in Mountain Ridge, Vermont? The production alone pumped a lot of money into the town. But they couldn’t have bought that kind of publicity. The filming of some of the winter scenery around that gorgeous little town sent people there in droves at a time of year when they don’t usually get tourists.”

“And that has what to do with me? And Ace?”

“The same could happen for Canterbury.”

“So what?” he asked.

“It seems to me,” she said softly, and if she was intimidated by his show of ill temper, she was not backing away from it, “that people need something to hope for. At Christmas more than any other time. They need to believe everything is going to be all right.”

“Do they now?” How could she be that earnest? How could she be so sure of what people needed? Why did he think, given a chance, she could show him what he needed, too?

The fire was fine. He picked up the bellows anyway, focused on it, made the bellows huff and the fire roar, but not enough to shut out her voice.

“Ace needs to believe,” Morgan continued softly. “She needs to believe that everything is going to be all right. And somehow I don’t think that belief will be nurtured by an escape to Disneyland, as pleasant a distraction as that may be.”

He put down the bellows. This had gone far enough, really. He turned to her, head-on, folded his arms over his chest. “This is beginning to sound depressingly like one of your notes. How did you get to know what the whole world needs? How do you get to be so smart for someone so wet behind the ears, fresh out of college?”

She blushed, but it was an angry blush.

Finally, he’d accomplished what he wanted. He was pushing her away. Straight out the door. Never to return, with any luck. Nate was aware that accomplishing his goal didn’t feel nearly as satisfying as he thought it would.

“Somehow,” she said, surprising him by matching his battle stance, folding her arms over her chest and facing him instead of backing away, “even though you have suffered tragedy, Nate, I would have never pegged you as the kind of man who would be indifferent to the woes of your neighbors. And their hopes.”

His mouth opened.

And then closed.

How had a discussion about a damned permission slip turned into this? A soul search? A desire to be a better man.

And not just for his daughter.

Oh, no, it would be easy if it was just for his daughter. No, it was for her, too. Miss Snippy Know-It-All.

“I’ll think about it,” he said.

The famous line was always used, by everyone including him, as a convenient form of dismissal. What it really meant was No, and I don’t ever intend to think about this again.

This time he knew he wasn’t going to be so lucky.

“It means a lot to Ace to be in that production,” Morgan said. “I already told the kids in my class we were all doing it, or none of us were.”

“Nothing like a little pressure,” he replied, turning away from her now, picking up his tongs, taking the red-hot rod of iron from the fire. “Are you telling me the Christmas joy of a dozen and a half six-year-olds relies on me?”

He glanced at her, and she nodded solemnly, ignoring his deliberately skeptical tone.

“That’s a scary thing,” he told her quietly, his voice deliberately loaded with cynicism. “Nearly as scary as the hope of the whole town resting on my shoulders.”

She didn’t have the sense to flinch from his sarcasm. He was going to have to lay it out nice and plain for her. “I’m the wrong man to trust with such things, Miss McGuire.”

She looked at him for a long time as he began to hammer out the rod, and then just as he glanced at her, eyebrows raised, looking askance as if Oh, are you still here? she nodded once, as if she knew something about him he did not know himself.

“I don’t think you are the wrong man to trust,” she said softly. “I think you just wish you were.”

And having looked right into his soul, Little Miss Snip removed the permission slip from her pink coat pocket, set it on his worktable, smoothed it carefully with her hand, and then turned on her heel and left him there to brood over his fire.

A little while later, in the house, getting dinner ready—hot dogs and a salad—he said to Ace, in his I-just-had-this-great-idea voice, “Ace, what would you think of a trip to Disneyland over Christmas?”

The truth was, he expected at least the exuberant dance that the shopping trip with Morgan McGuire had elicited. Instead there was silence.

He turned from the pot on the stove after prodding a frozen hot dog with a fork, as if that would get it to cook quicker, and looked at his daughter.

