Rescued by his Christmas Angel. Michelle Douglas

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 long are the kids going to be singing?” he asked.

      Thankfully, he’d left the topic of the stud behind him! “I was told the first rehearsal would be about an hour. I think that’s a little long for six-year-olds, but—”

      “The coffee’s bad, anyway. You want to play hooky for a few minutes, Miss Schoolmarm?”

      “Excuse me?”

      He leaned across the table and looked at her so intently she thought she might faint.

      “I’ll show you what a stud is,” he promised, his voice as sultry as a hot summer night.

      “Pardon?” She gulped.

      “You shouldn’t go through life without knowing.”

      She felt as if she was strangling.

      When she had nearly worn through the table scrubbing at the nonexistent spot, he said, “I’ll hang up the coat hangers for you.”

      “You want to come to my house?”

      He raised his eyebrows at her. “Unless you want the coat hangers hung somewhere else?”

      “You want to come to my house now?”

      His eyes had the most devilish little twinkle in them. “It’s not as if you’re entertaining a gentleman caller, Miss McGuire.”

      It was true. He was offering to do a chore for her. That involved studs.

      She was not going to let him see how rattled she was! Well, he already had, but she intended to curb his enjoyment.

      “Yes,” she said, “that would be fine. A very gentlemanly offer from someone who is not a gentleman caller. Though I’m sure you are. A gentleman. Most of the time. When you aren’t talking about beaning the choir director. Or hunting down the parents of children who have teased your daughter.”

      She was babbling. She clamped her mouth shut.

      “Nobody’s ever called me a gentleman before,” he told her with wicked enjoyment.

      But underneath the banter she heard something else. And so she said primly, “Well, it’s about time they did.”

      Ten minutes later, she was so aware of how life could take unexpected turns. Just this morning it would have never occurred to her that Nate Hathoway would be in her house by this afternoon. In fact, Santa coming down the chimney would have seemed a more likely scenario.

      And really, having Nate’s handiwork in her house was a bad enough distraction. Now having him here, it seemed somehow her space was never going to be quite the same.

      As if it would be missing something.

      Stop it, Morgan ordered herself. She was devoted to independence. Nate showing her how to hang something without it falling back off the wall could only forward that cause!

      That’s why she had given in so easily to his suggestion to come over here.

      Wasn’t it?

      No, said the little part of her that watched him filling her tiny space with his essence. There was an illusion of intimacy from having him in this space.

      Now his presence was large as he loomed in her living room waiting for her to find a hammer.

      When