“Don’t say that like it’s my fault!”
“Isn’t it?”
She felt ruffled by the accusation, until she looked at him more closely and realized he was teasing her.
Something warm unfolded in her.
“I didn’t know you were a carpenter, too,” she said, trying to fight the desire to know everything about him. And losing.
He snorted. “I’m no carpenter, but I know my way around tools. I was raised with self-sufficiency. We never bought anything we could make ourselves when I was a kid. And we never hired anybody to do anything, either. What we needed we figured out how to make or we did without.”
Though Morgan thought he had been talking very quietly, and she loved how much he had revealed about himself, Mrs. Wellhaven turned and gave them a quelling look.
Ace’s voice rose, more croaky than usual, loudly enthusiastic, above her peers. “Lost annngelll, who will find you? Where arrrrrre you—”
Mrs. Wellhaven’s head swung back around. “You! Little redheaded girl! Could you sing just a little more quietly?”
“Is she insinuating Ace sounds bad?”
“I think she just wants all the kids to sing at approximately the same volume,” Morgan offered.
“You’re just being diplomatic,” Nate whispered, listening. “Ace’s singing is awful. Almost as bad as yours.”
“Hers is not that bad, and neither is mine,” Morgan protested.
“Hey, take it from a guy who spent an hour and a half with you oinking and braying, it is.”
He was teasing her again. The warmth flooding her grew. “At least I gave you a break by sleeping all the way home.”
“You snore, too.”
Morgan’s mouth fell open. “I don’t!”
“How would you know?” he asked reasonably. “Snoring is one of those things you don’t know about yourself. Other people have to tell you.”
That seemed way too intimate—and embarrassing—a detail for him to know about her.
But when he grinned at her expression, she knew he was probably pulling her leg, and that he was enjoying teasing her as much as she was reluctantly enjoying being teased.
“Little redheaded girl—”
“Still, I’m going to have to go bean that shrew if she yells at Ace again.”
“You.” Mrs. Wellhaven rounded on him, and pointed her baton. “Who are you?”
“Little redheaded girl’s father,” he said evenly, dangerously, having gone from teasing Morgan to a warrior ready to defend his family in the blink of an eye.
Amazingly Mrs. Wellhaven was not intimidated. “No parents. Out. You, too, little redheaded girl’s mother.”
Morgan should point out she was the teacher, not a parent, certainly not a parent who had slept with this parent and produced a child, though the very thought made her go so weak in the knees, she had to reach out and balance herself by taking his arm.
Luckily, thanks to the darkening expression on Nate’s face, she made it look as if she had just taken hold of him to lead him firmly out the door.
Touching him—her fingertips practically vibrating with awareness of how his skin felt—was probably not the best way to banish thoughts of how people produced children together.
Morgan let go as soon as they were safely out the auditorium door.
“She’s a dragon,” Nate proclaimed when the door slapped shut behind him. “I’m not sure I should leave Ace in there. Did you actually talk me out of taking my daughter to Disneyland to expose her to that?”
Morgan knew it would be a mistake to preen under his unconscious admission that she had somehow influenced him. Then again, she probably hadn’t. He hadn’t even noticed her hand on his arm, and her fingertips were still tingling! With the look on his face right now, he looked like the man least likely to be talked into anything.
Besides, between the look on his face—knight about to do battle with the dragon—and the attitude of Mrs. Wellhaven, she was getting a case of the giggles.
Nate eyed her narrowly.
“I don’t get what’s funny.”
“If Mrs. Wellhaven is the brains of the outfit—” and she couldn’t even see that Nate was not a man to be messed with “—the whole town is in big trouble.”
Nate regarded her silently for a moment, and then he actually laughed.
It was the second time in a few short minutes that Morgan had heard him laugh. This time he made no attempt to stifle it, and it was a good sound, rich, deep and true. It was a sound that made her redefine, instantly, what sexy really was.
“It’s not too late for me to go and bean her,” he said finally.
“I’m afraid I don’t even know what it means to ‘bean’ somebody.”
He laughed again. “Morgan McGuire, I think you’ve led a sheltered life. Let’s go grab a coffee. I can’t listen to that.” He cocked his head at the cacophony of sound coming out the door, and shook his head. Ace’s voice rose louder than ever above all others. “Maybe I can still talk Ace into going to Disneyland.”
“Maybe Mrs. Wellhaven will pay for you to go.”
And then he laughed again, and so did she. And she could feel that shared laughter building a tenuous bridge between them.
And so Morgan found herself in the tiny, mostly empty school cafeteria drinking stale coffee and realizing she was alone across the table from Nate Hathoway.
Without a forge as a distraction. Or Ace. Or even Old MacDonald.
They were not strangers. For heaven’s sake, they had spent an entire day together! And yet Morgan felt awkwardly as if she didn’t have one single thing to say to him. She felt like a sixteen-year-old on her first date. Nervous. Self-conscious. Worried about what to say. Or what not to say.
Be a teacher, she ordered herself. Talk about Cecilia.
But somehow she didn’t want to. Not right this second. She didn’t want to be a teacher, or talk about Cecilia. There was something about the pure rush of feeling sixteen again, tongue-tied in the presence of a gorgeous guy, that she wanted to relish even as she was guiltily aware it was the antithesis of everything she had tried to absorb while reading Bliss.
“So,” he said, eyeing her over the top of the cup, “you get the coat hangers put up?”
“Thanks for the other pair. Two was plenty, but thanks. No, I didn’t put them up. Not yet.”
“Really? You don’t like them?”
Oh, she liked them. Way too much. Liked caressing that smooth metal in her hands, liked the way something of him, his absolute strength and even his maddening rigidity, was represented in the work that he did.
“It’s not that. I mean I tried to put them up. They keep falling down again. The first time it happened I thought I had a burglar. They’re too heavy. I’m afraid they’ve made a mess of the wall.”
He squinted at her. “You knew they had to be mounted on a stud, right?”
She willed herself not to blush, and not to choke on her coffee. He had not just said something dirty in the elementary-school cafeteria. She was pretty sure of it. Still, she couldn’t trust herself to answer. She took a sudden interest in mopping a nonexistent dribble of coffee off the table.
“How