Ace was getting her hot-dog bun ready, lots of ketchup and relish, not dancing around at all. Today she was wearing her new skirt, the red one with the white pom-poms on the hem. She looked adorable. He hoped that didn’t mean boys would start coming by here. No, surely that worry was years away.

“Disneyland?” he said, wondering if she was daydreaming and hadn’t heard him.

“Oh, Daddy,” she said with a sigh of long suffering, in her you’re so silly voice. “We can’t go to Disneyland over Christmas. I have to be in The Christmas Angel. It’s on Christmas Eve. It’s on TV, live. I should phone Grandma and Grandpa and tell them I’m going to be on TV.”

Then in case he was getting any other bright ideas, she told him firmly, “And I don’t want to go after, either. Brenda is having a skating party on Boxing Day. I hope I get new skates for Christmas. When am I going to see Santa?”

He was pretty sure Ace and Brenda had been mortal enemies a week ago. So, Morgan had been right. Superficial or not, the clothes helped. His daughter was having a good week.

That was worth something. So was the light in her eyes when she talked about being on television.

Nate made a promise as soon as Santa set up at Finnegan’s they would go, and then he made a mental note about the skates. Then once she was in bed, he took the permission slip, signed it and shoved it into Ace’s backpack.

It didn’t feel like nearly the concession it should have. He told himself it had nothing to do with Morgan McGuire and everything to do with Ace.

An hour after Ace was in bed, his phone rang. It was Canterbury’s mayor, who also owned the local gas station. The Christmas Angel needed skilled craftspeople to volunteer to work on the set. Would he consider doing it?

Before Morgan had arrived this afternoon his answer would have been curt and brief.

Now he was aware he did not want to be a man indifferent to the hopes and dreams of his neighbors.

What had she said? I don’t think you are the wrong man to trust, I think you just wish you were.

It irked him that she was right. He should say no to this request just to spite her. But he didn’t.

Small towns were strange places. Centuries-old feuds were put aside if tragedy struck.

Four generations of Hathoways had owned this forge and as far as Nate could tell they’d always been renegades and rebels. They didn’t go to church, or belong to the PTA or the numerous Canterbury service clubs. Hardworking but hell-raising, they were always on the fringe of the community. His family, David’s and Cindy’s.

And yet, when David had died, the town had given him the hero’s send-off that he deserved.

And their support had been even more pronounced after Cindy had died. Nate’s neighbors had gathered around him in ways he would have never expected. A minister at a church he had never been to had offered to do the service; there had not been enough seats for everyone who came to his wife’s funeral.

People who he would have thought did not know of his existence—like the man who had just phoned him—had been there for him and for Ace unconditionally, wanting nothing in return, not holding his bad temper or his need to deal with his grief alone against him.

Sometimes, still, he came to the house from the forge to find an anonymous casserole at the door, or freshbaked cookies, or a brand-new toy or outfit for Ace.

At first it had been hard for him to accept, but at some time Nate had realized it wasn’t charity. It was something deeper than that. It was why people chose to live in small communities. To know they were cared about, that whether you wanted it or not, your neighbors had your back.

And you didn’t just keep taking that. In time, when you were ready, you offered it back.

Nate wasn’t really sure if he was ready, but somehow it felt as if it was time to find out. And so that awareness of “something deeper” was how he found himself saying yes to the volunteer job of helping to build sets.

Since the school auditorium was the only venue big enough to host The Christmas Angel, Nate knew it was going to put him together again with Morgan McGuire. He knew it was inevitable that their lives were becoming intertwined. Whether he liked it or not.

And for a man who had pretty established opinions on what he liked and what he didn’t, Nate Hathoway was a little distressed to find he simply didn’t know if he liked it or not.

Morgan marched her twenty-two charges into the gymnasium. The truth was, after being so stern with Nate about the benefits of The Christmas Angel coming to Canterbury, she was beginning to feel a little sick of the whole thing herself.

