Rescued by his Christmas Angel (10 page)

“I understand Mr. Wellhaven will announce the choice at his welcome party. It's a skating party at the pond, a week from tonight. He's been sent video of some of the rehearsals.”

“I'd like it to be over with,” Molly said.

“Me, too,” Nate said. “I hate to think how disappointed she's going to be.”

“Who knows?” Morgan said. “Maybe she won't be disappointed. Maybe it will be her.”

Molly's and Nate's mouths fell open in equal expressions of shocked disbelief.

“Ace?” they said together.

“I've told all the girls they have an equal chance of being chosen.”

“But that's not true,” Nate said grimly. “Ace can't
sing a note, and she doesn't look like anyone's idea of an angel.”

“Her singing has actually improved quite a lot under Mrs. Wellhaven's tutelage.”

“She sings all those songs around the house all the time. I haven't noticed any improvement.”

“Well,” Morgan said firmly, “there has been. And I think anyone with a little imagination could see she would make a perfectly adorable Christmas Angel.”

“I don't want her getting her hopes up for something that doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of happening.”

It was the first grim note in a perfect day, so Molly quickly changed the subject, but the mood had shifted.

A few minutes later, saying goodbye on the doorstep, Nate cradling the sleeping child against his chest, it seemed to Morgan as if she had never had a more perfect day. She realized it was not the toddy alone that allowed her to feel this sense of warmth and well-being. It had only allowed her to relax into the feeling instead of analyzing it.

“Nate,” she said, as they drove through the snow, “it's so nice that you still are so connected with them, with Cindy's family.”

He shot her a surprised look. “Family is family. They became my family the day I married Cindy.”

Morgan shivered. She had always known he was a
forever
kind of man. Not like in her own family, where loyalties shifted with each new liaison. She could feel herself longing for what he represented.

Morgan realized tonight had been the kind of night she had always dreamed of.

A simple night of family. And connection. A feeling of some things not being temporary.

“I still think it's nice,” she said.

“We had already lost Cindy. It would have just made everything so much worse if we lost each other. Ace is what remains, she's what Cindy is sending forward into the future. I could never keep her from her aunt, from her mom's sister.”

But Morgan thought of all the people—including her own family—that when something happened, like a divorce, that's exactly what they did.

“When my mom and dad divorced,” she told him, “it was like my dad's whole side of the family, including him, just faded away.”

“You didn't have any contact with your dad?”

“A bit, at first. Then he moved for a job, and then he remarried. So, it was a card and some money on my birthday. He always paid my mother support, though.”

“Yippee for him,” Nate said darkly. “There's a lot more to being a dad than paying the bills.”

“Yes,” she said. “I can see that in the way you parent.”

“Now you like my parenting?” he teased her. “What about the notes?”

“You haven't gotten one for a while!”

“I kind of miss them.”

“You do not.”

They were in front of her house now, but he made no move to get out of the truck. “What your dad did? That was wrong,” he said, after a long time. “And sad.”

She liked that about Nate Hathoway. He had a strong value system. He knew what was right and what was wrong, and he would never compromise that.

“Nate, tell me if it's none of my business, but did someone else die, besides your wife? Molly said something.”

For a long moment he didn't answer. Then he said gruffly, “There were three of us who grew up together. Me, Cindy and David. Cindy and David had been in love since they were about twelve. I mean really in love. The head-over-heels kind. Some people outgrow things like that, other people don't. They didn't.”

He was silent for a long, long time. “David joined the army. Before he left he made me promise I'd look after her. If anything happened.”

“Something happened,” Morgan guessed when he was silent for a long time again.

He cast her a look that said it all, that confirmed that strong value system.

“David was killed in Iraq,” he said roughly. “And I looked after Cindy, just like I promised.”

She wanted to ask if he loved her, but it was so evident from the agony on his face that he had loved her. Loved both his friends.

“You are a good man,” she whispered. She wanted to ask,
Did she love you? The really-in-love kind? The head-over-heels kind?
But she could tell by the set of his face he already felt he might have said too much.

He shrugged it off uncomfortably, and they pulled up to her house. He shut off the truck, and leaped out, not wanting to discuss it anymore. Still, he walked her up to her front door, helped her with the key.

“Thank you, Nate,” she said softly. “It was such a perfect day.”

“You're welcome.” He turned to go down off her stoop.

Maybe it was the hot rum toddy.

Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was that he was a good, good man, who had made a vow to his best friend and kept it. Maybe it was because she thought he deserved to be
really
in love and suspected that he had sacrificed that feeling in the name of honor.

“Nate?”

He turned back to her.

Something else had been between them all day, too.

Awareness.

She crossed the small distance between them, stood on tiptoes and did what she had wanted to do from the moment she had met him.

She tasted him. She touched her lips to his own.

He tasted exactly as she had known he would.

Of mysterious things that made a woman's heart race, but underneath that, of strength and solidness. Of a man who would do the right thing.

Of things made to last forever.

She stumbled back from him, both frightened and intrigued by the strength of her longing.

He was a man, she knew, who had been tremendously hurt.

She held her breath knowing that everything between them had just shifted with the invitation of her lips.

So far everything had been casual and spontaneous.

Now their kiss changed that.

It asked for more. It demanded some definition, it asked where things were going. It asked if he was ready to
really
fall in love.

The head-over-heels kind.

Because despite it all, despite her determination to be independent, to not give her life away, she felt ready to surrender to the tug inside her.

To love him.

Morgan held her breath, thinking he would walk away, perhaps never to look back.

But he didn't. He regarded her solemnly, and then said, softly, “Wow.”

Then he walked away, leaving her feeling as if things were even more up in the air and ill-defined than they had been before.

 

“Mr. Hathoway?”

Nate glanced at the clock. It was just a little after 7 a.m. Morgan must have assumed he was up getting Ace ready for school. The truth was he had the process down to a science. He could get her ready, including hair, breakfast and bag lunch in under fifteen minutes.

“Yes, Miss McGuire?” he asked. Nate hadn't called her since the sleigh ride, since her unexpected kiss and the clear invitation in it.

He hadn't called her because he had told her things he had not expected to tell her. She was proving she could take chinks out of armor that not a single other person had even dented.

But Morgan McGuire wanted things that Nate could not promise. After that night with Molly and Keith, playing games, laughing, everything easy and light, he was aware of a deep longing in him, too.

To have a life like the one he'd had before. A stable life, where you woke up in the morning and trusted the day would go as you planned.

The truth? He wasn't even sure he could be the man
he had been before, a man naively unaware how quickly things could go wrong in the world, naively believing his strength would be enough to protect those he loved from harm.

He was aware how vulnerable answering a longing like that made a man.

“I'd like to discuss my last note with you.”

But here was another truth. Despite his desire to harden himself against Morgan McGuire, her temptations and invitations, he could feel a smile starting somewhere in the vicinity of his chest. He relished it, that he was lying in bed under the warmth of his blanket, the phone to his ear, listening to her.

He relished when she used that snippy, schoolmarm tone of voice on him. He wondered when that had happened, exactly, that he had started enjoying that schoolmarm tone.

“I sent you a request to send cookies for Mr. Wellhaven's welcome party at the skating rink at Old Sawmill Pond.”

“I sent the damned cookies.”

Silence. “We've discussed cussing.”

“Ace is still in bed.”

He could tell she was debating asking how he could get her ready for school in time if she was still in bed, but she wisely decided to stick to one topic at a time.

“All right,” Morgan said, after a pause. “Let's discuss the damned cookies, then.”

The smile was turning to laughter. He bit it back.

“I'm in charge of cookies for the welcome party for Mr. Wellhaven. He'll be arriving Saturday.”

“The note said that.” Plus, Ace was in excitement overdrive about the skating party to be held at the pond
in Mr. Wellhaven's honor. Nate was going to have to give her the gift he had planned to give his daughter from Santa—the new skates—early.

“You said you missed my notes,” she pointed out.

“Hmm,” he returned, noncommittally. “I did say that.” He realized what he missed was her.

“After she received my note, Mrs. Weston sent four dozen sugar cookies decorated individually like gift-wrapped Christmas parcels.”

“Good for Ashley.”

“Mrs. Campbell sent three dozen chocolate-dipped snowmen. Sharon McKinley sent melt-in-your-mouth shortbread, shaped like Christmas balls, with icing ribbons.”

“How did you know they were melt-in-your-mouth? Are you sampling the cookies, Miss McGuire? Tut-tut.” He heard her bite back laughter.

Why were the simplest things such a joy with her?

“Mrs. Bonnabell sent—”

“Look, it sounds like you have plenty of cookies. You won't even need the box of Peek Freans I sent over.”

“That is hardly the point, Mr. Hathoway.”

“What is the point?”

“Everyone else made the effort.”

