Cara Colter – His for Christmas: Rescued by his Christmas Angel / Christmas at Candlebark Farm / The Nurse Who Saved Christmas (страница 21)
Molly’s and Nate’s mouths fell open in equal expressions of shocked disbelief.
“Ace?” they said together.
“I’ve told all the girls they have an equal chance of being chosen.”
“But that’s not true,” Nate said grimly. “Ace can’t sing a note, and she doesn’t look like anyone’s idea of an angel.”
“Her singing has actually improved quite a lot under Mrs. Wellhaven’s tutelage.”
“She sings all those songs around the house all the time. I haven’t noticed any improvement.”
“Well,” Morgan said firmly, “there has been. And I think anyone with a little imagination could see she would make a perfectly adorable Christmas Angel.”
“I don’t want her getting her hopes up for something that doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of happening.”
It was the first grim note in a perfect day, so Molly quickly changed the subject, but the mood had shifted.
A few minutes later, saying goodbye on the doorstep, Nate cradling the sleeping child against his chest, it seemed to Morgan as if she had never had a more perfect day. She realized it was not the toddy alone that allowed her to feel this sense of warmth and well-being. It had only allowed her to relax into the feeling instead of analyzing it.
“Nate,” she said, as they drove through the snow, “it’s so nice that you still are so connected with them, with Cindy’s family.”
He shot her a surprised look. “Family is family. They became my family the day I married Cindy.”
Morgan shivered. She had always known he was a
Morgan realized tonight had been the kind of night she had always dreamed of.
A simple night of family. And connection. A feeling of some things not being temporary.
“I still think it’s nice,” she said.
“We had already lost Cindy. It would have just made everything so much worse if we lost each other. Ace is what remains, she’s what Cindy is sending forward into the future. I could never keep her from her aunt, from her mom’s sister.”
But Morgan thought of all the people—including her own family—that when something happened, like a divorce, that’s exactly what they did.
“When my mom and dad divorced,” she told him, “it was like my dad’s whole side of the family, including him, just faded away.”
“You didn’t have any contact with your dad?”
“A bit, at first. Then he moved for a job, and then he remarried. So, it was a card and some money on my birthday. He always paid my mother support, though.”
“Yippee for him,” Nate said darkly. “There’s a lot more to being a dad than paying the bills.”
“Yes,” she said. “I can see that in the way you parent.”
“Now you like my parenting?” he teased her. “What about the notes?”
“You haven’t gotten one for a while!”
“I kind of miss them.”
“You do not.”
They were in front of her house now, but he made no move to get out of the truck. “What your dad did? That was wrong,” he said, after a long time. “And sad.”
She liked that about Nate Hathoway. He had a strong value system. He knew what was right and what was wrong, and he would never compromise that.
“Nate, tell me if it’s none of my business, but did someone else die, besides your wife? Molly said something.”
For a long moment he didn’t answer. Then he said gruffly, “There were three of us who grew up together. Me, Cindy and David. Cindy and David had been in love since they were about twelve. I mean really in love. The head-over-heels kind. Some people outgrow things like that, other people don’t. They didn’t.”
He was silent for a long, long time. “David joined the army. Before he left he made me promise I’d look after her. If anything happened.”
“Something happened,” Morgan guessed when he was silent for a long time again.
He cast her a look that said it all, that confirmed that strong value system.
“David was killed in Iraq,” he said roughly. “And I looked after Cindy, just like I promised.”
She wanted to ask if he loved her, but it was so evident from the agony on his face that he had loved her. Loved both his friends.
“You are a good man,” she whispered. She wanted to ask,
He shrugged it off uncomfortably, and they pulled up to her house. He shut off the truck, and leaped out, not wanting to discuss it anymore. Still, he walked her up to her front door, helped her with the key.
“Thank you, Nate,” she said softly. “It was such a perfect day.”
“You’re welcome.” He turned to go down off her stoop.
Maybe it was the hot rum toddy.
Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was that he was a good, good man, who had made a vow to his best friend and kept it. Maybe it was because she thought he deserved to be
“Nate?”
He turned back to her.
Something else had been between them all day, too.
Awareness.
She crossed the small distance between them, stood on tiptoes and did what she had wanted to do from the moment she had met him.
She tasted him. She touched her lips to his own.
He tasted exactly as she had known he would.
Of mysterious things that made a woman’s heart race, but underneath that, of strength and solidness. Of a man who would do the right thing.
Of things made to last forever.
She stumbled back from him, both frightened and intrigued by the strength of her longing.
He was a man, she knew, who had been tremendously hurt.
She held her breath knowing that everything between them had just shifted with the invitation of her lips.
So far everything had been casual and spontaneous.
Now their kiss changed that.
It asked for more. It demanded some definition, it asked where things were going. It asked if he was ready to
The head-over-heels kind.
Because despite it all, despite her determination to be independent, to not give her life away, she felt ready to surrender to the tug inside her.
To love him.
Morgan held her breath, thinking he would walk away, perhaps never to look back.
But he didn’t. He regarded her solemnly, and then said, softly, “Wow.”
Then he walked away, leaving her feeling as if things were even more up in the air and ill-defined than they had been before.
“Mr. Hathoway?”