The children talked of nothing else. They all thought their few minutes on television, singing backup to Wesley Wellhaven, meant they were going to be famous. They all tried to sing louder than the person next to them. Some of them were getting quite theatrical in their delivery of the songs.

The rehearsal time for the three original songs her class would sing was eating into valuable class time that Morgan felt would be better used for teaching fundamental skills, reading, writing and arithmetic.

Today was the first day her kids would be showing The Christmas Angel production team what they had learned. Much of the team had arrived last week, filling up the local hotel. Now The Christmas Angel’s own choir director, Mrs. Wesley Wellhaven herself, had arrived in town last night and would be taking over rehearsing the children.

As soon as Morgan entered the auditorium—which was also the school gymnasium, not that it could be used for that because of all the work going on getting the only stage in town ready for Wesley—Morgan knew he was here.

Something happened to her neck. It wasn’t so sinister as the hackles rising, it was more as if someone sexy had breathed on her.

She looked around, and sure enough, there Nate was, helping another man lift a plywood cutout of a Christmas cottage up on stage.

At the same time as herding her small charges forward Morgan unabashedly took advantage of the fact Nate had no idea she was watching him, to study him, which was no mean feat given that Freddy Campbell kept poking Brenda Weston in the back, and Damien Dorchester was deliberately treading on Benjamin Chin’s heels.

“Freddy, Damien, stop it.” The correction was absent at best.

Because it seemed as if everything but him had faded as Morgan looked to the stage. Nate had looked sexy at his forge, and he looked just as sexy here, with his tool belt slung low on the hips his jeans rode over, a plain T-shirt showing off the ripple of unconscious muscle as he lifted.

Let’s face it, Morgan told herself, he’d look sexy no matter where he was, no matter what he was wearing, no matter what he was doing.

He was just a blastedly sexy man.

And yet there was more than sexiness to him.

No, there was a quiet and deep strength evident in Nate Hathoway. It had been there at Cheesie Charlie’s, it had been there when he sat in the pink satin chair at The Snow Cave. And it was there now as he worked, a self-certainty that really was more sexy than his startling good looks.

Mrs. Wellhaven, a pinch-faced woman of an indeterminate age well above sixty, called the children up onto the stage, and the workers had to stop to let the kids file onto the triple-decker stand that had been built for them.

“Hi, Daddy!” Ace called.

“Yes,” Mrs. Wellhaven said, lips pursed, “let’s deal with that first off, shall we? Please do not call out the names of people you know as you come on the stage. Not during rehearsal, and God knows, not during the live production.”

Ace scowled. Morgan glanced at Nate. Father’s and child’s expressions were identically mutinous.

Morgan shivered. In the final analysis could there be anything more sexy than a man who would protect his own, no matter what?

Still, the choir director had her job to do, and since Nate looked as if maybe he was going to go have a word with her, Morgan intercepted him.

“Hi. How are you?”

Though maybe it was just an excuse.

In all likelihood Nate was not going to berate the choir director.

“Who does she think she is telling my kid she can’t say hi to me?” he muttered, mutiny still written all over his handsome face.

Or maybe he had been.

“You have to admit it might be a little chaotic if all the kids started calling greetings to their parents, grandparents and younger siblings on national live television,” Morgan pointed out diplomatically.

He looked at her as if he had just noticed her. When Nate gave a woman his full attention, she didn’t have a chance. That probably included the crotchety choir director.

“Ah, Miss McGuire, don’t you ever get tired of being right all the time?” he asked her, folding his arms over the massiveness of his chest.

She had rather hoped they were past the Miss McGuire stage. “Morgan,” she corrected him.

Mrs. Wellhaven cleared her throat, tipped her glasses and leveled a look at them. “Excuse me. We are trying to concentrate here.” She turned back to the children. “I am Mrs. Wellhaven.” Then she muttered, tapping her baton sternly, “The brains of the outfit.”

Nate guffawed. Morgan giggled, at least in part because she had enjoyed his genuine snort of laughter so much.

