His for Christmas

by Cara Colter

  But he sucked it up and did what had to be done, wishing the little snip who was so quick to send the notes criticizing his parenting could see him manning up now.

  “Sure,” he said, his voice deliberately casual. “I’ll go, too.” Feeling like a man who had escaped certain torture, only to be recaptured, Nate slipped the envelope of shopping cash he had prepared for the teacher into his own pocket.

  “Are you sure, Daddy?” Ace looked faintly skeptical. She knew how he hated shopping.

  Enough to steal overalls to try and save him, he reminded himself. “I don’t want to miss our day, either,” he assured her.

  Inwardly, he was plotting. This could be quick. A trip down to Canterbury’s one-and-only department store, Finnegan’s Mercantile, a beeline to girls’ wear, a few sweat suits—Miss McGuire approved, probably in various shades of pink—stuffed into a carry basket and back out the door.

  He hoped the store would be relatively empty. He didn’t want rumors starting about him and the teacher.

  It occurred to Nate, with any luck, they were still going to make the car show. His happiness must have shown on his face, because Ace shot out of the bathroom and wrapped sturdy arms around his waist.

  “Daddy,” she said, in that little frog croak of hers, staring up at him with adoration he was so aware of not deserving, “I love you.”

  Ace saved him from the awkwardness of his having to break it to Miss Morgan McGuire that he was accompanying them on their trip, by answering the doorbell on its first ring.

  Freshly dressed in what she had announced was her best outfit—worn pink denims and a shirt that Hannah Montana had long since faded off—Ace threw open the front door.

  “Mrs. McGuire,” she crowed, “my daddy’s coming, too! He’s coming shopping with me and you.”

  And then Ace hugged herself and hopped around on one foot, while Morgan McGuire slipped in the door.

  Nate was suddenly aware his housekeeping was not that good, and annoyed by his awareness of it. He resisted the temptation to shove a pair of his work socks, abandoned on the floor, under the couch with his foot.

  It must be the fact she was a teacher that made him feel as if everything was being graded: newspapers out on the coffee table; a thin layer of dust on everything, unfolded laundry leaning out of a hamper balanced perilously on the arm of the couch.

  At Ace’s favorite play station, the raised fireplace hearth, there was an entire orphanage of naked dolls, Play-Doh formations long since cracked and hardened, a forlorn-looking green plush dog that had once had stuffing.

  So instead of looking like he cared how Morgan McGuire felt about his house and his housekeeping—or lack thereof—Nate did his best to look casual, braced his shoulder against the door frame of the living room, and shoved his hands into the front of his jeans pockets.

  Morgan actually seemed stunned enough by Ace’s announcement that he would be joining them that she didn’t appear to notice one thing about the controlled chaos of his housekeeping methods.

  She was blushing.

  He found himself surprised and reluctantly charmed that anyone blushed anymore, at least over something as benign as a shopping trip with a six-year-old and her fashion handicapped father.

  The first-grade teacher was as pretty as he remembered her, maybe prettier, especially with that high color in her cheeks.

  “I’m surprised you’ll be joining us,” Morgan said to him, tilting her chin in defiance of the blush, “I thought you made your feelings about shopping eminently clear.”

  He shrugged, enjoying her discomfort over his addition to the party enough that it almost made up for his aversion to shopping.

  Almost.

  “I thought we’d go to the mall in Greenville,” Morgan said, jingling her car keys in her hand and glancing away from him.

  Why did it please him that he made her nervous? And how could he be pleased and annoyed at the same time? A trip to Greenville was a full-day excursion!

  “I thought we were going to Finnegan’s,” he said. Why couldn’t Ace have just been bribed with Happy time, same as always?

  Why did he have an ugly feeling Morgan McGuire was the type of woman who changed same as always?

  “Finnegan’s?” Morgan said. “Oh.” In the same tone one might use if a fishmonger was trying to talk them into buying a particularly smelly piece of fish. “There’s not much in the way of selection there.”

