“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.”
And then he sighed. “I regret making an issue over it, now.”
Morgan heard lots of regret in his voice. She had heard about the accident, and knew one minute he’d had a wife, and a life, and the next that everything had changed forever. What were his regrets? Had he called, I love you, as his wife had headed out the door for the last time?
His face was closed now, as if he already had said way more than he wanted to. Which meant he was the strong one who talked to no one about his pain.
She wanted to reach across the darkness of the cab, and invite him to tell her things he had told no one else, but she knew he would not appreciate the gesture.
Silence fell over them. Despite the quiet, there was something good about driving through the night with him, the soft music, the snow falling outside, his scent tickling at her nose.
Normally, particularly if she was driving by herself, the snow would have made Morgan nervous, but tonight she had a feeling of being with a man who would keep those he had been charged with guarding safe no matter what it took, no matter what it cost him.
But he hadn’t, and he wore that failure to protect his wife around him like a cloak of pure pain.
Even though Morgan knew he had not been there at the accident that killed his wife, she was certain he would in some way hold himself responsible. Did he think he should have driven her that night? Not let her go into