His for Christmas: Rescued by his Christmas Angel / Christmas at Candlebark Farm / The Nurse Who Saved Christmas

“You want to come to my house now?”

His eyes had the most devilish little twinkle in them. “It’s not as if you’re entertaining a gentleman caller, Miss McGuire.”

It was true. He was offering to do a chore for her. That involved studs.

She was not going to let him see how rattled she was! Well, he already had, but she intended to curb his enjoyment.

“Yes,” she said, “that would be fine. A very gentlemanly offer from someone who is not a gentleman caller. Though I’m sure you are. A gentleman. Most of the time. When you aren’t talking about beaning the choir director. Or hunting down the parents of children who have teased your daughter.”

She was babbling. She clamped her mouth shut.

“Nobody’s ever called me a gentleman before,” he told her with wicked enjoyment.

But underneath the banter she heard something else. And so she said primly, “Well, it’s about time they did.”

Ten minutes later, she was so aware of how life could take unexpected turns. Just this morning it would have never occurred to her that Nate Hathoway would be in her house by this afternoon. In fact, Santa coming down the chimney would have seemed a more likely scenario.

And really, having Nate’s handiwork in her house was a bad enough distraction. Now having him here, it seemed somehow her space was never going to be quite the same.

As if it would be missing something.

Stop it, Morgan ordered herself. She was devoted to independence. Nate showing her how to hang something without it falling back off the wall could only forward that cause!

That’s why she had given in so easily to his suggestion to come over here.

Wasn’t it?

No, said the little part of her that watched him filling her tiny space with his essence. There was an illusion of intimacy from having him in this space.

Now his presence was large as he loomed in her living room waiting for her to find a hammer.

When she came back from the basement with one, she found him eyeing her purple couch with a look that was a cross between amusement and bewilderment.

“Do you like it?” she asked, feeling ridiculously as if it was a test. Of course he wouldn’t like it, proving to her the wisdom of living on her own, not having to consult with anyone else about her choices, proving the bliss of the single life.

“Yeah, I like it,” he said slowly. “What I don’t get is how a woman can make something like this work. If I bought a sofa this color it would look like I killed that purple dinosaur. You know the one? He dances. And sings. But it looks good in here. It suits you.”

She tried not to show how pleased she was, his words so different from what she expected. “I call my decorating style Bohemian chic.”

“You don’t strike me as Bohemian,” he said, looking at her thoughtfully. “I would think of that as kind of gypsylike. You seem, er, enormously conventional.”

“Perhaps I have a hidden side,” she said, a bit irked. Enormously conventional? That sounded boring!

“Perhaps you have. Perhaps you even have a hidden sheik,” he said, “which, come to think of it, would be just as good as a hidden stud. Maybe better. What do I know?”

“C-h-i-c,” she spelled out. “Not sheik!”

And then he laughed with such enjoyment at his own humor that she couldn’t help but join in. It was a treat to hear him laugh. She suspected he had not for a long time.

She handed him her hammer.

He frowned, the laughter gone. “The couch is good. This? Are you kidding me? What is this? A toy?”

It occurred to her that a woman that linked her life with his would have to like a traditional setup. She would choose the furniture, he would choose the tools. She would cook the meals, he would mow the lawn.

Considering she had left her fiancé because he had taken what she considered to be a sexist view of her career aspirations, considering her devotion to the principles of Bliss: The Extraordinary Joy of Being a Single Woman, Morgan was amazed by how easily something in her capitulated to this new vision. How lovely would it be having someone to share responsibilities with?

Shared, maybe certain things would not feel like such onerous, unachievable chores. Could there be unexpected pleasures in little things like hanging a few coat hangers? Is that what a good marriage was about?

She didn’t know. Her own parents had separated when she was young, her father had remarried and she had always felt outside the circle of his new family.

Her mother’s assessment of the situation—that she was looking for her father—seemed way too harsh. But Morgan knew her childhood experiences had made her long for love.

Not just love, but for a traditional relationship, like the one her best friend’s parents had enjoyed. How she had envied the stability of that home, the harmony there, the feeling of absolute security.

But after her relationship with Karl, its bitter ending, Morgan had decided the love she longed for was unrealistic, belonged in the fairy tales she so enjoyed reading to the children.

Now, with Nate Hathoway in her front entry, tapping her wall with her toy hammer, the choice Morgan had made to go it alone didn’t feel the least bit blissful. It felt achingly empty. Achingly.

Chapter Four (#ulink_a40f08ef-9e4c-518d-bbc9-e7afcd926264)

NATE HADN’T REALLY expected Morgan’s house to have this effect on him. It was cozy and cute, like a little nest. The enjoyment he had taken in her discomfort over agreeing to invite him over to help her find a “stud” was dissipating rapidly.

And who had pushed the envelope, who had suggested this foolishness? He wished he could blame her, but oh, no, it had been all him, lured by her blushing at the word stud.

Feeling the need to be a man, to do for her what she didn’t have the skill to do herself.

But now, in her house, with her purple sofa and her toy hammer in his hand? It was his lack he was aware of, not hers.

This house made him feel lonely for soft things. Feminine touches, Cindy’s warmth, seemed to be fading from his own house. The couch throw pillows she had chosen were worn out, the rag rug at the front door a little more rag than rug these days, the plaid blanket she had bought when Ace was a baby and that Ace still pulled over herself to watch television, was pathetically threadbare.

It reminded Nate, unhappily, how desperately inadequate he was to be raising a girl on his own.

What was it about Morgan that made him look at a life that he had felt he made full and satisfying despite the loss of his wife, to thinking maybe he wasn’t doing nearly as well as he’d imagined? Around Morgan his life suddenly seemed to have glaringly empty spaces in it.

“Wow,” he said, forcing himself to focus on her wall, to not give her even an inkling of the craving for softness that was going on inside of him, “for a little bit of a thing, you know how to destroy a wall.”

“It wasn’t intentional.”

“Destruction rarely is.”

He needed to remember that around Morgan McGuire. His life and Ace’s had had enough unintentional destruction wrought on it. They could not bear more loss, either of them. He needed to do what he had come here to do, and get out, plain and simple.

Not that anything seemed simple with Morgan sharing the same room with him as it did when he brooded on it alone over the forge.

Nate brought himself back, shook his head again at the large holes where she had tried to hang his coat hooks and the weight of them had pulled chunks of drywall off the walls.

He tapped lightly on her entrance wall with a hammer.