Rescued by his Christmas Angel (12 page)

In a split second, because of one dark accusing look from Nate, Morgan's night had gone from magic to misery.

And she felt as if she had failed herself.

Because somehow, somewhere, when she'd let her guard down, when she wasn't looking, she'd let herself be swept off her feet.

Morgan McGuire realized the truth. She had fallen in love with Nate Hathoway.

N
ATE SCANNED
the newspaper. And there it was, one more blow for Ace. His name was not among the three hundred names, listed alphabetically, that had received one of those coveted tickets for the rows and rows of uncomfortable chairs he had helped set up in the auditorium. He would not be part of the live audience that got to watch
The Christmas Angel.

“Buy the newspaper right away, Daddy,” Ace had told him when he had dropped her at school. “The names are coming out today. I just know you're going to get one of the tickets, Daddy. I just know it.”

It had meant a lot to her that he be there, at
The Christmas Angel,
in person. After her disappointment about not being chosen the angel, he had hoped to at least be able to give her his presence as she sang along with the rest of the angel choir. Especially since his little girl was being such a good sport. It hardly seemed like a glitch on her radar that she hadn't been chosen.

She had just switched her optimism, now it was all focused on Nate getting one of those tickets.

What had it been about her certainty that had almost convinced him that he would get one of the tickets?

He was becoming a dreamer, that's what. Had he
actually started to feel, like Ace, as if an angel maybe was watching over them?

Nate, you've been my angel. Now I'll be yours.

It was so unrealistic. So fantasy based, instead of fact based. It could not be a good thing.

His phone rang. He hoped it was Morgan, even though he knew she was teaching school. He hoped it was her, even though he had not called her since the skating party. Holding back.
Proving
to himself he did have control. That he wasn't
helpless
.

The caller was the set designer for
The Christmas Angel
. In a panic. Nate had noticed the people who flooded the town,
The Christmas Angel
production team, were always in a panic about one thing or another.

Today, it had been discovered one of the props wasn't working. A window on the cottage was supposed to slide open, and Mr. Wellhaven was to lean out that window to sing his first song. The window was stuck.

For a minute, the Nate who could already feel his daughter's disappointment that he had not received one of the tickets, wanted to tell the set designer to stuff it. To stuff the whole damn
Christmas Angel
. To stuff himself while he was at it.

But he didn't.

Instead he asked himself,
Where is all this anger coming from?

Was it because he had bought that damned ring? Or was it because ever since that announcement at the skating party he could feel his hopes dissolving, disappointment circling him and Ace, waiting, like vultures, for the inevitable. As if their very optimism had set them up for the kill.

But he thought of Wesley singing that night at the
frozen pond, and he thought of how that voice had eased something in him. Maybe it could do something for the rest of the world when they watched it live.

So, instead of telling the set designer to stuff it, Nate took a deep breath, looked at his watch, said he'd be there as soon as he could to have a look at the window.

He hung up the phone. “Nate saves Christmas,” he told himself sarcastically, but even his customary sarcasm felt funny, like a jacket that no longer fit.

No one was on the set or in the auditorium when Nate got there. It was unusual. Usually the whole area bustled with electricians and light people and sound people. But now it was down to the finishing details. Most of the work was done, and Nate had a rare opportunity to stand back and look at what they had accomplished.

It was amazing. The humble school stage had been transformed. It looked like the set for a highly polished and professional production.

The illusion that had been created was nothing short of magical. The cottage, dripping snow, looked amazingly realistic. Suspended snowflakes that actually moved and changed colors dangled from the ceiling. The tiers the grade-one choir would stand on looked like banks of snow.

And the huge Christmas tree, sent from Canada, a Frasier fir, was stage right. It was filling the whole auditorium with its scent, and it was finally magnificently decorated.

Nate went to the cottage, and went behind it, tested the window. It was sticking. He pulled a screwdriver from his belt, did an adjustment, tried it again. It slid a little more easily, but he wanted it to glide.

