Rescued by his Christmas Angel: Rescued by his Christmas Angel / Christmas at Candlebark Farm

And he was cynical enough to know that.

Even if she wasn’t.

Morgan glanced across the restaurant table at Nate Hathoway. Nothing in the time they had spent in the truck lessened her first impression of him standing alone bending iron to his will.

He was a warrior. Battle-scarred, self-reliant, his emotions contained behind walls so high it would be nearly impossible to scale them.

So, being Morgan, naturally she tried to scale them anyway.

She had been aware that she was trying to make him smile as they had traveled, deliberately using her worst singing voice, trying to get him to participate. She told herself it was so Ace could see a softer side of her father, but she knew that wasn’t the entire truth.

She had seen a tickle of a smile at his forge on their first meeting. She wanted to see if she could tempt it out again.

But she had failed. The more she tried, the more he had tightened his cloak of remoteness around himself.

Though Morgan had not missed how his eyes found Ace in the rearview mirror, had not missed he was indulging her antics because his daughter was enjoying them.

Really, Nate Hathoway was the man least likely to ever be seen at a Cheesie Charlie’s franchise, but here he was, tolerating a noise level that was nothing less than astonishing, his eyes unreadable when the menus were delivered by a guy in a somewhat the worse-for-wear chicken suit.

He ate the atrocious food without comment, slipped the waiter-chicken a tip when he came to their table and serenaded them with a song with Ace’s name liberally sprinkled throughout.

“Well, wasn’t that fun?” Morgan asked as they left Cheesie Charlie’s.

“Yes!” Ace crowed. Even she seemed to notice that nothing was penetrating the hard armor around her father. “Daddy,” she demanded, “didn’t you think that was fun?”

“Fun as pounding nails with my forehead,” he muttered.

“That doesn’t sound fun,” Ace pointed out.

“You’re right,” he said, and then sternly warned, “don’t try it at home.”

Morgan sighed as Ace skipped ahead to where they had parked. “How did you allow yourself to get talked into coming? I’m beginning to see you did not volunteer for this excursion.”

He hesitated, and then he nodded at Cecilia. “We always spend Saturday together. It’s our tradition. Since her mom passed. I was willing to forgo it, just this once. She wasn’t.”

“Somewhere under that hard exterior is there a heart of pure gold, Nate Hathoway?”

She finally got the smile, only it wasn’t the one she’d been trying for. Cynical. Something tight around the edges of it. His eyes shielded.

“Don’t kid yourself.”

Instead of scaling his wall, she’d managed to get him to put it up higher! And for some reason it made her mad. If she couldn’t make him laugh, then she might as well torment him.

“If you thought Cheesie Charlie’s was fun, you’re going to love The Snow Cave,” Morgan promised him.

He gave her a dark, lingering look that sent shivers from her ears to her toes.

The Snow Cave proudly proclaimed itself as haute tot.

If he had looked out of place at Cheesie’s, Nate Hathoway now looked acutely out of place in the exclusive girls’ store. He was big and rugged amongst the racks and displays of pint-size frilly clothing in more shades of pink than Morgan was certain the male mind could imagine.

Ignoring his discomfort, at the same time as enjoying it immensely, Morgan sorted through the racks until she had both her and Cecilia’s arms heaped up with selections: blouses and T-shirts, socks, slacks, dresses, skirts.

“Great,” he said when it was obvious they could not carry one more thing. “Are you done? Can we go?”

“She has to try everything on.”

“What?” He looked like a wolf caught in a trap. “What for? Just buy it all so we can leave.”

Not even a little ashamed for enjoying his misery so thoroughly, Morgan leaned close to him and whispered, “This store is very expensive. You should allow her to pick one or two items from here and we’ll get the rest elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere?” He closed his eyes and bit back a groan. “Just buy the damn stuff. I don’t care what it costs. I don’t want to go elsewhere.”

She waited to feel guilty, but given how easily he had resisted her efforts to charm, she didn’t.

Not in the least. This was a show of spunky liberation from needing his approval that even Amelia would have approved of!

“That’s not how it works,” Morgan said firmly. “We’ve been shopping for all of ten minutes. Don’t be such a baby.”

His mouth dropped open in shock, closed again. Morgan was sure she could hear him grinding his teeth before he finally said, “A baby? Me?”

“And could you try not to curse? Cecilia tends to bring some of your words to school.”

“You consider damn a curse?” he said, clearly as astonished by that as by the fact that she’d had the audacity to call him a baby.

“I do,” she said bravely.

He stared at her as if she was freshly minted from a far-off planet. He scowled. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He looked longingly at the door. And then Ace danced up, with one more find.