Mrs. Wellhaven sent them a look, raised her baton and swung it down. The children watched her in silent awe. “That means begin!”

“She’s a dragon,” Nate whispered.

The children launched, a little unsteadily, into the opening number, “Angel Lost.”

“What are you doing here?” Morgan whispered to Nate. “I thought you made it clear you weren’t in favor of The Christmas Angel.”

“Or shopping,” he reminded her sourly. “I keep finding myself in these situations that I really don’t want to be in.”

“Don’t say that like it’s my fault!”

“Isn’t it?”

She felt ruffled by the accusation, until she looked at him more closely and realized he was teasing her.

Something warm unfolded in her.

“I didn’t know you were a carpenter, too,” she said, trying to fight the desire to know everything about him. And losing.

He snorted. “I’m no carpenter, but I know my way around tools. I was raised with self-sufficiency. We never bought anything we could make ourselves when I was a kid. And we never hired anybody to do anything, either. What we needed we figured out how to make or we did without.”

Though Morgan thought he had been talking very quietly, and she loved how much he had revealed about himself, Mrs. Wellhaven turned and gave them a quelling look.

Ace’s voice rose, more croaky than usual, loudly enthusiastic, above her peers. “Lost annngelll, who will find you? Where arrrrrre you—”

Mrs. Wellhaven’s head swung back around. “You! Little redheaded girl! Could you sing just a little more quietly?”

“Is she insinuating Ace sounds bad?”

“I think she just wants all the kids to sing at approximately the same volume,” Morgan offered.

“You’re just being diplomatic,” Nate whispered, listening. “Ace’s singing is awful. Almost as bad as yours.”

“Hers is not that bad, and neither is mine,” Morgan protested.

“Hey, take it from a guy who spent an hour and a half with you oinking and braying, it is.”

He was teasing her again. The warmth flooding her grew. “At least I gave you a break by sleeping all the way home.”

“You snore, too.”

Morgan’s mouth fell open. “I don’t!”

“How would you know?” he asked reasonably. “Snoring is one of those things you don’t know about yourself. Other people have to tell you.”

That seemed way too intimate—and embarrassing—a detail for him to know about her.

But when he grinned at her expression, she knew he was probably pulling her leg, and that he was enjoying teasing her as much as she was reluctantly enjoying being teased.

“Little redheaded girl—”

“Still, I’m going to have to go bean that shrew if she yells at Ace again.”

“You.” Mrs. Wellhaven rounded on him, and pointed her baton. “Who are you?”

“Little redheaded girl’s father,” he said evenly, dangerously, having gone from teasing Morgan to a warrior ready to defend his family in the blink of an eye.

Amazingly Mrs. Wellhaven was not intimidated. “No parents. Out. You, too, little redheaded girl’s mother.”

Morgan should point out she was the teacher, not a parent, certainly not a parent who had slept with this parent and produced a child, though the very thought made her go so weak in the knees, she had to reach out and balance herself by taking his arm.

Luckily, thanks to the darkening expression on Nate’s face, she made it look as if she had just taken hold of him to lead him firmly out the door.

Touching him—her fingertips practically vibrating with awareness of how his skin felt—was probably not the best way to banish thoughts of how people produced children together.

Morgan let go as soon as they were safely out the auditorium door.

“She’s a dragon,” Nate proclaimed when the door slapped shut behind him. “I’m not sure I should leave Ace in there. Did you actually talk me out of taking my daughter to Disneyland to expose her to that?”

Morgan knew it would be a mistake to preen under his unconscious admission that she had somehow influenced him. Then again, she probably hadn’t. He hadn’t even noticed her hand on his arm, and her fingertips were still tingling! With the look on his face right now, he looked like the man least likely to be talked into anything.

Besides, between the look on his face—knight about to do battle with the dragon—and the attitude of Mrs. Wellhaven, she was getting a case of the giggles.

Nate eyed her narrowly.

“I don’t get what’s funny.”

