Rescued by his Christmas Angel (5 page)

His mouth opened.

And then closed.

How had a discussion about a damned permission slip turned into this? A soul search? A desire to be a better man.

And not just for his daughter.

Oh, no, it would be easy if it was just for his daughter. No, it was for her, too. Miss Snippy Know-It-All.

“I'll think about it,” he said.

The famous line was always used, by everyone including him, as a convenient form of dismissal. What it really meant was
No, and I don't ever intend to think about this again.

This time he knew he wasn't going to be so lucky.

“It means a lot to Ace to be in that production,” Morgan said. “I already told the kids in my class we were all doing it, or none of us were.”

“Nothing like a little pressure,” he replied, turning away from her now, picking up his tongs, taking the red-hot rod of iron from the fire. “Are you telling me the Christmas joy of a dozen and a half six-year-olds relies on me?”

He glanced at her, and she nodded solemnly, ignoring his deliberately skeptical tone.

“That's a scary thing,” he told her quietly, his voice deliberately loaded with cynicism. “Nearly as scary as the hope of the whole town resting on my shoulders.”

She didn't have the sense to flinch from his sarcasm. He was going to have to lay it out nice and plain for her. “I'm the wrong man to trust with such things, Miss McGuire.”

She looked at him for a long time as he began to hammer out the rod, and then just as he glanced at her, eyebrows raised, looking askance as if
Oh, are you still here?
she nodded once, as if she knew something about him he did not know himself.

“I don't think you are the wrong man to trust,” she said softly. “I think you just wish you were.”

And having looked right into his soul, Little Miss Snip removed the permission slip from her pink coat pocket, set it on his worktable, smoothed it carefully with her hand, and then turned on her heel and left him there to brood over his fire.

A little while later, in the house, getting dinner ready—hot dogs and a salad—he said to Ace, in his I-just-had-this-great-idea voice, “Ace, what would you think of a trip to Disneyland over Christmas?”

The truth was, he expected at least the exuberant dance that the shopping trip with Morgan McGuire had elicited. Instead there was silence.

He turned from the pot on the stove after prodding a frozen hot dog with a fork, as if that would get it to cook quicker, and looked at his daughter.

Ace was getting her hot-dog bun ready, lots of ketchup and relish, not dancing around at all. Today she
was wearing her new skirt, the red one with the white pom-poms on the hem. She looked adorable. He hoped that didn't mean boys would start coming by here. No, surely that worry was years away.

“Disneyland?” he said, wondering if she was daydreaming and hadn't heard him.

“Oh, Daddy,” she said with a sigh of long suffering, in her
you're so silly
voice. “We can't go to Disneyland over Christmas. I
have
to be in
The Christmas Angel
. It's on Christmas Eve. It's on TV,
live.
I should phone Grandma and Grandpa and tell them I'm going to be on TV.”

Then in case he was getting any other bright ideas, she told him firmly, “And I don't want to go after, either. Brenda is having a skating party on Boxing Day. I hope I get new skates for Christmas. When am I going to see Santa?”

He was pretty sure Ace and Brenda had been mortal enemies a week ago. So, Morgan had been right. Superficial or not, the clothes helped. His daughter was having a good week.

That was worth something. So was the light in her eyes when she talked about being on television.

Nate made a promise as soon as Santa set up at Finnegan's they would go, and then he made a mental note about the skates. Then once she was in bed, he took the permission slip, signed it and shoved it into Ace's backpack.

It didn't feel like nearly the concession it should have. He told himself it had nothing to do with Morgan McGuire and everything to do with Ace.

An hour after Ace was in bed, his phone rang. It was Canterbury's mayor, who also owned the local gas
station.
The Christmas Angel
needed skilled craftspeople to volunteer to work on the set. Would he consider doing it?

Before Morgan had arrived this afternoon his answer would have been curt and brief.

Now he was aware he did not want to be a man indifferent to the hopes and dreams of his neighbors.