“Fine. I'll ask Molly to whip me up a batch of brown snowmen, with ribbons around their necks, holding Christmas parcels. Individually decorated.”

“Your listening skills are very good, Mr. Hathoway.”

“Thank you.” Ridiculous to feel pleased that she had noticed how closely he listened to her every word.
However,
he guessed.

“However,”
Morgan continued, “I don't really
think it's fair to ask Molly to contribute to
our
class project.”

“I don't know how to make cookies.”

“Well, yes, I understand that. It is a situation that can be remedied. I mean, a few short weeks ago, I didn't know how to hang a coat hanger.”

“You're not exactly ready to start building furniture.”

“No, I suppose not.”

Said a bit doubtfully, as if she might actually be considering trying to build some furniture. He reminded himself he'd have to follow up on getting her a new hammer before she wrecked something else trying to use the one she had.

“The point is,” Morgan said, “I was willing to learn. If you and Ace would like to come over this afternoon after school, I would be happy to teach you how to make Christmas cookies.”

His schedule had become insane because of the volunteer hours he was putting in on the set of
The Christmas Angel
. He still had special orders he had to get out for Christmas, as well as the gate commission.

Plus, he was avoiding Morgan. And her lips. And the clear invitation he had seen in her eyes the other night after the disastrous sleigh ride. Boy, if a sleigh ride like that couldn't scare a girl off, what would?

And there was the other disastrous thing, too. Telling her about Cindy and David had poked a little hole in the dam of feelings walled up within him… He was all too aware that he might be like the little boy hoping his finger poked in that hole was going to be enough to hold it back.

The thing was, her voice on the other end of the
phone was like a lifeline thrown to a man who had been in the water so long he didn't even know he was drowning.

The thing was, he knew it had cost her to make the move, and he could not bear to hurt her. It seemed she had experienced quite enough hurt in her life. Not at the hands of fate, either, but at the hands of the very people who should have loved and protected her.

Though there was probably a far more sensible way of looking at that. Hurt her a little now. Or a lot later.

He didn't feel like being sensible. Or maybe, closer to the truth, he was not as sure as he had been a few weeks ago about what sensible was.

“Sure,” he said, as if he grabbed lifelines every single day. “What time would you like us to come make cookies?”

A
S IT TURNED OUT
,
after school, Ace had been offered a Christmas shopping outing to Greenville with the Westons. She still had to buy something for her daddy, she informed Nate, and it would be much too hard to keep it a secret if he came with her.

She was so excited about going shopping with her new friend Brenda that he didn't have the heart to tell her she would be missing making cookies with her teacher. Having to make such a momentous choice would have torn her in two.

Nate knew he could phone and cancel, and maybe even
should
phone and cancel, but as he moved up the walkway to Morgan's house, he contemplated the fact that he hadn't.

And knew he was saying yes to the Light.

Even though he knew better. Even though he knew, better than most, life could be hard, and cruel, and made no promises.

When Morgan opened her door, that's what he saw in her face. Light. And he moved toward it like a man who had been away for a long time, a soldier away at the wars, who had spotted the light pouring out the window of home.

An hour later her kitchen was covered in flour and red food coloring. He was pretty sure there were more sprinkles on the floor than on the cookies.

And, despite the fact she was the world's best teacher, calm, patient, clear about each step and the order to do them in, those cookies were extra ugly. Sugar cookies, they were supposed to look like Christmas tree decorations. They didn't.

He held one of the finished cookies up for her. “What does this look like?”

She studied it. “An icicle?”

“Morgan, it looks like something obscene.” He bit into it, loving her blush. “But it tastes not bad.”

She put her hands on her hips, still very much Miss McGuire, pretending that kiss of a few nights ago wasn't hanging in the air between them like mistletoe, pretending her face wasn't on fire. “Has anyone ever told you you're incorrigible?”

“Of course,” he said, picked up a misshapen Santa and bit his head off. “That's part of being a Hathoway.”

“Really?” She surveyed the cookies, apparently realized they were not going anywhere near Wesley's welcome party, picked one up and bit into it. “Tell me about growing up a Hathoway.”

And oddly enough, he did. In Morgan's kitchen, surrounded by the scent of cookies baking and a feeling of
home,
Nate told her about how it was to grow up poor in a small town.

“But,” he said, making sure she knew he was not inviting pity, “we might have been poor, but our family was everything. We were fiercely loyal to each other. My dad couldn't give my mom much materially, but I don't think a man has ever loved a woman the way he
loves her. He would fight off tigers for her. For any of us. There was an intense feeling of family.