  “But Greenville is over an hour and a half away!” he protested. By the time they got there, they’d have to have lunch. Even before they started shopping. He could see the car show slip a little further from his grasp.

  And lunch with the first-grade teacher? His life, deliberately same as always since Cindy’s death, was being hijacked, and getting more complicated by the minute.

  “It’s the closest mall,” Morgan said, and he could see she had a stubborn bent to her that might match his own, if tested.

  As if the careful script on the handwritten notes sent home hadn’t been fair enough warning of that.

  “And the best shopping.”

  “The best shopping,” Ace breathed. “Could we go to The Snow Cave? That’s where Brenda Weston got her winter coat. It has white fur.”

  Nate shot his daughter an astonished look. This was the first time she’d ever indicated she knew the name of a store in Greenville, or that she coveted a coat that had white fur.

  “Surrender to the day,” he muttered sternly to himself, not that the word surrender had appeared in a Hathoway’s vocabulary for at least two hundred years.

  “Pardon?” Morgan asked.

  “I said lead the way.”

  But when she did, he wasn’t happy about that, either. She drove one of those teeny tiny cars that got three zillion miles per every gallon of gas.

  There was no way he could sit in the sardine-can-size backseat, and if he got in the front seat, his shoulder was going to be touching hers.

  All the way to Greenville.

  And even if he was determined to surrender to the day, he was not about to invite additional assaults on his defenses.

  “I’ve seen Tinkertoys bigger than this car,” he muttered. “We’d better take my vehicle.”

  And there was something about Miss Morgan McGuire that already attacked his defenses. That made a part of him he thought was broken beyond repair wonder if there was even the slimmest chance it could be fixed.

  Why would anyone in their right mind want to fix something that hurt so bad when it broke?

  He realized he was thinking of his heart.

  Stupid thoughts for a man about to spend an hour and a half in a vehicle—any vehicle—with someone as cute as Morgan McGuire. He was pretty sure it was going to be the longest hour and a half of his life.

  Stupid thoughts for a man who had vowed when his wife died—and Hathoways took their vows seriously—that his heart was going to be made of the same iron he made his livelihood shaping.

  Out of nowhere, a memory blasted him.

  I wish you could know what it is to fall in love, Nate.

  Stop it, Cin, I love you.

  No. Head over heels, I can’t breathe, think, function. That kind of fall-in-love.

  Cindy had been his best friend’s girl. David had joined the services and been killed overseas. For a while, it had looked like the grief would take her, too. But Nate had done what best friends do, what he had promised David. He had stepped in to look after her.

  Can’t breathe? Think? Function? That doesn’t even sound fun to me.

  She’d laughed. But sadly. Hath, you don’t know squat.

  There was a problem with vowing your heart was going to be made of iron, and Nate was aware of it as he settled in the driver’s seat beside Morgan, and her delicate perfume surrounded him.

  Iron had a secret. It was only strong until it was tested by fire. Heated hot enough it was as pliable as butter.

  And someone like Morgan McGuire probably had a whole lot more fire than her prim
exterior was letting on.

  But as long as he didn’t have to touch her shoulder all the way to Greenville he didn’t have to find out. He could make himself immune to her, despite the delicacy of her scent.

  It should be easy. After all, Nate had made himself immune to every other woman who had come calling, thinking he and Ace needed sympathy and help, loving and saving.

  He didn’t need anything. From anyone. And in that, he took pride.

  And some days it felt like pride—and Ace—were all he had left.

  But even once they were all loaded into his spacious SUV, even though his shoulder was not touching Morgan’s, Nate was totally aware of her in the passenger seat, turning around to talk to Ace.

  And he was aware the trip to Greenville had never gone by more quickly.

  Because Morgan had switched cars, but not intent. And Nate saw she was intent on making the day fun for Ace, and her genuine caring for his daughter softened him toward her in a way he did not want to be softened.

  For as much as he resisted her attempts to involve him, it made Nate mildly ashamed that on a long car trip with Ace he had a tendency to plug a movie into the portable DVD player.