What had she said?
I don't think you are the wrong man to trust, I think you just wish you were.

It irked him that she was right. He should say no to this request just to spite her. But he didn't.

Small towns were strange places. Centuries-old feuds were put aside if tragedy struck.

Four generations of Hathoways had owned this forge and as far as Nate could tell they'd always been renegades and rebels. They didn't go to church, or belong to the PTA or the numerous Canterbury service clubs. Hardworking but hell-raising, they were always on the fringe of the community. His family, David's and Cindy's.

And yet, when David had died, the town had given him the hero's send-off that he deserved.

And their support had been even more pronounced after Cindy had died. Nate's neighbors had gathered around him in ways he would have never expected. A minister at a church he had never been to had offered to do the service; there had not been enough seats for everyone who came to his wife's funeral.

People who he would have thought did not know of his existence—like the man who had just phoned him—had been there for him and for Ace unconditionally, wanting nothing in return, not holding his bad temper or his need to deal with his grief alone against him.

Sometimes, still, he came to the house from the forge to find an anonymous casserole at the door, or fresh-baked cookies, or a brand-new toy or outfit for Ace.

At first it had been hard for him to accept, but at some time Nate had realized it wasn't charity. It was something deeper than that. It was why people chose to live in small communities. To know they were cared about, that whether you wanted it or not, your neighbors had your back.

And you didn't just keep taking that. In time, when you were ready, you offered it back.

Nate wasn't really sure if he was ready, but somehow it felt as if it was time to find out. And so that awareness of “something deeper” was how he found himself saying yes to the volunteer job of helping to build sets.

Since the school auditorium was the only venue big enough to host
The Christmas Angel,
Nate knew it was going to put him together again with Morgan McGuire. He knew it was inevitable that their lives were becoming intertwined. Whether he liked it or not.

And for a man who had pretty established opinions on what he liked and what he didn't, Nate Hathoway was a little distressed to find he simply didn't know if he liked it or not.

 

Morgan marched her twenty-two charges into the gymnasium. The truth was, after being so stern with Nate about the benefits of
The Christmas Angel
coming to Canterbury, she was beginning to feel a little sick of the whole thing herself.

The children talked of nothing else. They all thought their few minutes on television, singing backup to Wesley Wellhaven, meant they were going to be famous.
They all tried to sing louder than the person next to them. Some of them were getting quite theatrical in their delivery of the songs.

The rehearsal time for the three original songs her class would sing was eating into valuable class time that Morgan felt would be better used for teaching fundamental skills, reading, writing and arithmetic.

Today was the first day her kids would be showing
The Christmas Angel
production team what they had learned. Much of the team had arrived last week, filling up the local hotel. Now
The Christmas Angel
's own choir director, Mrs. Wesley Wellhaven herself, had arrived in town last night and would be taking over rehearsing the children.

As soon as Morgan entered the auditorium—which was also the school gymnasium, not that it could be used for that because of all the work going on getting the only stage in town ready for Wesley—Morgan
knew
he was here.

Something happened to her neck. It wasn't so sinister as the hackles rising, it was more as if someone sexy had breathed on her.

She looked around, and sure enough, there Nate was, helping another man lift a plywood cutout of a Christmas cottage up on stage.

At the same time as herding her small charges forward Morgan unabashedly took advantage of the fact Nate had no idea she was watching him, to study him, which was no mean feat given that Freddy Campbell kept poking Brenda Weston in the back, and Damien Dorchester was deliberately treading on Benjamin Chin's heels.

“Freddy, Damien, stop it.” The correction was absent at best.

Because it seemed as if everything but
him
had faded as Morgan looked to the stage. Nate had looked sexy at his forge, and he looked just as sexy here, with his tool belt slung low on the hips his jeans rode over, a plain T-shirt showing off the ripple of unconscious muscle as he lifted.

