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

is a situation that can be remedied. I mean, a few short weeks ago, I didn’t know how to hang a coat hanger.”

      “You’re not exactly ready to start building furniture.”

      “No, I suppose not.”

      Said a bit doubtfully, as if she might actually be considering trying to build some furniture. He reminded himself he’d have to follow up on getting her a new hammer before she wrecked something else trying to use the one she had.

      “The point is,” Morgan said, “I was willing to learn. If you and Ace would like to come over this afternoon after school, I would be happy to teach you how to make Christmas cookies.”

      His schedule had become insane because of the volunteer hours he was putting in on the set of The Christmas Angel. He still had special orders he had to get out for Christmas, as well as the gate commission.

      Plus, he was avoiding Morgan. And her lips. And the clear invitation he had seen in her eyes the other night after the disastrous sleigh ride. Boy, if a sleigh ride like that couldn’t scare a girl off, what would?

      And there was the other disastrous thing, too. Telling her about Cindy and David had poked a little hole in the dam of feelings walled up within him…He was all too aware that he might be like the little boy hoping his finger poked in that hole was going to be enough to hold it back.

      The thing was, her voice on the other end of the phone was like a lifeline thrown to a man who had been in the water so long he didn’t even know he was drowning.

      The thing was, he knew it had cost her to make the move, and he could not bear to hurt her. It seemed she had experienced quite enough hurt in her life. Not at the hands of fate, either, but at the hands of the very people who should have loved and protected her.

      Though there was probably a far more sensible way of looking at that. Hurt her a little now. Or a lot later.

      He didn’t feel like being sensible. Or maybe, closer to the truth, he was not as sure as he had been a few weeks ago about what sensible was.

      “Sure,” he said, as if he grabbed lifelines every single day. “What time would you like us to come make cookies?”

Chapter Seven

      AS IT TURNED OUT, after school, Ace had been offered a Christmas shopping outing to Greenville with the Westons. She still had to buy something for her daddy, she informed Nate, and it would be much too hard to keep it a secret if he came with her.

      She was so excited about going shopping with her new friend Brenda that he didn’t have the heart to tell her she would be missing making cookies with her teacher. Having to make such a momentous choice would have torn her in two.

      Nate knew he could phone and cancel, and maybe even should phone and cancel, but as he moved up the walkway to Morgan’s house, he contemplated the fact that he hadn’t.

      And knew he was saying yes to the Light.

      Even though he knew better. Even though he knew, better than most, life could be hard, and cruel, and made no promises.

      When Morgan opened her door, that’s what he saw in her face. Light. And he moved toward it like a man who had been away for a long time, a soldier away at the wars, who had spotted the light pouring out the window of home.

      An hour later her kitchen was covered in flour and red food coloring. He was pretty sure there were more sprinkles on the floor than on the cookies.

      And, despite the fact she was the world’s best teacher, calm, patient, clear about each step and the order to do them in, those cookies were extra ugly. Sugar cookies, they were supposed to look like Christmas tree decorations. They didn’t.

      He held one of the finished cookies up for her. “What does this look like?”

      She studied it. “An icicle?”

      “Morgan, it looks like something obscene.” He bit into it, loving her blush. “But it tastes not bad.”

      She put her hands on her hips, still very much Miss McGuire, pretending that kiss of a few nights ago wasn’t hanging in the air between them like mistletoe, pretending her face wasn’t on fire. “Has anyone ever told you you’re incorrigible?”

      “Of course,” he said, picked up a misshapen Santa and bit his head off. “That’s part of being a Hathoway.”

      “Really?” She surveyed the cookies, apparently realized they were not going anywhere near Wesley’s welcome party, picked one up and bit into it. “Tell me about growing up a Hathoway.”

      And oddly enough, he did. In Morgan’s kitchen, surrounded by the scent of cookies baking and a feeling of home, Nate told her about how it was to grow up poor in a small town.

      “But,” he said, making sure she knew he was not inviting pity, “we might have been poor, but our family was everything. We were fiercely loyal to each other. My dad couldn’t give my mom much materially, but I don’t think a man has ever loved a woman the way he loves her. He would fight off tigers for her. For any of us. There was an intense feeling of family.

      “And we might have been poor, but we were never bored.” He told her about working in the forge since he was just a little boy, starting on small chores, working up to bending the iron.

      He told her about making their own fun, since they could never afford anything. In the summer fun was a secondhand bicycle and the swimming hole, or a hose and a pile of dirt.

      “You haven’t really lived until you’ve squished mud through your toes,” he told her. “And in winter fun was a skate on a frozen pond in skates way too big because they were purchased to last a few seasons. It was tobogganing on a homemade sled, and snowball fights. It was an old deck of worn-out cards in the kitchen.”

      “Like at Molly and Keith’s the other night?” she said, and he heard the wistfulness.

      “Yeah, growing up was like that…” Each of his memories held Cindy and David. It was the first time in a long time he felt the richness of that friendship, instead of the loss. It was the first time he understood how much it had become a part of who he was today.

      “Tell me about how you grew up,” he invited Morgan.

      And then Morgan told him about her family, and how fragmented it was, how some of her earliest memories were of tension, of feeling as if she was responsible for holding something together that could not be held.

      “It was like trying to stop an avalanche that had already broken free,” Morgan said. “My mom and dad eventually split when I was eleven. And it was a blessing, but it made me long for things I couldn’t have.”

      “Such as?”

      She smiled sadly. “I used to watch other families on the block, families on television, and long for that. To be together with other people who loved you in a special way. A way that both shut out the rest of the world, and made you able to go into it in a different way.”

      He was astonished how sad he felt for her. “I’m surprised you don’t have it, if you longed for it,” he said gruffly.