  Nate glanced over at Morgan. Her eyes had a shine to them, a clearness, a trueness.

  He was aware that since the death of Cindy he had lived in the darkness of sorrow, in the grip of how helpless he had been to change anything at a moment when it had really counted.

  Morgan’s light was not going to pierce that. He wasn’t going to allow it.

  “With an oink, oink here, and an oink, oink there,” Morgan McGuire sang with enthusiasm that made up for a surprisingly horrible voice.

  It was written all over her that she was young and innocent and completely naive. That she had never known hardship like his own hardscrabble upbringing at a forge that was going broke, that she had been untouched by true tragedy.

  “Oink,” she invited him, and then teased, “you look like you would make a terrific pig.”

  He hoped that wasn’t a dig at his housekeeping, but again he was taken by the transparency in her face. Morgan McGuire appeared to be the woman least likely to make digs.

  “—here an oink, there an oink, everywhere an oink, oink—”

  He shook his head, refusing to be drawn into her world. No good could come from it. When soft met hard, soft lost.

  The best thing he could ever do for this teacher who cared about his daughter with a genuineness he could not deny, was to make sure he didn’t repay her caring by hurting her.

  And following the thin thread of attraction he could feel leaping in him as her voice and her scent and her enthusiasm for oinking filled his vehicle, could only end in that one place.

  And he was cynical enough to know that.

  Even if she wasn’t.

  Morgan glanced across the restaurant table at Nate Hathoway. Nothing in the time they had spent in the truck lessened her first impression of him standing alone bending iron to his will.

  He was a warrior. Battle-scarred, self-reliant, his emotions contained behind walls so high it would be nearly impossible to scale them.

  So, being Morgan, naturally she tried to scale them anyway.

  She had been aware that she was trying to make him smile as they had traveled, deliberately using her worst singing voice, trying to get him to participate. She told herself it was so Ace could see a softer side of her father, but she knew that wasn’t the entire truth.

  She had seen a tickle of a smile at his forge on their first meeting. She wanted to see if she could tempt it out again.

  But she had failed. The more she tried, the more he had tightened his cloak of remoteness around himself.

  Though Morgan had not missed how his eyes found Ace in the rearview mirror, had not missed he was indulging her antics because his daughter was enjoying them.

  Really, Nate Hathoway was the man least likely to ever be seen at a Cheesie Charlie’s franchise, but here he was, tolerating a noise level that was nothing less than astonishing, his eyes unreadable when the menus were delivered by a guy in a somewhat the worse-for-wear chicken suit.

  He ate the atrocious food without comment, slipped the waiter-chicken a tip when he came to their table and serenaded them with a song with Ace’s name liberally sprinkled throughout.

  “Well, wasn’t that fun?” Morgan asked as they left Cheesie Charlie’s.

  “Yes!” Ace crowed. Even she seemed to notice that nothing was penetrating the hard armor around her father. “Daddy,” she demanded, “didn’t you think that was fun?”

  “Fun as pounding nails with my forehead,” he muttered.

  “That doesn’t sound fun,” Ace pointed out.

  “You’re right,” he said, and then sternly warned, “don’t try it at home.”

  Morgan sighed as Ace skipped ahead to where they had parked. “How did you allow yourself to get talked into coming? I’m beginning to see you did not volunteer for this excursion.”

  He hesitated, and then he nodded at Cecilia. “We always spend Saturday together. It’s our tradition. Since her mom passed. I was willing to forgo it, just this once. She wasn’t.”

  “Somewhere under that hard exterior is there a heart of pure gold, Nate Hathoway?”

  She finally got the smile, only it wasn’t the one she’d been trying for. Cynical. Something tight around the edges of it. His eyes shielded.

  “Don’t kid yourself.”

  Instead of scaling his wall, she’d managed to get him to put it up higher! And for some reason it made her mad. If she couldn’t make him laugh, then she might as well torment him.

  “If you thought Cheesie Charlie’s was fun, you’re going to love The Snow Cave,” Morgan promised him.