“And we might have been poor, but we were never bored.” He told her about working in the forge since he was just a little boy, starting on small chores, working up to bending the iron.

He told her about making their own fun, since they could never afford anything. In the summer fun was a secondhand bicycle and the swimming hole, or a hose and a pile of dirt.

“You haven't really lived until you've squished mud through your toes,” he told her. “And in winter fun was a skate on a frozen pond in skates way too big because they were purchased to last a few seasons. It was tobogganing on a homemade sled, and snowball fights. It was an old deck of worn-out cards in the kitchen.”

“Like at Molly and Keith's the other night?” she said, and he heard the wistfulness.

“Yeah, growing up was like that…” Each of his memories held Cindy and David. It was the first time in a long time he felt the richness of that friendship, instead of the loss. It was the first time he understood how much it had become a part of who he was today.

“Tell me about how you grew up,” he invited Morgan.

And then Morgan told him about her family, and how fragmented it was, how some of her earliest memories were of tension, of feeling as if she was responsible for holding something together that could not be held.

“It was like trying to stop an avalanche that had already broken free,” Morgan said. “My mom and dad eventually split when I was eleven. And it was a blessing, but it made me long for things I couldn't have.”

“Such as?”

She smiled sadly. “I used to watch other families on the block, families on television, and long for that. To be together with other people who loved you in a special way. A way that both shut out the rest of the world, and made you able to go into it in a different way.”

He was astonished how sad he felt for her. “I'm surprised you don't have it, if you longed for it,” he said gruffly.

“I tried to set it up, to manipulate it into happening, to impose my sugarplums-and-fairies vision of family on every single relationship I was in, but I just ended up more disillusioned. At some point, I decided the kids I taught would be my family.”

It seemed to him that this was a lesson Morgan would teach him again and again. It wasn't all about him. Maybe that was part of the legacy his two best friends had left him with.

When you cared about people, putting what they needed sometimes came ahead of what you needed.

He knew he wasn't a man who could be counted on to make anyone's life better forever. Certainly he could not be trusted with sugarplum-and-fairy fantasies about family.

But he could probably be trusted with making her feel better for one single day.

And that day was today.

“Eating all these cookies?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Has made me really hungry. Want to go for Chinese?”

Taking somebody for Chinese food was a sign of a
serious relationship in a small town, but she probably didn't know that.

She smiled at him, and he was bathed in the light of that smile.

“Yes,” she breathed as if something was settled between them. So, maybe she knew what going for Chinese in small towns meant after all.

And really over the next few hectic days, it felt as if something
was
settled between them. Whatever it had been in Nate that could fight her, and his attraction to her, could fight no more.

The rehearsals were stepped up now in preparation for Wesley Wellhaven's arrival. The children were practicing their parts in earnest, and Mrs. Wellhaven still frowned on an audience, so more and more Nate and Morgan used that as an excuse to slip away.

They were not dates. Or at least Nate told himself they were not dates.

Because mostly they were mere moments stolen from crowded schedules.

A quick walk around the block the school was on. A cup of coffee in the cafeteria. A shared crossword puzzle and biscotti at Bookworms café down the street. Sometimes, they'd sit in his truck, the heater blasting, just talking or sharing a newspaper. Once they had a snowball fight in the parking lot.

There was a time when all this waiting for Ace to finish rehearsals would have grated on Nate. Now he looked forward to every minute he got to spend with his daughter's teacher.

When he was with Morgan, Nate had the strangest sensation that he was discovering the town he had always lived in as if it was brand-new to him.

He had never ridden the horse-drawn wagon that old Pete Smith drove around town for the three weeks before Christmas. Now he did. He had never taken the Light Tour, following a map through the town of the best Christmas decorated properties, but one night, when the kids were in a late rehearsal, he and Morgan did that. He had never been in Canterbury Tails, the pet store, but one time they went in and played on the floor with the new golden-retriever puppies that would be ready to go home for Christmas. Morgan guided him through the foreign land of the antiques stores and the bookstores and the art galleries. He'd lived in Canterbury his whole life, and he saw its museum for the first time with her at his side.

Morgan's sense of wonder, her joy in discovery, was obviously part of what made her a teacher her students adored. But it was also what gave Nate the sensation that it was all brand-new, an adventure that had always been right in front of him all his life but that he had missed completely.

His own sense of wonder, his joy in discovery, seemed to be all about her. More and more her hand found its way to his, and he savored the feeling of it: soft and small within his larger one.