“Look! Sparkle skinny jeans that will fit me!”

He sighed with long suffering, shot Morgan a dark look that she answered with a bland, uncaring smile, and then allowed Ace to take his hand and tug him toward the change area.

Which, like everything at The Snow Cave, was designed to delight little girls. The waiting area, newly decorated for Christmas, was like the throne room in a winter palace fantasy.

And so there sat Nate Hathoway front row and center, in a pink satin chair which looked as if it could snap into kindling under his weight. But as Cecilia danced out in each of her new outfits, the scowl dissolved from his face, and even if he didn’t smile, his expression was at least less menacing.

It was hours later that they finally drove through the darkness toward Canterbury and home. Ace fell asleep in her booster seat in the back instantly, nearly lost amongst the clothing bags and shoe boxes that surrounded her. They could have gone in the back of Nate’s huge SUV, but she had insisted she had to have each of her purchases close to her.

Ace wore her new coat: an impractical pure-white curly fur creation that was going to make her the absolute envy of the grade-one girls. She had on a hair band with a somewhat wilted bow, and little red patent-leather shoes on her leotarded feet.

“She’s worn right out,” Nate said with a glance in the rearview mirror. “And no wonder. Is the female of the species born with an ability to power shop?”

“I think so.”

“So how come you didn’t get anything for yourself?”

“Because today wasn’t about me.”

He glanced at her, and she saw a warmth had crept past his guard and into his eyes. But he looked quickly away, before she could bask in it for too long.

Looking straight ahead, as snow was beginning to fall gently, Nate turned on the radio. It was apparently preset to a rock station, but he glanced at the sleeping girl, and then at Morgan, and fiddled with the dial until he found a soft country ballad.

“Why do you call Cecilia ‘Ace’?” Morgan asked.

He hesitated, as if he did not want to reveal one single thing about himself or his family to her.

But then he said, “Her mom had started calling her Sissy, short for Cecilia, I guess. There are no sissies in the Hathoway family. Nobody was calling my kid Sissy.”

And then he sighed. “I regret making an issue over it, now.”

Morgan heard lots of regret in his voice. She had heard about the accident, and knew one minute he’d had a wife, and a life, and the next that everything had changed forever. What were his regrets? Had he called, I love you, as his wife had headed out the door for the last time?

His face was closed now, as if he already had said way more than he wanted to. Which meant he was the strong one who talked to no one about his pain.

She wanted to reach across the darkness of the cab, and invite him to tell her things he had told no one else, but she knew he would not appreciate the gesture.

Silence fell over them. Despite the quiet, there was something good about driving through the night with him, the soft music, the snow falling outside, his scent tickling at her nose.

Normally, particularly if she was driving by herself, the snow would have made Morgan nervous, but tonight she had a feeling of being with a man who would keep those he had been charged with guarding safe no matter what it took, no matter what it cost him.

But he hadn’t, and he wore that failure to protect his wife around him like a cloak of pure pain.

Even though Morgan knew he had not been there at the accident that killed his wife, she was certain he would in some way hold himself responsible. Did he think he should have driven her that night? Not let her go into the storm?

She could not ask him that. Not yet. Which meant she thought someday maybe she could. Why was she hoping this shopping trip was not the end of it?

Because she felt so safe driving with him through the snow-filled night?

Amelia wouldn’t have approved, but it was nice to rely on someone else’s competence. Even though it might be weak, Morgan felt herself savoring the feeling of being looked after.

She glanced at his strong features, illuminated by the dash lights. He looked calm, despite the snowfall growing heavier outside, the windshield wipers slapping along trying to keep up.

Nate Hathoway might not smile much, but Morgan suddenly knew if your back was against the wall and barbarians were coming at you with knives in their teeth, he was the one you would want standing right beside you.

It was weariness that had allowed an independent woman such as herself to entertain such a traitorous thought, Morgan defended herself. And then, as if to prove it, the warmth inside the vehicle, the radio, the mesmerizing fall of snow—and the sense of being safe and taken care of—made it impossible for her to think of clever things to say. Or even to keep her eyes open.

When she woke up, it was to absolute stillness. The sound of the radio was gone, the vehicle had stopped moving, the dashboard lights were off, and the vehicle was empty.

She realized there was a weight on her shoulder, and that it was his hand, not shaking her, just touching her.

Even through the puffiness of her parka, she could feel his warmth, and his strength. It made her want to go back to sleep.

“Morgan, we’re home.”

For home to be a place shared, instead of a place of aloneness, felt like the most alluring dream of all.

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.