  He gave her a dark, lingering look that sent shivers from her ears to her toes.

  The Snow Cave proudly proclaimed itself as haute tot.

  If he had looked out of place at Cheesie’s, Nate Hathoway now looked acutely out of place in the exclusive girls’ store. He was big and rugged amongst the racks and displays of pint-size frilly clothing in more shades of pink than Morgan was certain the male mind could imagine.

  Ignoring his discomfort, at the same time as enjoying it immensely, Morgan sorted through the racks until she had both her and Cecilia’s arms heaped up with selections: blouses and T-shirts, socks, slacks, dresses, skirts.

  “Great,” he said when it was obvious they could not carry one more thing. “Are you done? Can we go?”

  “She has to try everything on.”

  “What?” He looked like a wolf caught in a trap. “What for? Just buy it all so we can leave.”

  Not even a little ashamed for enjoying his misery so thoroughly, Morgan leaned close to him and whispered, “This store is very expensive. You should allow her to pick one or two items from here and we’ll get the rest elsewhere.”

  “Elsewhere?” He closed his eyes and bit back a groan. “Just buy the damn stuff. I don’t care what it costs. I don’t want to go elsewhere.”

  She waited to feel guilty, but given how easily he had resisted her efforts to charm, she didn’t.

  Not in the least. This was a show of spunky liberation from needing his approval that even Amelia would have approved of!

  “That’s not how it works,” Morgan said firmly. “We’ve been shopping for all of ten minutes. Don’t be such a baby.”

  His mouth dropped open in shock, closed again. Morgan was sure she could hear him grinding his teeth before he finally said, “A baby? Me?”

  “And could you try not to curse? Cecilia tends to bring some of your words to school.”

  “You consider damn a curse?” he said, clearly as astonished by that as by the fact that she’d had the audacity to call him a baby.

  “I do,” she said bravely.

  He stared at her as if she was freshly minted from a far-off planet. He scowled. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He looked longingly at the door. And then Ace danced up, with one more
find.

  “Look! Sparkle skinny jeans that will fit me!”

  He sighed with long suffering, shot Morgan a dark look that she answered with a bland, uncaring smile, and then allowed Ace to take his hand and tug him toward the change area.

  Which, like everything at The Snow Cave, was designed to delight little girls. The waiting area, newly decorated for Christmas, was like the throne room in a winter palace fantasy.

  And so there sat Nate Hathoway front row and center, in a pink satin chair which looked as if it could snap into kindling under his weight. But as Cecilia danced out in each of her new outfits, the scowl dissolved from his face, and even if he didn’t smile, his expression was at least less menacing.

  It was hours later that they finally drove through the darkness toward Canterbury and home. Ace fell asleep in her booster seat in the back instantly, nearly lost amongst the clothing bags and shoe boxes that surrounded her. They could have gone in the back of Nate’s huge SUV, but she had insisted she had to have each of her purchases close to her.

  Ace wore her new coat: an impractical pure-white curly fur creation that was going to make her the absolute envy of the grade-one girls. She had on a hair band with a somewhat wilted bow, and little red patent-leather shoes on her leotarded feet.

  “She’s worn right out,” Nate said with a glance in the rearview mirror. “And no wonder. Is the female of the species born with an ability to power shop?”

  “I think so.”

  “So how come you didn’t get anything for yourself?”

  “Because today wasn’t about me.”

  He glanced at her, and she saw a warmth had crept past his guard and into his eyes. But he looked quickly away, before she could bask in it for too long.

  Looking straight ahead, as snow was beginning to fall gently, Nate turned on the radio. It was apparently preset to a rock station, but he glanced at the sleeping girl, and then at Morgan, and fiddled with the dial until he found a soft country ballad.

  “Why do you call Cecilia ‘Ace’?” Morgan asked.

  He hesitated, as if he did not want to reveal one single thing about himself or his family to her.

  But then he said, “Her mom had started calling her Sissy, short for Cecilia, I guess. There are no sissies in the Hathoway family. Nobody was calling my kid Sissy.”