“Perhaps you have. Perhaps you even have a hidden sheik,” he said, “which, come to think of it, would be just as good as a hidden stud. Maybe better. What do I know?”
“C-h-i-c,” she spelled out. “Not sheik!”
And then he laughed with such enjoyment at his own humor that she couldn’t help but join in. It was a treat to hear him laugh. She suspected he had not for a long time.
She handed him her hammer.
He frowned, the laughter gone. “The couch is good. This? Are you kidding me? What is this? A toy?”
It occurred to her that a woman that linked her life with his would have to like a traditional setup. She would choose the furniture, he would choose the tools. She would cook the meals, he would mow the lawn.
Considering she had left her fiancé because he had taken what she considered to be a sexist view of her career aspirations, considering her devotion to the principles of Bliss: The Extraordinary Joy of Being a Single Woman, Morgan was amazed by how easily something in her capitulated to this new vision. How lovely would it be having someone to share responsibilities with?
Shared, maybe certain things would not feel like such onerous, unachievable chores. Could there be unexpected pleasures in little things like hanging a few coat hangers? Is that what a good marriage was about?
She didn’t know. Her own parents had separated when she was young, her father had remarried and she had always felt outside the circle of his new family.
Her mother’s assessment of the situation—that she was looking for her father—seemed way too harsh. But Morgan knew her childhood experiences had made her long for love.
Not just love, but for a traditional relationship, like the one her best friend’s parents had enjoyed. How she had envied the stability of that home, the harmony there, the feeling of absolute security.
But after her relationship with Karl, its bitter ending, Morgan had decided the love she longed for was unrealistic, belonged in the fairy tales she so enjoyed reading to the children.
Now, with Nate Hathoway in her front entry, tapping her wall with her toy hammer, the choice Morgan had made to go it alone didn’t feel the least bit blissful. It felt achingly empty. Achingly.
Chapter Four
NATE HADN’T REALLY expected Morgan’s house to have this effect on him. It was cozy and cute, like a little nest. The enjoyment he had taken in her discomfort over agreeing to invite him over to help her find a “stud” was dissipating rapidly.
And who had pushed the envelope, who had suggested this foolishness? He wished he could blame her, but oh, no, it had been all him, lured by her blushing at the word stud.
Feeling the need to be a man, to do for her what she didn’t have the skill to do herself.
But now, in her house, with her purple sofa and her toy hammer in his hand? It was his lack he was aware of, not hers.
This house made him feel lonely for soft things. Feminine touches, Cindy’s warmth, seemed to be fading from his own house. The couch throw pillows she had chosen were worn out, the rag rug at the front door a little more rag than rug these days, the plaid blanket she had bought when Ace was a baby and that Ace still pulled over herself to watch television, was pathetically threadbare.
It reminded Nate, unhappily, how desperately inadequate he was to be raising a girl on his own.
What was it about Morgan that made him look at a life that he had felt he made full and satisfying despite the loss of his wife, to thinking maybe he wasn’t doing nearly as well as he’d imagined? Around Morgan his life suddenly seemed to have glaringly empty spaces in it.
“Wow,” he said, forcing himself to focus on her wall, to not give her even an inkling of the craving for softness that was going on inside of him, “for a little bit of a thing, you know how to destroy a wall.”
“It wasn’t intentional.”
“Destruction rarely is.”
He needed to remember that around Morgan McGuire. His life and Ace’s had had enough unintentional destruction wrought on it. They could not bear more loss, either of them. He needed to do what he had come here to do, and get out, plain and simple.
Not that anything seemed simple with Morgan sharing the same room with him as it did when he brooded on it alone over the forge.
Nate brought himself back, shook his head again at the large holes where she had tried to hang his coat hooks and the weight of them had pulled chunks of drywall off the walls.
He tapped lightly on her entrance wall with a hammer.
“See? There’s a stud.” He glanced at her. She was refusing to blush this time, probably because of his explanation, so he went on explaining, as if his voice going on and on was an amulet against the spell of her. “You can hear the solid sound behind the wall. They’re placed every sixteen inches. So you could put a coat hanger here, and—” he tapped the wall gently “—here. Here. Here.”
“But that’s not where I want the coat hangers,” she said mutinously. “It’s not centered properly. I want them in a row like this.”
She went and took a pair of hangers from where he had set them on the floor, inserted herself between him and the wall and showed him.
“Here and here. And the other two in a straight line down from them.”
He went very still. She was so close to him. He had no protection against this kind of spell. His craving for all things soft intensified. Her scent, clean, soap and shampoo, filled him. She was not quite touching him, but he could feel a delicate warmth radiating off her.
It seemed, dangerously, as if she could fill the something missing place in his life.
Nate knew he should back away from her a careful step but he didn’t. He tried to hold up the amulet of words again. “Hmm. Guys don’t think like that. For most men, it’s all about function, not form.”
But all the words did this time was make him more sharply aware of their differences, male and female, soft and hard, emotionally open and emotionally closed.
“Tell that to someone who hasn’t seen your work,” she said.
“I do try and marry form and function in my work.”
Now his amulet, words, had come back to bite him. He contemplated his use of the word marry in such close proximity to her, hoped it was completely coincidental and not a subliminal longing.
He could not help but feel he was being drugged by her closeness, the spell of her winding its way around him, stronger than all that physical toughness he possessed.
Because Nate still had not moved. He could smell that good, good smell that was all hers. Wholesome. Unpretentious. But alluringly soft, feminine, just like this space.
She seemed to realize suddenly that she had placed herself in very close proximity to him. She went as still as him, caught, too, in the unexpected bond of awareness that leaped sizzling in the air between them.
Then, stronger than him, after all, Morgan tried to slip away, back out under his arm, but he dropped it marginally, and they were locked together in the small space of the hallway.
He looked at her for a moment, the intensity between them as tangible as a static shock off a cat, or clothes out of the dryer. He was weakened enough. It was absolutely the wrong time to remember how soft her cheek had felt under his fingertips, and then his lips.
Nate was not seeing her as his daughter’s teacher right now. Unless he was mistaken, her eyes were smoky with a longing that mirrored his own.
But