The door to the backstage opened and shut, but he paid no attention to the sound of footsteps.

A curtain moved and a shaft of light fell across him. Nate looked up from where he was crouched below the window, and frowned.

Ace?

What was she doing here by herself? He almost called out a greeting, but some instinct stopped him.

Her intensity, her single-minded focus on
something.

So instead of calling out a greeting, Nate pulled back into the shadows behind the cottage and stood frozen and silent, watching his daughter tiptoe across the stage.

She went behind the tree, and with the familiarity of someone who had done this a million times, she climbed the staircase, hidden from the audience, that allowed the angel to get to the top of the tree.

Once there, she stood for a moment, radiant. From her lofty height advantage, she smiled out at the empty auditorium.

And then she began to sing.

It was an awful sound, reminiscent of alley cats meeting and greeting under a full moon. And yet, despite how awful it was, Nate was transfixed.

His daughter looked so beautiful on that perch above the tree, her eyes closed, her arms extended, singing with exuberance that was attractive, even if the tone was not. He recognized the song and realized Ace had been humming and singing that same tune around the house for days.

“Angel of Hope,” the number Brenda Weston had been chosen to sing.

As Ace poured her heart into singing now, there was a look on her face that every parent lives to see on the face of their child.

As if she was sure of her place in the world, and was claiming it. And as if she was accepting the world embracing her back.

But for as ethereal as the moment was, Nate realized he could not be transfixed by this! He was her father. And he had to do the responsible thing, even if it hurt. And it was going to hurt, him more than her, not that she ever had to know.

He stepped out from the cottage, stood before the Christmas tree, gazing up at her, his arms folded over his chest.

It took Ace a minute to realize she had an audience. Her eyes opened, her voice faltered and then died. She looked down at him.

“Daddy?”

“Get down from there,” he said.

She came down slowly, not demonstrating even half the confidence she had gone up the staircase with. Finally, she stood in front of him, not looking at him, scuffing her toes against the floor.

The backstage door opened again.

“Cecilia?”

The curtain parted again and Morgan stood there, but he held up a hand and focused on his daughter.

“What were you doing?” he asked Ace.

“Just practicing,” Ace said in a small voice.

“Practicing what?”

She hesitated. She looked at Morgan for help. Good God, was Morgan in on this?

“Practicing for what?” he said again.

“To be the Christmas Angel,” Ace muttered.

“What?”

“I'm going to be the Christmas Angel.”

“No, you aren't.”

“I am so! I'm going to be the Christmas Angel!” Ace shouted at him.

“Oh, Cecilia,” Morgan said, and stepped forward, but he stopped her with a look. It seemed his daughter's ridiculous, impossible, unrealistic hopes only mirrored his own. It felt as if that ring was burning a hole through his shirt pocket.

He didn't need any of what Morgan was bringing to his daughter. Or to him. All that softness and light. And hope.

He'd even started to think, just like his daughter, that an angel was looking after them! It was enough.

False hopes had to be dealt with. And destroyed.

Before they destroyed the one who harbored them.

“You…are…not…going…to…be…the…Christmas… Angel.” He enunciated every word carefully. He wanted his daughter to understand how dangerous his mood was.

“I am!” Ace shouted. “I am. My mommy told me I was.”

He closed his eyes and asked for the strength to do what needed to be done. “Ace, your mother is dead. She's been dead a long time. She didn't tell you anything.”

“She did so! In the dream. She told me! She was an angel.”

“There are no angels,” he said. He said it firmly, but he could feel something dip inside himself. Who was he to make a statement like that? Still, it felt as though
to show his daughter one bit of doubt right now would be the wrong thing. The worst thing.

Tears were coming up in Ace's eyes, furious, hurt, and he knew he couldn't react to them. Or to that funny feeling that he had just said something really, really bad.

For her own good, these hopes had to be dashed.