Let's face it, Morgan told herself, he'd look sexy no matter where he was, no matter what he was wearing, no matter what he was doing.

He was just a blastedly sexy man.

And yet there was more than sexiness to him.

No, there was a quiet and deep strength evident in Nate Hathoway. It had been there at Cheesie Charlie's, it had been there when he sat in the pink satin chair at The Snow Cave. And it was there now as he worked, a self-certainty that really was more sexy than his startling good looks.

Mrs. Wellhaven, a pinch-faced woman of an indeterminate age well above sixty, called the children up onto the stage, and the workers had to stop to let the kids file onto the triple-decker stand that had been built for them.

“Hi, Daddy!” Ace called.

“Yes,” Mrs. Wellhaven said, lips pursed, “let's deal with that first off, shall we? Please do not call out the names of people you know as you come on the stage. Not during rehearsal, and God knows, not during the live production.”

Ace scowled. Morgan glanced at Nate. Father's and child's expressions were identically mutinous.

Morgan shivered. In the final analysis could there be
anything more sexy than a man who would protect his own, no matter what?

Still, the choir director had her job to do, and since Nate looked as if maybe he was going to go have a word with her, Morgan intercepted him.

“Hi. How are you?”

Though maybe it was just an excuse.

In all likelihood Nate was not going to berate the choir director.

“Who does she think she is telling my kid she can't say hi to me?” he muttered, mutiny still written all over his handsome face.

Or maybe he had been.

“You have to admit it might be a little chaotic if all the kids started calling greetings to their parents, grandparents and younger siblings on national live television,” Morgan pointed out diplomatically.

He looked at her as if he had just noticed her. When Nate gave a woman his full attention, she didn't have a chance. That probably included the crotchety choir director.

“Ah, Miss McGuire, don't you ever get tired of being right all the time?” he asked her, folding his arms over the massiveness of his chest.

She had rather hoped they were past the
Miss McGuire
stage. “Morgan,” she corrected him.

Mrs. Wellhaven cleared her throat, tipped her glasses and leveled a look at them. “Excuse me. We are trying to concentrate here.” She turned back to the children. “I am Mrs. Wellhaven.” Then she muttered, tapping her baton sternly, “The brains of the outfit.”

Nate guffawed. Morgan giggled, at least in part
because she had enjoyed his genuine snort of laughter so much.

Mrs. Wellhaven sent them a look, raised her baton and swung it down. The children watched her in silent awe. “That means begin!”

“She's a dragon,” Nate whispered.

The children launched, a little unsteadily, into the opening number, “Angel Lost.”

“What are you doing here?” Morgan whispered to Nate. “I thought you made it clear you weren't in favor of
The Christmas Angel
.”

“Or shopping,” he reminded her sourly. “I keep finding myself in these situations that I really don't want to be in.”

“Don't say that like it's my fault!”

“Isn't it?”

She felt ruffled by the accusation, until she looked at him more closely and realized he was teasing her.

Something warm unfolded in her.

“I didn't know you were a carpenter, too,” she said, trying to fight the desire to know everything about him. And losing.

He snorted. “I'm no carpenter, but I know my way around tools. I was raised with self-sufficiency. We never bought anything we could make ourselves when I was a kid. And we never hired anybody to do anything, either. What we needed we figured out how to make or we did without.”

Though Morgan thought he had been talking very quietly, and she
loved
how much he had revealed about himself, Mrs. Wellhaven turned and gave them a quelling look.

Ace's voice rose, more croaky than usual, loudly
enthusiastic, above her peers. “Lost annngelll, who will find you? Where arrrrrre you—”

Mrs. Wellhaven's head swung back around. “You! Little redheaded girl! Could you sing just a little more quietly?”

“Is she insinuating Ace sounds bad?”

“I think she just wants all the kids to sing at approximately the same volume,” Morgan offered.

“You're just being diplomatic,” Nate whispered, listening. “Ace's singing is awful. Almost as bad as yours.”