Rescued by his Christmas Angel: Rescued by his Christmas Angel / Christmas at Candlebark Farm

Recognizing her groggy vulnerability, Morgan shook herself awake. He was standing at her side of the SUV, the door open.

A quick glance showed the back was empty of every parcel and package. Ace was gone.

“Put her in bed,” he said before Morgan asked. “Thought you might wake up as I moved stuff and the vehicle cooled off, but you were sleeping hard.”

Morgan felt herself blushing. She’d obviously slept like a rock. She hoped she hadn’t drooled and muttered his name in her sleep. Had she dreamed of the smile she had tried so hard—and failed—to produce?

And then suddenly, when she least expected it, it was there.

He was actually smiling at her. A small smile, but so genuine it was like the sun coming out on a dreary day. He reached out and touched her cheek.

“You’ve got the print of the seat cover across your cheek.”

And then his hand dropped away, and he looked away.

“Miss McGuire?”

“Morgan.”

He looked right at her. The smile was gone. “You gave my daughter a gift today. I haven’t seen her so happy for a long, long time. I thank you for that.”

And then, he bent toward her, brushed the print on her cheek again, and kissed the place on her cheek where his fingers had been. His lips were gloriously soft, a tenderness in them that belied every single thing she thought she had ever seen in his eyes.

And then Nate turned away from her, went up the walk to his house and into it, shut the door without once looking back.

She sat in his truck stunned, wondering if she had dreamed that moment, but finally managed to stir herself, shut the door of his vehicle and get into her own.

The night was so bright and cold and star-filled. Was she shivering from the cold, or from the absence of the warmth she had felt when he had touched his lips to her cheek?

It wasn’t until she was nearly home that she realized that while she slept he had done more than empty his vehicle of parcels, and carry a sleeping Ace to her bedroom. Morgan saw he had put two more of the coat hangers on her front seat.

And she remembered she still had not gotten the permission slip for The Christmas Angel signed.

And she knew it was weak, and possibly stupid, and she knew it went against every single thing she had decided for herself when she had moved to Canterbury. It challenged every vow she had made as she devoured chapter after chapter of Bliss: The Extraordinary Joy of Being a Single Woman.

But Morgan still knew that she would use that unsigned permission slip as an excuse to see him again.

Chapter Three

HE NEVER WANTED TO see her again.

Morgan McGuire was stirring things up in Nate Hathoway that did not need stirring.

That impulse to kiss her cheek was the last impulse he intended to follow. It had been like kissing the petals of a rose, so soft, so yielding. Touching the exquisite softness of her with his lips had made him acutely aware of a vast empty spot in his life.

As had spending a day with her, her laughter, her enthusiasm, contagious.

So, it was an easy decision. No more Morgan McGuire.

Nate, alone in his workshop, vowed it out loud. “I won’t see her again. Won’t have anything to do with her.”

There. His and Ace’s lives felt complicated enough without adding the potential messiness of a relationship with the teacher.

Relationship? That was exactly why he wasn’t seeing her again. A day—shopping of all things—made him think of the sassy schoolteacher in terms of a relationship?

No. He was setting his mind against it, and that was that.

One thing every single person in this town knew about Nate Hathoway: his discipline was legendary. When he said something, it happened.

It was that kind of discipline that had allowed him to take a forge—a relic from a past age that had not provided a decent living for the past two generations of Hathoway blacksmiths—and bend it to his vision for its future.

His own father had been skeptical, but then he was a Hathoway, and skepticism ran deep through the men in this family. So did hard work and hell-raising.

Cindy and David had been raised in the same kind of families as his. Solidly blue-collar, poor, proud. The three of them had been the musketeers, their friendship shielding them from the scorn of their wealthier classmates.

While his solution to the grinding poverty of his childhood had been the forge, David’s had been the army. He felt the military would be his ticket to an education, to being able to provide for Cindy after he married her.

Instead, he’d come home in a flag-draped box.

You look after her if anything happens to me.

And so Nate had.

She’d never been quite the same, some laughter gone from her forever, but the baby had helped. Still, they had had a good relationship, a strong partnership, loyalty to each other and commitment to family.

Her loss had plunged him into an abyss that he had been able to avoid when David had died. Now he walked with an ever present and terrifying awareness that all a man’s strength could not protect those he loved entirely. A man’s certainty in his ability to control his world was an illusion. A man could no more hold back tragedy than he could hold back waves crashing onto a shore.

Nate felt Cindy’s loss sharply. But at the same time he felt some loss of himself.

Still, thinking of her now, Nate was aware Cindy would never have flinched from such a mild curse as damn.

And he was almost guiltily aware Cindy’s scent per-meating the interior of a vehicle had never filled him with such an intense sense of longing. For things he couldn’t have.

Someone like Morgan McGuire could never fit into his world. His was a world without delicacy, since Cindy’s death it had become even more a man’s world.

“So, no more.”

What about Ace in this world that was so without soft edges?

Well, he told himself, it had changed from the world of his childhood. It wasn’t hardscrabble anymore. It wasn’t the grinding poverty he had grown up with. The merciless teasing from his childhood—about his worn shoes, faded shirts, near-empty lunchbox—sat with him still. And made him proud.

And mean if need be.

Not that there had been even a hint of anyone looking down their noses at him for a long, long time.

Partly in respect for his fists.

Mostly because within two years of Nate taking over the forge—pouring his blood and his grit and his pure will into it—it had turned around.