“Dreams aren't real,” he said. “You aren't going to be the Christmas Angel. Not ever. There's no use thinking it. Brenda Weston is the Christmas Angel.”

His daughter looked at him mutinously, not backing down.

“You can't sing,” he told her, feeling like Simon in
American Idol
. “You sound awful.”

Ace's mouth moved, but for a moment, no sound came out. When it did it was a howl of pain so pure it reminded him of when he had told her Cindy was dead.

He made himself go on. “Brenda looks like the Christmas Angel, and she sounds like the Christmas Angel. She's the perfect Christmas Angel.”

“I hate you,” Ace screamed, and then ran past him and into Morgan's arms. She buried her head against Morgan, who was looking at him as if he was the devil himself.

“How could you?” she asked quietly.

Yeah, that was the question he was asking himself. How could he have done this? Let hope creep in? Allowed himself and his daughter to believe impossible things? How could he have let things go this far?

“It needed to be said.” He could hear the grimness in his tone.

“Not like that, it didn't.”

“Yeah. It did. Exactly like that.”

“You're breaking her heart.”

“No,” he said quietly. “I'm not. Her heart has already been broken. Unlike you, I'm doing my best to make sure it doesn't happen again.”

“Unlike me?” Morgan whispered.

“We don't need dreams, Miss McGuire. We don't need the kind of dreams you represent.”

“You're right,” she said, her eyes snapping with indignation and anger. “You don't need dreams. You need a miracle.”

He could tell she was within an inch of stamping her foot and announcing she hated him, too.

“We don't believe in miracles, either,” he said, his tone deliberately flat, even though he felt that same little dip in his chest as he said it.

Morgan didn't stamp her foot, or tell him she hated him. That almost would have been easier to deal with than her look of hurt disdain, of absolute betrayal. She gathered Ace in close to her, and they left the stage.

Only after the door was shut, did Nate allow himself to crumple. He sat on the edge of the stage, and buried his head in his hands.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, if there are angels, or miracles, I could sure use one now.”

He felt instantly ridiculous.

And all he felt was that same yawning emptiness he had felt on those pitiful occasions he had gone to Cindy's grave, hoping to feel something. Anything.

It felt as though the darkness was gathering around him, pitch-black, tarlike, so thick and so sticky that nothing, least of all light, would ever penetrate it again.

 

Morgan looked around her little house. The tree was down. Most of her dishes and clothing were packed in boxes stacked along her living room wall.

The coat hangers remained in the hall. She could not bear to take those with her.

She had, she acknowledged, had a problem her whole life. She cared about everything way too much, way too deeply.

She had fallen in love with Ace Hathoway.

And even more, she had fallen in love with her father.

Over the past few weeks, she had cherished a dream. That they were all going to be together, that they were going to be a family. With each moment spent with Nate, with each time he had held her hand, teased her, looked at her, kissed her, her dreams had billowed to life. Filled her. Made her feel something she had never really felt.

Complete.

How could she stay here, feeling that way, loving them both so much and knowing her dreams, like Ace's own, were not based in reality?

It was just wishful thinking. It was just dreams.

“We don't need dreams, Miss McGuire. We don't need the kind of dreams you represent.”

The words had been hurtful enough. The way he had been so harsh with Ace had been devastating. The memory of the look on his face—angry, closed—still had the power to make Morgan shiver.

She'd made a mistake thinking she saw things in him that weren't there. She'd made a mistake of the heart.

She was always making mistakes of the heart.

But the thought of him
knowing
how deeply he'd hurt
her was unbearable. She had to get out of here with what little was left of her pride intact.

So, as soon as she got her kids through the production of
The Christmas Angel,
she was going.

On Christmas Day, when everyone was busy with their families, cocooned in those circles of love she had longed for, Morgan would and could just slip away unnoticed. She would get in her little car, the tank already filled with gas, and she would go to anywhere. It didn't matter where. She had some savings. She would leave a check here for January's rent. And then, when she found where she wanted to be, she would hire movers to come get her things.