His for Christmas: Rescued by his Christmas Angel / Christmas at Candlebark Farm / The Nurse Who Saved Christmas

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.

Chapter Four

NATE HADN’T REALLY expected Morgan’s house to have this effect on him. It was cozy and cute, like a little nest. The enjoyment he had taken in her discomfort over agreeing to invite him over to help her find a “stud” was dissipating rapidly.

And who had pushed the envelope, who had suggested this foolishness? He wished he could blame her, but oh, no, it had been all him, lured by her blushing at the word stud.

Feeling the need to be a man, to do for her what she didn’t have the skill to do herself.

But now, in her house, with her purple sofa and her toy hammer in his hand? It was his lack he was aware of, not hers.

This house made him feel lonely for soft things. Feminine touches, Cindy’s warmth, seemed to be fading from his own house. The couch throw pillows she had chosen were worn out, the rag rug at the front door a little more rag than rug these days, the plaid blanket she had bought when Ace was a baby and that Ace still pulled over herself to watch television, was pathetically threadbare.

It reminded Nate, unhappily, how desperately inadequate he was to be raising a girl on his own.

What was it about Morgan that made him look at a life that he had felt he made full and satisfying despite the loss of his wife, to thinking maybe he wasn’t doing nearly as well as he’d imagined? Around Morgan his life suddenly seemed to have glaringly empty spaces in it.

“Wow,” he said, forcing himself to focus on her wall, to not give her even an inkling of the craving for softness that was going on inside of him, “for a little bit of a thing, you know how to destroy a wall.”

“It wasn’t intentional.”

“Destruction rarely is.”

He needed to remember that around Morgan McGuire. His life and Ace’s had had enough unintentional destruction wrought on it. They could not bear more loss, either of them. He needed to do what he had come here to do, and get out, plain and simple.

Not that anything seemed simple with Morgan sharing the same room with him as it did when he brooded on it alone over the forge.

Nate brought himself back, shook his head again at the large holes where she had tried to hang his coat hooks and the weight of them had pulled chunks of drywall off the walls.

He tapped lightly on her entrance wall with a hammer.

“See? There’s a stud.” He glanced at her. She was refusing to blush this time, probably because of his explanation, so he went on explaining, as if his voice going on and on was an amulet against the spell of her. “You can hear the solid sound behind the wall. They’re placed every sixteen inches. So you could put a coat hanger here, and—” he tapped the wall gently “—here. Here. Here.”

“But that’s not where I want the coat hangers,” she said mutinously. “It’s not centered properly. I want them in a row like this.”

She went and took a pair of hangers from where he had set them on the floor, inserted herself between him and the wall and showed him.

“Here and here. And the other two in a straight line down from them.”

He went very still. She was so close to him. He had no protection against this kind of spell. His craving for all things soft intensified. Her scent, clean, soap and shampoo, filled him. She was not quite touching him, but he could feel a delicate warmth radiating off her.

It seemed, dangerously, as if she could fill the something missing place in his life.

Nate knew he should back away from her a careful step but he didn’t. He tried to hold up the amulet of words again. “Hmm. Guys don’t think like that. For most men, it’s all about function, not form.”

But all the words did this time was make him more sharply aware of their differences, male and female, soft and hard, emotionally open and emotionally closed.

“Tell that to someone who hasn’t seen your work,” she said.

“I do try and marry form and function in my work.”

Now his amulet, words, had come back to bite him. He contemplated his use of the word marry in such close proximity to her, hoped it was completely coincidental and not a subliminal longing.

He could not help but feel he was being drugged by her closeness, the spell of her winding its way around him, stronger than all that physical toughness he possessed.

Because Nate still had not moved. He could smell that good, good smell that was all hers. Wholesome. Unpretentious. But alluringly soft, feminine, just like this space.

She seemed to realize suddenly that she had placed herself in very close proximity to him. She went as still as him, caught, too, in the unexpected bond of awareness that leaped sizzling in the air between them.

