“I thought we’d go to the mall in Greenville,” Morgan said, jingling her car keys in her hand and glancing away from him.
Why did it please him that he made her nervous? And how could he be pleased and annoyed at the same time? A trip to Greenville was a full-day excursion!
“I thought we were going to Finnegan’s,” he said. Why couldn’t Ace have just been bribed with Happy time, same as always?
Why did he have an ugly feeling Morgan McGuire was the type of woman who changed same as always?
“Finnegan’s?” Morgan said. “Oh.” In the same tone one might use if a fishmonger was trying to talk them into buying a particularly smelly piece of fish. “There’s not much in the way of selection there.”
“But Greenville is over an hour and a half away!” he protested. By the time they got there, they’d have to have lunch. Even before they started shopping. He could see the car show slip a little further from his grasp.
And lunch with the first-grade teacher? His life, deliberately same as always since Cindy’s death, was being hijacked, and getting more complicated by the minute.
“It’s the closest mall,” Morgan said, and he could see she had a stubborn bent to her that might match his own, if tested.
As if the careful script on the handwritten notes sent home hadn’t been fair enough warning of that.
“And the best shopping.”
“The best shopping,” Ace breathed. “Could we go to The Snow Cave? That’s where Brenda Weston got her winter coat. It has white fur.”
Nate shot his daughter an astonished look. This was the first time she’d ever indicated she knew the name of a store in Greenville, or that she coveted a coat that had white fur.
“Surrender to the day,” he muttered sternly to himself, not that the word surrender had appeared in a Hathoway’s vocabulary for at least two hundred years.
“Pardon?” Morgan asked.
“I said lead the way.”
But when she did, he wasn’t happy about that, either. She drove one of those teeny tiny cars that got three zillion miles per every gallon of gas.
There was no way he could sit in the sardine-can-size backseat, and if he got in the front seat, his shoulder was going to be touching hers.
All the way to Greenville.
And even if he was determined to surrender to the day, he was not about to invite additional assaults on his defenses.
“I’ve seen Tinkertoys bigger than this car,” he muttered. “We’d better take my vehicle.”
And there was something about Miss Morgan McGuire that already attacked his defenses. That made a part of him he thought was broken beyond repair wonder if there was even the slimmest chance it could be fixed.
Why would anyone in their right mind want to fix something that hurt so bad when it broke?
He realized he was thinking of his heart.
Stupid thoughts for a man about to spend an hour and a half in a vehicle—any vehicle—with someone as cute as Morgan McGuire. He was pretty sure it was going to be the longest hour and a half of his life.
Stupid thoughts for a man who had vowed when his wife died—and Hathoways took their vows seriously—that his heart was going to be made of the same iron he made his livelihood shaping.
Out of nowhere, a memory blasted him.
I wish you could know what it is to fall in love, Nate.
Stop it, Cin, I love you.
No. Head over heels, I can’t breathe, think, function. That kind of fall-in-love.
Cindy had been his best friend’s girl. David had joined the services and been killed overseas. For a while, it had looked like the grief would take her, too. But Nate had done what best friends do, what he had promised David. He had stepped in to look after her.
Can’t breathe? Think? Function? That doesn’t even sound fun to me.
She’d laughed. But sadly. Hath, you don’t know squat.
There was a problem with vowing your heart was going to be made of iron, and Nate was aware of it as he settled in the driver’s seat beside Morgan, and her delicate perfume surrounded him.
Iron had a secret. It was only strong until it was tested by fire. Heated hot enough it was as pliable as butter.
And someone like Morgan McGuire probably had a whole lot more fire than her prim exterior was letting on.
But as long as he didn’t have to touch her shoulder all the way to Greenville he didn’t have to find out. He could make himself immune to her, despite the delicacy of her scent.
It should be easy. After all, Nate had made himself immune to every other woman who had come calling, thinking he and Ace needed sympathy and help, loving and saving.
He didn’t need anything. From anyone. And in that, he took pride.
And some days it felt like pride—and Ace—were all he had left.
But even once they were all loaded into his spacious SUV, even though his shoulder was not touching Morgan’s, Nate was totally aware of her in the passenger seat, turning around to talk to Ace.
And he was aware the trip to Greenville had never gone by more quickly.
Because Morgan had switched cars, but not intent. And Nate saw she was intent on making the day fun for Ace, and her genuine caring for his daughter softened him toward her in a way he did not want to be softened.
For as much as he resisted her attempts to involve him, it made Nate mildly ashamed that on a long car trip with Ace he had a tendency to plug a movie into the portable DVD player.
Nate glanced over at Morgan. Her eyes had a shine to them, a clearness, a trueness.
He was aware that since the death of Cindy he had lived in the darkness of sorrow, in the grip of how helpless he had been to change anything at a moment when it had really counted.
Morgan’s light was not going to pierce that. He wasn’t going to allow it.
“With an oink, oink here, and an oink, oink there,” Morgan McGuire sang with enthusiasm that made up for a surprisingly horrible voice.
It was written all over her that she was young and innocent and completely naive. That she had never known hardship like his own hardscrabble upbringing at a forge that was going broke, that she had been untouched by true tragedy.
“Oink,” she invited him, and then teased, “you look like you would make a terrific pig.”
He hoped that wasn’t a dig at his housekeeping, but again he was taken by the transparency in her face. Morgan McGuire appeared to be the woman least likely to make digs.
“—here an oink, there an oink, everywhere an oink, oink—”
He shook his head, refusing to be drawn into her world. No good could come from it. When soft met hard, soft lost.
The best thing he could ever do for this teacher who cared about his daughter with a genuineness he could not deny, was to make sure he didn’t repay her caring by hurting her.
And following the thin thread of attraction he could feel leaping in him as her voice and her scent and her enthusiasm for oinking filled his vehicle, could only end in that one place.
And he was cynical enough to know that.
Even if she wasn’t.
Morgan glanced across the restaurant table at Nate Hathoway. Nothing in the time they had spent in the truck