Kitabı oku: «His For Christmas», sayfa 3

Recognizing her groggy vulnerability, Morgan shook herself awake. He was standing at her side of the SUV, the door open.

A quick glance showed the back was empty of every parcel and package. Ace was gone.

“Put her in bed,” he said before Morgan asked. “Thought you might wake up as I moved stuff and the vehicle cooled off, but you were sleeping hard.”

Morgan felt herself blushing. She’d obviously slept like a rock. She hoped she hadn’t drooled and muttered his name in her sleep. Had she dreamed of the smile she had tried so hard—and failed—to produce?

And then suddenly, when she least expected it, it was there.

He was actually smiling at her. A small smile, but so genuine it was like the sun coming out on a dreary day. He reached out and touched her cheek.

“You’ve got the print of the seat cover across your cheek.”

And then his hand dropped away, and he looked away.

“Miss McGuire?”

“Morgan.”

He looked right at her. The smile was gone. “You gave my daughter a gift today. I haven’t seen her so happy for a long, long time. I thank you for that.”

And then, he bent toward her, brushed the print on her cheek again, and kissed the place on her cheek where his fingers had been. His lips were gloriously soft, a tenderness in them that belied every single thing she thought she had ever seen in his eyes.

And then Nate turned away from her, went up the walk to his house and into it, shut the door without once looking back.

She sat in his truck stunned, wondering if she had dreamed that moment, but finally managed to stir herself, shut the door of his vehicle and get into her own.

The night was so bright and cold and star-filled. Was she shivering from the cold, or from the absence of the warmth she had felt when he had touched his lips to her cheek?

It wasn’t until she was nearly home that she realized that while she slept he had done more than empty his vehicle of parcels, and carry a sleeping Ace to her bedroom. Morgan saw he had put two more of the coat hangers on her front seat.

And she remembered she still had not gotten the permission slip for The Christmas Angel signed.

And she knew it was weak, and possibly stupid, and she knew it went against every single thing she had decided for herself when she had moved to Canterbury. It challenged every vow she had made as she devoured chapter after chapter of Bliss: The Extraordinary Joy of Being a Single Woman.

But Morgan still knew that she would use that unsigned permission slip as an excuse to see him again.

Chapter Three

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.”