Then, stronger than him, after all, Morgan tried to slip away, back out under his arm, but he dropped it marginally, and they were locked together in the small space of the hallway.

He looked at her for a moment, the intensity between them as tangible as a static shock off a cat, or clothes out of the dryer. He was weakened enough. It was absolutely the wrong time to remember how soft her cheek had felt under his fingertips, and then his lips.

Nate was not seeing her as his daughter’s teacher right now. Unless he was mistaken, her eyes were smoky with a longing that mirrored his own.

But he had already buried a wife. And his best friend. To believe in good things again felt as if it would challenge even his legendary strength.

Even this situation should be showing him something important. He had vowed he did not want to tangle any further with the young schoolteacher.

And yet, here he stood in her front hallway.

Nate knew, the hard way, that life could be wrested out of his control. His young wife had gone out the door, Christmas Eve, for one more thing.

One more thing for Ace’s sock. He could even remember what it was, because she had told him as she went out the door laughing. Reindeer poop. Chocolatecovered raisins that one of the stores had bagged and labeled in tiny ziplock bags.

He’d been so glad to see her laughing, so happy to see her engrossed in getting ready for Christmas that he hadn’t really paid any attention to the snow outside.

Why had he let her go? Why hadn’t he offered to drive her?

And then, instead of Cindy coming back with reindeer poop, there had been that awful knock on the door, and a terrible descent into hell.

So, he knew, firsthand and the hard way, life could be snatched from your control.

It only made him more determined to control the things he could.

And he could still exercise some control over this. And he was aware that he needed to do it. The last thing he needed to do was give in to the insane desire to kiss Morgan again…And not on the cheek this time, either.

Congratulating himself on the return of his strength, feeling as Sampson must have done when his hair grew back and he pulled that building down, Nate dropped his arm, backed away. He needed to go now.

“Look, I’ll make you a mounting board for the coat hangers. I’ve got some really nice barn wood at home that I’d been planning to reclaim. I’ll fasten the board to the studs, so it’s nice and solid, and then put the coat hangers on that.” He looked at his watch. “Rehearsal is nearly over, Miss McGuire.”

And he was aware as he said it that it could be taken a number of ways. That their rehearsal was nearly over. And what would that mean? The real thing to follow?

He hoped not, but now that he had promised her the barn board, he knew his escape was temporary. He was going to have to come back and put it up.

Hopefully he would have time to gird his loins against her before he did that!

They got back to the auditorium just as Mrs. Wellhaven was wrapping up. Ace flew off the stage and into his arms, seeming remarkably unscathed by her hour in the clutches of the dragon.

He lifted her up easily, and he felt the weight and responsibility of loving her, of protecting her from hurt, from more loss.

He glanced at Morgan over his daughter’s head. His tangling with her teacher had the potential to hurt her. Bad.

“Guess what, Daddy?”

“What, sweetheart?”

“Mrs. Wellhaven says one of us, somebody from our class, is going to be the Christmas Angel! They get to stand on a special platform so it looks like they are on the top of the tree. They sing a song all by themselves!”

He knew this latest development had the potential to hurt Ace bad, too. His love for his daughter might blind him to her—like every father he thought his little girl was the most beautiful in the world—but he knew Ace’s was not a traditional beauty. With her croaky voice and funny carrottop, she was hardly Christmas-angel material.

“She’s letting all twenty-two of you think you have a chance of being the Christmas Angel?” He could hear annoyance in his voice, but Ace missed it.

“Not the boys, silly.” She beamed at him. “Just the girls can be Christmas angels. It could be me!”

Ace’s voice was even more croaky than ever, excitement and hope dancing across her very un-angel-like features.

Hope. Wasn’t that the most dangerous thing of all?

Nate’s eyes met Morgan’s over the top of Ace’s head. She didn’t even have the decency to look distressed, to clearly see how unrealistic his daughter’s hopes were.

He felt the weight of wanting to protect his daughter from all of life’s disappointments, felt the weight of his inability to do so.

“I should have beaned Mrs. Wellhaven while I had the chance,” he said darkly. And he felt that even more strongly the next morning at breakfast.

