Rescued by his Christmas Angel (14 page)

But Nate Hathoway wasn't going to. Not anymore.

What seemed to be a long time ago, Morgan had told him she was going to spend Christmas alone.

And he had known she wasn't.

Now he knew she wasn't ever going to again. Not as long as she lived and breathed. Not as long as he lived and breathed.

If
she said yes.

Standing there on that stage, with his daughter in his arms and the woman he loved with that head-over-heels kind of love that made it impossible for a man to breathe or think or function, with the whole town on their feet whistling and clapping, he felt a breath on his neck.

And heard her whisper, once,
yes
.

He glanced at Morgan and realized she had not said a word.

And he realized, his heart swelling, that he and his daughter and the woman he loved stood among angels.

 

Morgan looked around her tiny house sadly. She snapped her tiny suitcase shut, put her book
Bliss: The Extraordinary Joy of Being a Single Woman
on top of it.

She was going to cry. She knew it.

Just thinking of those last moments on stage—not Ace's performance, or Brenda's, either—but the moment those children had surrounded her. She had hugged each and every one, only she knowing the truth.

Goodbye.

When she thought of not seeing her kids again, or her friends at the school, when she thought of not seeing Nate and Ace, the lump in her throat grew so large she could not even swallow.

Of course, she was going to cry for the rest of her life every single time she thought of Ace,
The Christmas Angel,
giving up her dream so that her friend could have hers.

She was going to cry for the rest of her life every single time she thought of these days before Christmas that she had spent with Nate.

They had a shine to them that was imprinted on her soul.

She was exhausted. She should probably wait for morning, but the thought of waking up alone on Christmas morning in this sweet little house was more than she could bear.

Just as she moved toward the door, there was a tap on it. Morgan froze, thinking she might have imagined it, thinking that maybe a branch had tapped the window.

But no, there it came again.

She tiptoed to her front window, craned her neck and could see her doorstep. Nate stood there.

Now what?

She was determined to go, to give this independent life a genuine shot. To make it a success this time. To not be swept from her chosen path.

He had gotten in the way before, a test that she had failed.

Maybe he was still testing her. And she wasn't going to fail this time.

Hoping only she would ever know her boldness was a complete pretext, she went and threw open the door.

“Hi.”

“Nate.”

His eyes drank her in, like a man who had crossed the desert, and she was a long cool drink of water.

Then his eyes left her, found the suitcase, went back to her. He frowned.

“Did you decide to go spend Christmas with your family after all?”

“Yes,” she lied. So much easier than saying,
I am running away from you who wants no part of me or the kind of dreams I offer.

Something in her voice tipped him off, because his eyes went back to her face, suddenly skeptical. Without being invited, he moved by her and stood in her living room.

“What happened to your tree?”

“I took it down. I didn't want to come home—” her voice caught on the word
home,
but she rushed on “—to find a pile of needles on the floor.”

He was looking now at the boxes packed neatly on top of the purple couch. His eyes scanned her living room.

“Where's all the highly breakable bric-a-brac?” he asked.

She said nothing.

“Are you leaving?”

She couldn't look at him. Her shoulders were shaking. She looked down at her feet. She was mortified to see a teardrop on the end of her shoe.

His feet moved into her line of vision. One lean finger came under her chin and lifted it.

“You can't leave,” he said huskily. “We've just begun.”

But it was him who wasn't leaving. He took off his jacket and hung it on one of
their
coat hangers. He set down a wrapped Christmas package beside it.

“You said you didn't need me or my kind of dreams,” she reminded him shakily, as he turned back to her and regarded her with those steady eyes.

We've just begun?
That weakness was sweeping her, that
longing
was knocking the legs right out from under her.

She pulled away from him, caught a glance of her book sitting on top of her luggage, a stern reminder of the bliss that awaited her if she could just get through this.

“Did you know,” she told him, “whole cultures are dispensing with relationships?”

