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

“I’ll come back for you in an hour or so,” he promised.

And he was gone, which was good, because she had been gravely tempted to lean forward, close her eyes and offer her lips as a form of goodbye.

“You’re dreaming,” she warned herself as she heard his vehicle roar to life outside.

In fact, it would have been too easy to dismiss the whole thing as a dream, except that her coat hangers were hung and her Christmas tree was up. Except lights winked from the branches, and the star, that age-old symbol of hope, shone bright from the very top of that tree, a pinnacle she could not have reached without a ladder.

It would be easy to dismiss the whole thing as a dream, except that when Morgan looked in the mirror, her hair was standing up sideways and her cheek held the perfect imprint of his shirt.

Chapter Six (#ulink_b25bf3ac-a8d4-5bce-a9ce-d44b9e413925)

“MRS. MCGUIRE, this is Happy.” Ace patted the Shetland pony vigorously, kissed his nose. Ace’s lips were stained an unnatural shade of red as if she had smeared them with raspberries.

“You were right about the lipstick,” Nate had told Morgan, rolling his eyes, when they had picked her up.

“And you were wrong about—”

“Everything,” he admitted. “No hazards of any kind. Don’t ask me to admit I was wrong ever again. It unmans me.”

He was teasing her, and Morgan was coming to enjoy the growing ease between them so much. But she liked the underlying message, too. That somehow their lives were linked, and ever again suggested it might be staying that way.

Even this outing suggested that. By inviting her to this Christmas-card-pretty farm—red barn, snow-covered fields, cows behind white fences—that belonged to his and Ace’s family, weren’t the links that connected them growing stronger?

Now Nate was trying to get a harness on the uncooperative, chunky brown-and-white pony. So far his hand had been stepped on twice. He had said something—both times—quite a bit stronger than “damn,” then shot Morgan looks that dared comment.

But she did not want to be the schoolteacher today. Just a woman enjoying the extraordinary bliss of not being alone, of sharing a wonderful winter day with a glorious man and his adorable little girl.

“This is the meanest horse ever born,” Nate grumbled. “Keep your face away from his teeth, for God’s sake, Ace. He might mistake your lips for an apple.”

“He loves me,” Ace said with certainty. “He won’t bite me.”

“I don’t know why he doesn’t bite her,” Nate told Morgan, apparently not convinced it was love. “He’s bitten me at least six times since our unhappy first meeting. Mostly, now I can manage to outwit him.”

“But not the time he bit you on the bum,” Ace said. “Remember, Daddy?”

“Speaking of being unmanned,” he muttered with a sigh. “That’s kind of a hard one to forget. I couldn’t sit down for a week.”

She shouted with laughter.

The sleigh ride might not be turning out quite as she’d expected, but Morgan loved the feeling growing inside her. It was blissful. She didn’t just feel as if she was being included in this little family outing. She felt as if she belonged.

If she contemplated it, she might find it just a little bit frightening that she was feeling something right now, in this very moment, that she had been waiting her whole life to feel.

But she determined not to contemplate it, not to wreck these precious moments by trying to look into that foggy place that was the future. For once, she would just enjoy what she had been given, no worrying, no analyzing, no planning, no plotting.

“He’s going to be good today,” Ace predicted. “Be good, Happy.”

“Ace thinks he’s going to pull the sleigh. I think he won’t. Unless there’s a cliff nearby that he can pull us all off.”

“I don’t think horses are that…devious, are they?” Morgan asked. The stocky miniature steed trying to sidestep the traces was so different from the stallion of her imagination she laughed out loud again.

Or maybe the laughter had nothing to do with the surprise of the pony. It was the day. And being with him. Them. The very air seemed to be tingling with merriment, with joy.

Snow was beginning to fall gently. The little horse stamped his feet and shook his mane, and a lovely smell drifted up from him. In the background was a redbrick farmhouse, snow drifts in the front yard, a cheery wreath on the front door.

Ace had told her that was her aunt Molly’s house, and that she wasn’t home right now. Happy had been her Christmas gift from her aunt last year.

Morgan thought it took a pretty special aunt to know what a hard time Christmas would be for this child, and to come up with a gift good enough to make a dent in all that sadness.

In fact mischief and merriment seemed to dance in the air around the pony. Finally, Nate loaded her and Ace into a red sleigh. The pony did have bells on, and as it set off, their music filled the air.

And that was about the only part of Morgan’s fantasy that had been realistic. Nate wasn’t even cuddled under a blanket with her and Ace. He walked to one side of the pony, trying to persuade him to keep up a forward motion.

An hour later, Morgan thought she had never laughed so hard in her entire life. She was doubled over she was laughing so hard.

“You have to stop,” Morgan gasped. She was begging.

“We are stopped,” Nate pointed out, not sharing her amusement. “That’s the problem. Unhappy hasn’t moved for ten minutes.”

It was snowing, but it was no longer big, gentle flakes floating down around them. It was coming down hard now, the wind whipping it up in gusts around the sleigh. But even the freezing cold could not dampen Morgan’s enjoyment.

Nate stood in front of Happy, pulling on the pony’s obstinate head, trying to get him to move.

The pony had pulled the little sleigh, with Ace and Morgan in it, only in stops and starts, mostly stops. Ace held the reins, and jiggled them and shouted encouragement, while her father walked slightly behind and to the right of the pony.

Forward movement was accomplished sporadically when Nate slapped the pony’s ample brown-and-white rump with his gloves.

Now, a mile from the house, Happy was no longer startled by the rather frequent popping across his rump with the gloves. Apparently he had decided against forward motion and was not going to be persuaded with glove smacks.

“I think he likes it,” Morgan said, watching the pony sway his rump happily into the pressure of Nate’s hand after every increasingly vigorous smack with the gloves. Happy turned his head just enough that she could see the pony’s decidedly beady eyes half shut in an expression that Morgan had to assume was pure pleasure.

Nate had his hands firmly planted on either side of the pony’s headstall and was leaning back hard on his heels, pulling with all his might.

“Come on, you dastardly little devil.”

Considerable as Nate’s might was, the pony outweighed him by several hundred pounds. Happy planted his own feet, and showed Nate he wasn’t the only one who could lean back!

“There’s a dog-food factory waiting for you!” Nate warned the pony darkly. “One phone call. The meat wagon comes by here on Monday.”

“Please stop,” Morgan begged again. All this cold, all this jolting and all this laughter was having the most unfortunate effect on her kidneys.

“He’s just kidding,” Ace whispered. “He says that every time.”

The pony stepped back instead of forward, pulling Nate with him.

“On second thought, dog food is too good for you,” Nate muttered. “Bear bait. The bear-bait wagon comes by on Wednesday.”

The pony cocked his head, as if he was actually considering this, then stepped back again, yanking Nate backward with him.