“Daddy, I dreamed about Mommy last night.”

Nate flinched, and then deliberately relaxed his shoulders. He was standing at the kitchen counter, making a packed lunch, his back to Ace, who was floating battle formations with the remains of the breakfast cereal in her bowl.

He knew his own dreams about his wife were never good. Cindy swept away by a raging river, him reaching out but not being able to get to her. Cindy falling from an airplane, him reaching out the door, trying desperately to reach a hand that fell farther and farther away…

He often woke himself up screaming Cindy’s name.

Nate hadn’t heard Ace scream last night. He tried not to let his dread show in his voice, but didn’t turn around to look at her.

“Uh-huh?” He scowled at the lunch ingredients. If he sent peanut butter again was Morgan going to say something? When had he started to care what Morgan had to say?

Probably about the same time he’d been dumb enough to plant that impromptu kiss on her cheek.

It was ridiculous that a full-grown man, renowned for his toughness, legend even, was shirking from the judgments, plentiful as those were, of a grade-one teacher.

“It was a good dream,” his daughter announced, and Nate felt relief shiver across his shoulder blades. Maybe finally, they had reached a turning point. Ace had had a good dream.

He recognized that he, too, seemed to be getting back into the flow of a life. If going shopping and volunteering to help with a town project counted. He suspected it did.

And did it all relate back to Morgan? Again, Nate suspected it did.

In defiance of that fact, and the fact that some part of him leaned toward liking Miss McGuire’s approval, he slathered peanut butter on bread. Ace liked peanut butter. And she liked nonnutritiously white bread, too.

“You rebel, you,” Nate chided himself drily, out loud.

“Do you want to hear about my dream?”

He turned from the counter, glanced at his daughter, frowned faintly. Ace was glowing in her new sparkle skinny jeans and Christmas sweater with a white, fluffy reindeer on it. Even her hair was tamed, carefully combed, flattened down with water.

He turned back to the counter. “Sure. Raspberry or strawberry?”

“Raspberry. In my dream, Mommy was an angel.”

Something shivered along his spine. You’ve been my angel, Hath, now I’ll be yours.

“She had on a long white dress, and she had big white wings made out of feathers. She took me on her lap, and she said she was sorry she had to leave me and that she loved me.”

“That’s nice, Ace. It really is.”

“Mommy told me that she had to leave me right at Christmas because people have forgotten what Christmas is about, and that she was going to teach them. She said she’s going to save Christmas. Do you think that’s true, Daddy?”

After David had died, Cindy had found respite from her grief in that time of year. By the time Ace had come along, she loved every single thing about Christmas. Every single thing. Turkey. Trees. Carols. Gifts. Reindeer poop.

After David’s death, she’d developed a simple faith that she had not had when they were children. Cindy believed God was looking after things, that there were reasons she could not understand, that He could make good come from bad.

While not quite sharing her beliefs, to Nate it had been a nice counterpoint toward his own tendency toward cynicism.

After she had died, his cynicism had hardened in him. In fact, he felt as if he shook his fist at the heavens. This was how her faith was rewarded? How could this have happened if things were really being looked after?

Show me the reason. Show me something good coming from this.

And the answer? Yawning emptiness.

He had buried her in the gravesite in an empty plot that was right beside David. Nate had gone to that gravesite a few times, hoping to feel something there. A presence, a sense of something watching over him, but no, more yawning emptiness.

So his cynicism hardened like concrete setting up on a hot day, and he didn’t go to the graveyard anymore, not even when Cindy’s sister, Molly, went to mark special occasions, birthdays, Christmas.

And now listening to Ace chatter about angels, it felt as if his cynicism had just ramped up another gear.

Why did he have an ugly feeling he knew exactly where this was going?

“I hope so, honey.” Because, despite the cynicism, he was aware nobody needed Christmas saved more than him and his daughter.

Unfortunately, he was pretty damned sure Ace’s dream had a whole lot more to do with Mrs. Wellhaven’s ill-conceived announcement about one of Ace’s class being chosen the Christmas Angel than with her mother.