He folded his arms over the mightiness of his chest, she suspected to keep himself from shaking her, but she bravely went on.

“In some Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Iceland, women are
choosing
not to get married anymore. They still have children, they've just dispensed with the, er, bothersome part.”

“You mean men?” he asked grimly.

“Yes,” she said, tilting her chin at him, “the bothersome part.”

“Ah. The insensitive part.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The part that tends to run and hide when something like commitment begins to look likely.”

“Exactly.”

“The part that looks for an excuse to drive people away when they start getting too close.”

Was he talking about
him
or about her? Because wasn't that what she was doing? Literally driving away because she had gotten too close. Her relationship with Karl had never asked this much of her, but she had driven away from that one, too.

“Well, dispensing with men is probably all well and good, we are a bothersome lot, but who puts up their coat hangers?”

“I'm sure they hire it out.”

“Ditto for Christmas trees?”

“I haven't got to that part of the book, yet.”

“And who deals with the stubborn ponies?”

“Not everyone has a stubborn pony to deal with.”

“Who do they teach to make cookies?”

“Their children.”

“Ah, the children that they dispensed with the bother of giving a father. How do the children feel about that?”

“I don't know,” she said, a little querulously. “I don't know any Scandinavian children. Or Scandinavian women for that matter.”

He moved closer to her, stared down at her.

“Who holds them in the night, Morgan? Who do they laugh with? Who do they hold hands with? Who do they kiss? Who makes the loneliness go away? Who makes the sun come out when it's raining?”

“You can't make the sun come out when it's raining!” Oh, hell. They weren't even talking about him. They were talking in
general
terms. Why had she said that?

But he moved closer to her. “Try me,” he breathed.

“It's not raining.”

“It is in my world, Morgan. The thought of you going away is making it rain in my world.”

And then he closed the small distance between them, bent, cupped his hand at the back of her neck and drew her lips to his.

She willed herself to pull away in the interests of being the woman she should be.

But it seemed when her lips met his, she discovered, anew, exactly who that was.

“It's working for me,” he said softly against her lips.

“The sun is coming out for me, Morgan. And I know. Because I've been without it for a long time. Do you have to go there? Do you have to see for yourself what a lonely place the world can be?”

His lips took hers again before she could answer.

“I've been married,” he said to her, a whisper. “And I've been single. A good marriage is the best, Morgan. You live with your best friend. You aren't lonely anymore.”

She could feel something stilling in her, rising up to meet him.

“And you know what else, Morgan? You don't have to be afraid.”

And that said it all. All her life she had thought she was afraid her dreams would not come true.

Now, she could see, she was much more afraid they would. What could ever live up to the expectation she had in her mind, after all? How long before the disillusionment set in? How long before one of them crashed out the door in the middle of the night and never came back?

Stunned, she realized she was repeating the pattern
of her childhood. She was abandoning the ship because of exactly what he had just said.

Morgan was afraid.

He looked at her, and in his eyes, she knew he could see her fear. He took her hand, and guided it gently to his face.

And found what he had said was true.

She did not have to be afraid anymore.

She touched his face with her fingertips, explored it. The word
beloved
came to her mind and stayed.

“Don't go, Morgan. Stay. Stay and marry me. I love you. I have loved you from the first moment you ignored my Go Away sign.”

“You didn't. You were annoyed by me.”

“Some part of me may have been annoyed. Another part knew that you had come to get me. To pull me out of the darkness. And now, I'm coming to get you, Morgan. I don't care what they do in Iceland. I don't want you to be alone.”

She could hardly believe what she had just heard, what he had just offered, but when she saw his face, she knew it was true.

“Look,” he said. “I got you a Christmas present.”

He handed her the package he had set on the floor.

“This is one of the worst wrapping jobs I've ever seen,” she said, tears, this time of joy, sparking in her eyes.

“You have a lifetime to teach me how to wrap parcels. And bake cookies.”

