took a deep shuddering breath.
“Let’s put up the lights on the tree,” he suggested. If there was one thing personal pain had taught him, it was that sitting around contemplating it was no way to make it go away. Action was the remedy.
“Okay,” she said, her voice wobbly with the tears she had not shed. She let go of his hand abruptly and leaped to her feet. “I guess that means I have to find the star.”
Nate noted that everything she owned was brand-new, and there was a sadness in that in itself.
His childhood might have been poor, but both sides of his family had given him Christmas relics that went on his tree every year. He was pretty sure his lights, the color cracked off them in spots, predated his birth by several years. He had antique ornaments that his grandmother had carried across the ocean with her, acorn ornaments that Cindy had made when she was Ace’s age.
Morgan’s lack of anything old in her Christmas decoration boxes made him acutely aware of how bad her first Christmas alone could be.
And it was that awareness—of her aloneness, of how close to tears she had been—that made him tease her.
About the size of her tree, and the rather large size of the striped sock she put on the mantel for herself, about her selection of treetop star, a gaudy creation of pink-and-green neon lights.
He teased her until she was breathless with laughter, until the last remnants of sadness had left her face, and the sparkle in her eyes was not from tears. He was heartened when she began teasing him back.
Together, they put up the lights, ornaments way too scanty for such a big tree, tons of tinsel that she demanded, in her schoolteacher voice, get added to the tree a single strand at a time.
By the time they were done, it was close to midnight.
She insisted on making more hot chocolate. She turned off all the other lights in her house, and they sat on her purple couch in darkness made happy by the glow of the Christmas tree lights.
Nate had not realized how on guard he was against life, until now, when his guard came down.
He felt as relaxed as he had felt in years. And
exhausted. Keeping a guard up that high was hard work he realized, it required constant vigilance.
And that was the last thing he thought.
He was still sitting up, but Nate Hathoway had gone to sleep on her couch, Morgan noted. Another woman might have thought it wasn’t a very exciting end to what had turned out to be a wonderful evening.
But, staring at him mesmerized, Morgan thought it was perfect.
Sometime during the night—around the time she had made that announcement about spending Christmas alone, intended to solidify in her own mind and his her independence, but somehow turning pathetically maudlin instead—he had let go of some finely held tension in him.
Now, she loved watching him sleep. She could study him to her heart’s content without the embarrassment of him knowing.
And so she indulged in the guilty pleasure of just looking at him: the crumple of dark hair against his collar, the lashes so thick they could have been inkencrusted, and cast soft shadows that contrasted the hard angles of his face, cheekbones, nose, chin.
His jaw was relaxed. And he didn’t snore.
Sighing with the oddest contentment, she got up, finally, moved the hot chocolate from where he had set it on the ottoman and unplugged the Christmas lights. She fetched a blanket.
Her intention was to toss it lightly over him and tuck it around him.
But his head was tilted at an odd angle, so she gently leaned over and put pressure on his shoulder. He sighed, leaned, and she tucked a pillow behind his head.
Better, except that she felt reluctant to remove her hand from his shoulder.
He reached up and took her wrist, yanked gently. “Lie down beside me.”
She knew he was sleeping, or in that groggy state between being asleep and being awake where he didn’t really even know who she was or what he was asking.
His guard had come way down tonight. Now he was in a really vulnerable state, admitting something he would probably not normally admit.
He did not want to be alone.
Just like her.
She knew she should disengage his fingers one by one from her wrist and tiptoe off to her own room. Probably he would wake sometime in the night, be embarrassed to find himself asleep on her couch and disappear.
So she knew what she should do. But it seemed all her life had been about shoulds. The one time she’d rebelled and not put her own life on hold because she should defer to her fiancé’s more lucrative career it had ended rather badly.
So, maybe she’d become even more attached to shoulds than before.
For all its talk of the joy of freedom, wasn’t Bliss: The Extraordinary Joy of Being a Single Woman just another book of shoulds? It was a desperate need for an instruction manual to guide her through life, to make the rules for her. Hadn’t the book just provided another excuse not to rely on herself, not to risk following her instincts, not to risk taking control of her own life?
This was the truth: there was no instruction manual for life.
No one was going to grade her on what she did next. It was possible no one even cared. Her mother was in Thailand. Her father had long ago replaced his first family.
So why not do what she truly wanted? Why not do what would give her a moment’s pleasure, even if that pleasure was stolen?
She didn’t have to stay tucked into Nate’s side. She could just see what it felt like, enjoy it for a few minutes and then go to bed.
With a sigh of pure surrender, Morgan sat on the edge of the couch, leaned tentatively into him. He was so solid it was like leaning against a stone, except the stone was deliciously sun-warmed.
He let go of her wrist, but his arm, freed, circled her waist and pulled her deep into his long leanness. For a moment, she felt as if she couldn’t breathe.
What was she going to say if he woke up suddenly and completely?
She held her breath, waiting, but he didn’t wake up. If anything his breathing deepened, touched the sensitive skin of her ear, felt on her neck exactly as she had always known it would, heated, as textured as silk.
She willed herself to relax, and as she did, she noticed her awareness of him deepening. Her own heart seemed to rise and fall with his each breath. He was not all hard lines as she had first thought. No, he radiated warmth, and his skin, taut over muscle, bone, sinew, had the faintest seductive give to it.
There, she told herself, she had felt it. She could get up and go to her own bed now, satisfied that she had followed her own instincts.
Except it was harder than she could have imagined to get up, to leave the warmth and strength of him, to walk to her lonely room and her cold bed.
It was harder than she could have ever imagined to walk away from what was unfolding inside of her. A brand-new experience. A very physical feeling of connection. Closeness. Awareness.
A physical experience that had a mental component…
For as she snuggled more deeply into him, Morgan felt the moment begin to shine as if it had a life of its own.
Her mind struggled to put a label on the level of sensation she was experiencing. And then it succeeded.
Bliss.
Morgan fell asleep in the circle of his arms. And woke in the morning to winter sunshine pouring through her windows.
For a moment, she felt it again, bliss.
But