Ace confirmed his ugly feeling by announcing, sunnily, “In the dream, Mommy told me I’m going to be the Christmas Angel!”

Nate struggled not to let the cynicism show in his face. Still, he shot a worried look at his daughter.

Even with the new clothes and better hair, Ace looked least likely to be the Christmas Angel, at least not in the typical sense he thought of Christmas angels: blond ringlets, china-blue eyes, porcelain skin.

Ace looked more like a leprechaun, or a yard gnome, than an angel.

“Poor Brenda,” Ace continued. “She thinks it’s going to be her. I wonder if she’ll still be my friend if it’s me.”

Brenda Weston, naturally, took after her mother, Ashley, and looked like everyone’s vision of the Christmas Angel. Chances were she didn’t sing flat, either.

“You know it was just a dream, don’t you, Ace?”

“Mrs. McGuire says dreams come true.”

Thank you, Miss McGuire. There she was again, somehow front and center in his life.

“Miss McGuire,” he said, choosing his words with great care, “doesn’t mean dreams you have while you’re sleeping come true. She means dreams you think of while you’re awake. Like you might dream of being a doctor someday. Or a teacher. Or a pilot. And that can come true.”

“Oh, like stupid Freddy Campbell thinks he’s going to be a hockey player?”

“Exactly like that.”

“Can he?”

“I don’t know. I guess if he works hard enough and has some natural talent, maybe he could.”

Ace snorted. “If Freddy Campbell can be a hockey player, I can be the Christmas Angel. See? I’m dreaming it while I’m awake, too.”

There was no gentle way to put this.

“Ace, don’t get your hopes up.” He said it sternly.

She smiled at him, easily forgiving of the fact he was doing his best to dash her dreams. “Don’t worry, Daddy, I won’t.”

“You know what?” he said gruffly. “You’re the smartest kid I ever met.” Six going on thirty. Maybe that wasn’t such a good thing, but Ace beamed at him as if he’d presented her with a new puppy.

“The Christmas Angel probably has to be smart,” she decided happily.

He sighed. Over the next few days, he’d try and get it through to her. She wasn’t going to be the Christmas Angel. And he’d better let Morgan know he didn’t want this particular brand of hopeless optimism encouraged.

An excuse to talk to Morgan, a little voice inside him, disturbingly gleeful, pointed out.

He had to deliver her the board he’d made for her coat hangers anyway. So, maybe he’d kill two birds with one stone. And then he’d be out of excuses for seeing her.

And then he’d get back on track in terms of distancing himself from her, protecting his daughter and himself from the loss of coming to care too deeply for someone.

Which meant he knew the potential was there. That Morgan McGuire was a person you could come to care too deeply about if you weren’t really, really careful.

“Come on, squirt, I’ll drive you to school.” He shoved Ace’s lunch into a bag, and went to the table. He roughed her hair, and she got up and threw her arms around his waist, hugged hard.

“I love you, Daddy.”

And for one split second, everything in his world seemed okay, and Ace, the one who had given him a reason to live, seemed like the most likely angel of all.

Morgan’s doorbell rang just as the Christmas tree fell over. Thankfully it made a whooshing sound, probably because it was so large, so she heard it and leaped out of the way, narrowly missing being hit by it.

“Hell and damnation!” she said, regarding the tree lying in a pool of bent branches and dead needles on her floor.

Her bell rang again, and Morgan climbed over the tree that blocked her entrance hallway and went and flung open the front door.

Nate Hathoway stood there, looking like damnation itself. Despite the cold out, he wore a black leather jacket and jeans. Whiskers darkened his cheeks. His eyes sparked with a light that would have put the devil himself to shame.

“I thought you were opposed to cussing,” he said mildly, white puffs of vapor forming as his hot breath hit the cold air.

Silently, she cussed the lack of insulation in her old house that had allowed her voice to carry right through the door. She also cussed the fact that she was wearing a horrible pair of gray sweatpants and a sweatshirt that said Teachers Spell It Out.