“If Mrs. Wellhaven is the brains of the outfit—” and she couldn’t even see that Nate was not a man to be messed with “—the whole town is in big trouble.”

Nate regarded her silently for a moment, and then he actually laughed.

It was the second time in a few short minutes that Morgan had heard him laugh. This time he made no attempt to stifle it, and it was a good sound, rich, deep and true. It was a sound that made her redefine, instantly, what sexy really was.

“It’s not too late for me to go and bean her,” he said finally.

“I’m afraid I don’t even know what it means to ‘bean’ somebody.”

He laughed again. “Morgan McGuire, I think you’ve led a sheltered life. Let’s go grab a coffee. I can’t listen to that.” He cocked his head at the cacophony of sound coming out the door, and shook his head. Ace’s voice rose louder than ever above all others. “Maybe I can still talk Ace into going to Disneyland.”

“Maybe Mrs. Wellhaven will pay for you to go.”

And then he laughed again, and so did she. And she could feel that shared laughter building a tenuous bridge between them.

And so Morgan found herself in the tiny, mostly empty school cafeteria drinking stale coffee and realizing she was alone across the table from Nate Hathoway.

Without a forge as a distraction. Or Ace. Or even Old MacDonald.

They were not strangers. For heaven’s sake, they had spent an entire day together! And yet Morgan felt awkwardly as if she didn’t have one single thing to say to him. She felt like a sixteen-year-old on her first date. Nervous. Self-conscious. Worried about what to say. Or what not to say.

Be a teacher, she ordered herself. Talk about Cecilia.

But somehow she didn’t want to. Not right this second. She didn’t want to be a teacher, or talk about Cecilia. There was something about the pure rush of feeling sixteen again, tongue-tied in the presence of a gorgeous guy, that she wanted to relish even as she was guiltily aware it was the antithesis of everything she had tried to absorb while reading Bliss.

“So,” he said, eyeing her over the top of the cup, “you get the coat hangers put up?”

“Thanks for the other pair. Two was plenty, but thanks. No, I didn’t put them up. Not yet.”

“Really? You don’t like them?”

Oh, she liked them. Way too much. Liked caressing that smooth metal in her hands, liked the way something of him, his absolute strength and even his maddening rigidity, was represented in the work that he did.

“It’s not that. I mean I tried to put them up. They keep falling down again. The first time it happened I thought I had a burglar. They’re too heavy. I’m afraid they’ve made a mess of the wall.”

He squinted at her. “You knew they had to be mounted on a stud, right?”

She willed herself not to blush, and not to choke on her coffee. He had not just said something dirty in the elementary-school cafeteria. She was pretty sure of it. Still, she couldn’t trust herself to answer. She took a sudden interest in mopping a nonexistent dribble of coffee off the table.

“How long are the kids going to be singing?” he asked.

Thankfully, he’d left the topic of the stud behind him! “I was told the first rehearsal would be about an hour. I think that’s a little long for six-year-olds, but—”

“The coffee’s bad, anyway. You want to play hooky for a few minutes, Miss Schoolmarm?”

“Excuse me?”

He leaned across the table and looked at her so intently she thought she might faint.

“I’ll show you what a stud is,” he promised, his voice as sultry as a hot summer night.

“Pardon?” She gulped.

“You shouldn’t go through life without knowing.”

She felt as if she was strangling.

When she had nearly worn through the table scrubbing at the nonexistent spot, he said, “I’ll hang up the coat hangers for you.”

“You want to come to my house?”

He raised his eyebrows at her. “Unless you want the coat hangers hung somewhere else?”

“You want to come to my house now?”

His eyes had the most devilish little twinkle in them. “It’s not as if you’re entertaining a gentleman caller, Miss McGuire.”

It was true. He was offering to do a chore for her. That involved studs.

She was not going to let him see how rattled she was! Well, he already had, but she intended to curb his enjoyment.