The wrapping fell away, and she saw the hammer he had picked for her. And tied to its sturdy handle with a fine piece of gold wire was a ring.

“And I have a lifetime to show you,” he continued
softly, “how to hang coat hangers and choose the right hammer. I have all kinds of skills you don't know about, too.”

She could feel herself blushing, and he grinned wickedly.

“Well, there is that. But I'm also a champion diaper changer. You don't get that in every man.”

And that the miracle she had waited her whole life for had just come. To have someone to lean on. To belong. To love.

“Will you?” he asked softly. “Will you come and spend Christmas Eve out at Molly and Keith's? And spend Christmas Day with us?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“We'll start there, then,” he decided. He took the hammer from her, carefully unwound the sparkling diamond ring and slid it onto her finger.

She held up her hand, and the ring twinkled, and diamond sparks of light flew from it.

That matched the sparks of light that flew from his eyes.

“Yes,” Morgan whispered again. Not just to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but to a life spent beside this man, bathed in the Light.

T
HE GRAVEYARD WAS QUIET
and cold, a little daylight lingered in a cobalt-blue sky. The deep snow muffled his footprints. It was not where everyone would spend a Christmas Eve, but Nate had been drawn here tonight.

“I hope not to escape my mother-in-law,” he muttered wryly.

But, of course, it was partly to escape her. Morgan's mother, who used to be plain old Anne, but had changed her name to Chosita after her long stay in Thailand. She said she had adopted the new moniker because everyone had called her that there. She said it meant happiness.

Morgan elbowed Nate in the ribs hard, when he said, coincidentally they had a pony by the same name and that he had almost exactly the same disposition. Nate had since found out that Chosita could indeed mean happiness, but it was sort of the American equivalent of “Hey, lady!”

Morgan's mother drove him nuts, wearing her Thai sarongs in downtown Canterbury where she improved stocks in the bookstore by adding to her substantial self-help collection.

But Ace adored her, and Morgan was thrilled that her mother was here to spend Christmas with them. Morgan
genuinely hoped the baby, due any day, would put in an appearance while her mom was here.

Nate exacted subtle revenge on Chosita for what he saw as her astoundingly poor parenting throughout Morgan's childhood and adolescence. This afternoon, for instance, he subjected her to the longest sleigh ride in Happy history. He'd made sure to ply her with several buckets of tea first, too.

He smiled, now, just thinking of it, then knelt beside the two stones.

He knew flowers couldn't handle the cold, so he always brought sprigs of holly, and a fir bough with a candle in it that he would light before he left, and that would burn through to Christmas morning.

“I know, I know,” he said, as he brushed the snow from the two stones, “I'm being uncharitable for Christmas. It's just her, really.”

The wind howled.

“Okay, so I've never warmed to Mrs. Wellhaven, either.”

He had just gotten a thank-you note from the Wellhavens for the intricate iron fireplace grate he had sent them. He never forgot Wesley, or the debt he felt he owed to the man who had not left him in the darkness that Christmas Eve two years ago.

As it had turned out, the whole economy of Canterbury had not been saved by the production of
The Christmas Angel,
but it had certainly been helped over the hump.

As it had turned out, the second annual Christmas production had been the last one Wesley gave. Shortly after
The Christmas Angel,
Wesley had gone back into retirement to lead the quiet reclusive life he
enjoyed. There had been no more Christmas productions, and people thought he did not sing at all. Every now and then one of the tabloids would run a story about the tragic loss of his voice.

But of course Nate knew that not to be true, because on the finest day of his life, when he had stood at the altar waiting for the woman who would be his wife to come toward him,
that
voice had filled the cathedral. Between the beauty of that voice and the beauty of his bride, there had not been a dry eye in the house that afternoon, including his own.

And so, every year, he sent the Wellhavens something.

His reputation as a tough guy seemed to have largely gone out the window as he courted Morgan, anyway. The whole town had seen he was smitten. And he didn't care.