He kissed her. At first lightly, casually, but as time went on, the kisses deepened, and instead of slaking some desire inside of him the taste of her fueled it.

Nate found himself telling Morgan things he had never told another person, and she told him things he suspected she had never told another person.

Nate began to feel things around Morgan that he had never felt. He would never say it was a better relationship than what he had had with his wife.

But it was different.

He and Cindy had grown up together, he had known her forever. He had loved her, and he had loved David, and when the time came he had kept his vow to David gladly.

But now, with Morgan, sometimes Nate would remember Cindy's words to him, a long time ago.

I wish you could know what it is to fall in love, Nate.

Stop it, Cin, I love you.

No. Head over heels, I can't breathe, think, function. That kind of fall-in-love.

At the time, he had thought she was crazy. He hadn't felt he could love anybody any more than he loved her.

But now, with Morgan, he saw that there were different kinds of love. It felt as if Cindy's wish for him was coming true.

You've been my angel, Hath. Now I'll be yours.

For the most pragmatic man in the world to even consider those words and wonder if they could be true was a measure of what was happening to him.

Nate felt as if he was making a choice, saying yes to something that was bigger than him. He had never felt like this: breathless with wanting, on fire with life and longing.

The simplest things: discussing the newspaper, opening a fortune cookie at a Chinese-food restaurant, playing with a puppy on the floor, it all made him feel so intensely alive, almost as if he had sleepwalked his way through life, and now the touch of her lips, her eyes on his, her hand folded into his hand, were making him come fully gloriously awake.

He was aware of feeling like a teenage boy around Morgan, wanting to show off for her. He loved how he could make her eyes catch on his muscles when he flexed, how his breath would stop in his chest when she caught the tip of that little pink tongue between her teeth.

He loved the stolen kisses, the sizzling moments of pure awareness, the desire building to heat that could melt steel. He loved the smoky look that would cloud her green eyes after they kissed.

And he loved it that they didn't give in, as he had with Cindy. That they let the
wanting
become a part of the tantalizing sizzle of being together.

He felt dazzled, as if he was conducting an old-fashioned courtship, as if he had become the gentleman she had promised him she could see, even when no one else ever had.

When Nate was not with Morgan it felt as if the color had leeched from his world, as surely as the color leeched from the autumn leaves, stealing their reds and golds and oranges until they were just brown.

He anticipated seeing her. He found himself thinking of little ways to win that smile. He sent her a single orchid in a candleholder. He made her little trinkets at the forge, a frog, a chunky bracelet, a set of little metal worry beads.

Morgan's relationship with Ace was a marvel. She knew everything there was to know about little girls. She knew about hair bows and pink shoes and underwear with the days of the week embroidered on each pair. She knew about doll's clothes, and Hannah Montana and baking things.

His little girl was blossoming like a cactus that had waited for Christmas.

But through it all, Nate felt as if he was in a love-hate relationship with himself, as if his surrender to all these good things and good feelings was temporary.

He liked the way it felt to be excited about life, to explore the mysteries and gift of another human being. But at the same time he hated the sensation of losing control.

The feeling of
choosing
this was leaving him. Because with every day that Morgan's laughter and her nearness filled his life with light, it felt the choice to walk away was a door that was closing.

What man could choose to go back to darkness after he had been in the Light?

Maybe walking a great distance in darkness was even about this: recognizing the Light when you felt it. Honoring it by knowing it was something not to be taken for granted.

Nate was beginning to see the events of his life in a larger perspective.

How would you even know it
was
light, if you had never known darkness?

He was so accustomed to being a man of action that these thoughts, deep and complex, troubled him.

And it troubled him even more when he realized what was happening.

He could call it whatever he wanted: discovering the Light, learning to play again, having fun, being awake.

But all those names could not really distance him from the truth that it was far deeper than any of the labels he was trying to attach to it.

Nate knew it when he found himself in Greenville, alone,
shopping,
a weekday when both Morgan and Ace were at school.

The thing was, he knew darn well he had not come here to shop for Ace. No, Ace's parcels were spilling out from under their Christmas tree in a pile so high and wide they were taking over the living room.

No, Nate had taken advantage of the fact Morgan and Ace were in school to make the trip to Greenville by himself to find something to give Morgan for Christmas.

He wasn't quite sure what. The hammer in the bag from the building supply store—a nice little 12-ounce curved-claw trim hammer—didn't quite cut it.