“Yes,” she said, “that would be fine. A very gentlemanly offer from someone who is not a gentleman caller. Though I’m sure you are. A gentleman. Most of the time. When you aren’t talking about beaning the choir director. Or hunting down the parents of children who have teased your daughter.”

She was babbling. She clamped her mouth shut.

“Nobody’s ever called me a gentleman before,” he told her with wicked enjoyment.

But underneath the banter she heard something else. And so she said primly, “Well, it’s about time they did.”

Ten minutes later, she was so aware of how life could take unexpected turns. Just this morning it would have never occurred to her that Nate Hathoway would be in her house by this afternoon. In fact, Santa coming down the chimney would have seemed a more likely scenario.

And really, having Nate’s handiwork in her house was a bad enough distraction. Now having him here, it seemed somehow her space was never going to be quite the same.

As if it would be missing something.

Stop it, Morgan ordered herself. She was devoted to independence. Nate showing her how to hang something without it falling back off the wall could only forward that cause!

That’s why she had given in so easily to his suggestion to come over here.

Wasn’t it?

No, said the little part of her that watched him filling her tiny space with his essence. There was an illusion of intimacy from having him in this space.

Now his presence was large as he loomed in her living room waiting for her to find a hammer.

When she came back from the basement with one, she found him eyeing her purple couch with a look that was a cross between amusement and bewilderment.

“Do you like it?” she asked, feeling ridiculously as if it was a test. Of course he wouldn’t like it, proving to her the wisdom of living on her own, not having to consult with anyone else about her choices, proving the bliss of the single life.

“Yeah, I like it,” he said slowly. “What I don’t get is how a woman can make something like this work. If I bought a sofa this color it would look like I killed that purple dinosaur. You know the one? He dances. And sings. But it looks good in here. It suits you.”

She tried not to show how pleased she was, his words so different from what she expected. “I call my decorating style Bohemian chic.”

“You don’t strike me as Bohemian,” he said, looking at her thoughtfully. “I would think of that as kind of gypsylike. You seem, er, enormously conventional.”

“Perhaps I have a hidden side,” she said, a bit irked. Enormously conventional? That sounded boring!

“Perhaps you have. Perhaps you even have a hidden sheik,” he said, “which, come to think of it, would be just as good as a hidden stud. Maybe better. What do I know?”

“C-h-i-c,” she spelled out. “Not sheik!”

And then he laughed with such enjoyment at his own humor that she couldn’t help but join in. It was a treat to hear him laugh. She suspected he had not for a long time.

She handed him her hammer.

He frowned, the laughter gone. “The couch is good. This? Are you kidding me? What is this? A toy?”

It occurred to her that a woman that linked her life with his would have to like a traditional setup. She would choose the furniture, he would choose the tools. She would cook the meals, he would mow the lawn.

Considering she had left her fiancé because he had taken what she considered to be a sexist view of her career aspirations, considering her devotion to the principles of Bliss: The Extraordinary Joy of Being a Single Woman, Morgan was amazed by how easily something in her capitulated to this new vision. How lovely would it be having someone to share responsibilities with?

Shared, maybe certain things would not feel like such onerous, unachievable chores. Could there be unexpected pleasures in little things like hanging a few coat hangers? Is that what a good marriage was about?

She didn’t know. Her own parents had separated when she was young, her father had remarried and she had always felt outside the circle of his new family.

Her mother’s assessment of the situation—that she was looking for her father—seemed way too harsh. But Morgan knew her childhood experiences had made her long for love.

Not just love, but for a traditional relationship, like the one her best friend’s parents had enjoyed. How she had envied the stability of that home, the harmony there, the feeling of absolute security.

But after her relationship with Karl, its bitter ending, Morgan had decided the love she longed for was unrealistic, belonged in the fairy tales she so enjoyed reading to the children.

Now, with Nate Hathoway in her front entry, tapping her wall with her toy hammer, the choice Morgan had made to go it alone didn’t feel the least bit blissful. It felt achingly empty. Achingly.