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.”