He had serenaded her. He'd delivered wagons of flowers pulled by a reluctant Happy. He had taken her on picnics, and sat at home in front of the fire with her.

Cindy would have been proud. He had not wasted one minute, not one, of that glorious falling-in-love feeling that she had wished for him. He still didn't. He didn't think a man should ever take the gifts he had been given for granted.

Ace was eight now. She was in hockey
and
ballet. She also, much to Happy's distress (the pony, not her grandmother) had started taking riding lessons at the stable where Brenda Weston rode.

The instructor had suggested Ace was ready for a better horse, but Ace had said no. In a statement reminiscent of her famous
Christmas Angel
production speech,
she said that if being a good rider meant leaving Happy behind, she would just stay where she was, thanks.

Ace's little speech that had gone live all over North America, was played as one of that year's highlights on almost every news station in America. It was still, two years later, one of the most popular hits on the Internet.

Ace was still tickled when a piece of fan mail reached her.

As far as Nate knew, Brenda, the one everyone, including him, had proclaimed to be the perfect Christmas Angel, had never gotten a single piece of fan mail. But then Brenda, nice as she was, just didn't have the heart Ace had. When the riding instructor had suggested she trade up to a better horse, she'd gotten rid of her epileptic Welsh pony, O'Henry, without a backward glance.

“Which means,” he finished softly, “I'm now feeding two ponies, and have double trouble when I try to harness them to the sleigh. At least O'Henry doesn't bite. Okay, he falls over now and then, but who asked for a perfect life?”

He realized he had spoken each of his thoughts out loud, and he smiled. Once, all he had felt here was yawning emptiness.

Now when he came, he felt
full
.

He finished dusting the snow off each of the stones, and then he put the holly and the fir bough between them.

He read them, out loud, too.

David Henderson, gone with angels, son, friend, soldier.

Cynthia Dawn Hathoway. Beloved wife and mother.

When he had chosen this plot next to David, he had
known that though Cindy had married him she had really belonged with David. Heart and soul. Forever. That is who she had been crazy in love with since she was fourteen years old.

Still, she had been beloved to Nate. And she had become his Christmas angel. There was not a doubt in his mind that somehow, in some way, in ways that were far too huge for the human mind to grapple with, she had been there that Christmas he had found Morgan.

Bringing meaning out of tragedy. Showing him she had been right all along. Everything had a reason. And good could come from bad.

Somehow Cindy had a hand in bringing him and Ace the woman who would be the best mom for her daughter.

And the best wife for him.

My wish for you is that you could fall in love.

“I did,” Nate said out loud. “I have. Crazy in love, just like you always wanted. It's better than anything I could have ever imagined.”

Right now, Morgan and Ace and Grandma Happiness were at home making Christmas cookies and decorating the tree he had put the lights on earlier. He had warned Morgan, direly, about getting on the ladder to put up the higher decorations. Naturally, she had stuck out her tongue at him, which meant she was probably on the top rung of the ladder—the one that said “do not use this as a step”—right now.

The baby was due in the first part of the New Year. Ace was more excited about that than she was about Christmas.

They had chosen not to find out the sex. A boy or a girl, either would be a blessing.

Nate lit the candle. It was getting dark and that candle was a small light in that darkness, but a small light could be enough.

He knew Cindy wasn't really here. Nor was David. He knew love didn't go into the ground. It went on and on. It lived in the people left behind.

Still, he needed to come here, even if they were not here. He needed to come here to remind himself to be grateful for things he could not understand. Angels.

Miracles.

Especially Christmas ones.

“Thank you,” he said softly.

Yes.
He heard it as clearly as though they stood on either side of him. Exuberant. Triumphant.

That word, that simple affirmation of love and of life, was so real that Nate glanced over his left shoulder, and then his right one. The graveyard was empty. He was alone.

But not really. Not ever.

He was not alone. And he was full. To the top. And then to overflowing.