last night and would be taking over rehearsing the children.
As soon as Morgan entered the auditorium—which was also the school gymnasium, not that it could be used for that because of all the work going on getting the only stage in town ready for Wesley—Morgan knew he was here.
Something happened to her neck. It wasn’t so sinister as the hackles rising, it was more as if someone sexy had breathed on her.
She looked around, and sure enough, there Nate was, helping another man lift a plywood cutout of a Christmas cottage up on stage.
At the same time as herding her small charges forward Morgan unabashedly took advantage of the fact Nate had no idea she was watching him, to study him, which was no mean feat given that Freddy Campbell kept poking Brenda Weston in the back, and Damien Dorchester was deliberately treading on Benjamin Chin’s heels.
“Freddy, Damien, stop it.” The correction was absent at best.
Because it seemed as if everything but him had faded as Morgan looked to the stage. Nate had looked sexy at his forge, and he looked just as sexy here, with his tool belt slung low on the hips his jeans rode over, a plain T-shirt showing off the ripple of unconscious muscle as he lifted.
Let’s face it, Morgan told herself, he’d look sexy no matter where he was, no matter what he was wearing, no matter what he was doing.
He was just a blastedly sexy man.
And yet there was more than sexiness to him.
No, there was a quiet and deep strength evident in Nate Hathoway. It had been there at Cheesie Charlie’s, it had been there when he sat in the pink satin chair at The Snow Cave. And it was there now as he worked, a self-certainty that really was more sexy than his startling good looks.
Mrs. Wellhaven, a pinch-faced woman of an indeterminate age well above sixty, called the children up onto the stage, and the workers had to stop to let the kids file onto the triple-decker stand that had been built for them.
“Hi, Daddy!” Ace called.
“Yes,” Mrs. Wellhaven said, lips pursed, “let’s deal with that first off, shall we? Please do not call out the names of people you know as you come on the stage. Not during rehearsal, and God knows, not during the live production.”
Ace scowled. Morgan glanced at Nate. Father’s and child’s expressions were identically mutinous.
Morgan shivered. In the final analysis could there be anything more sexy than a man who would protect his own, no matter what?
Still, the choir director had her job to do, and since Nate looked as if maybe he was going to go have a word with her, Morgan intercepted him.
“Hi. How are you?”
Though maybe it was just an excuse.
In all likelihood Nate was not going to berate the choir director.
“Who does she think she is telling my kid she can’t say hi to me?” he muttered, mutiny still written all over his handsome face.
Or maybe he had been.
“You have to admit it might be a little chaotic if all the kids started calling greetings to their parents, grandparents and younger siblings on national live television,” Morgan pointed out diplomatically.
He looked at her as if he had just noticed her. When Nate gave a woman his full attention, she didn’t have a chance. That probably included the crotchety choir director.
“Ah, Miss McGuire, don’t you ever get tired of being right all the time?” he asked her, folding his arms over the massiveness of his chest.
She had rather hoped they were past the Miss McGuire stage. “Morgan,” she corrected him.
Mrs. Wellhaven cleared her throat, tipped her glasses and leveled a look at them. “Excuse me. We are trying to concentrate here.” She turned back to the children. “I am Mrs. Wellhaven.” Then she muttered, tapping her baton sternly, “The brains of the outfit.”
Nate guffawed. Morgan giggled, at least in part because she had enjoyed his genuine snort of laughter so much.
Mrs. Wellhaven sent them a look, raised her baton and swung it down. The children watched her in silent awe. “That means begin!”
“She’s a dragon,” Nate whispered.
The children launched, a little unsteadily, into the opening number, “Angel Lost.”
“What are you doing here?” Morgan whispered to Nate. “I thought you made it clear you weren’t in favor of The Christmas Angel.”
“Or shopping,” he reminded her sourly. “I keep finding myself in these situations that I really don’t want to be in.”
“Don’t say that like it’s my fault!”
“Isn’t it?”
She felt ruffled by the accusation, until she looked at him more closely and realized he was teasing her.
Something warm unfolded in her.
“I didn’t know you were a carpenter, too,” she said, trying to fight the desire to know everything about him. And losing.
He snorted. “I’m no carpenter, but I know my way around tools. I was raised with self-sufficiency. We never bought anything we could make ourselves when I was a kid. And we never hired anybody to do anything, either. What we needed we figured out how to make or we did without.”
Though Morgan thought he had been talking very quietly, and she loved how much he had revealed about himself, Mrs. Wellhaven turned and gave them a quelling look.
Ace’s voice rose, more croaky than usual, loudly enthusiastic, above her peers. “Lost annngelll, who will find you? Where arrrrrre you—”
Mrs. Wellhaven’s head swung back around. “You! Little redheaded girl! Could you sing just a little more quietly?”
“Is she insinuating Ace sounds bad?”
“I think she just wants all the kids to sing at approximately the same volume,” Morgan offered.
“You’re just being diplomatic,” Nate whispered, listening. “Ace’s singing is awful. Almost as bad as yours.”
“Hers is not that bad, and neither is mine,” Morgan protested.
“Hey, take it from a guy who spent an hour and a half with you oinking and braying, it is.”
He was teasing her again. The warmth flooding her grew. “At least I gave you a break by sleeping all the way home.”
“You snore, too.”
Morgan’s mouth fell open. “I don’t!”
“How would you know?” he asked reasonably. “Snoring is one of those things you don’t know about yourself. Other people have to tell you.”
That seemed way too intimate—and embarrassing—a detail for him to know about her.
But when he grinned at her expression, she knew he was probably pulling her leg, and that he was enjoying teasing her as much as she was reluctantly enjoying being teased.
“Little redheaded girl—”
“Still, I’m going to have to go bean that shrew if she yells at Ace again.”
“You.” Mrs. Wellhaven rounded on him, and pointed her baton. “Who are you?”
“Little redheaded girl’s father,” he said evenly, dangerously, having gone from teasing Morgan to a warrior ready to defend his family in the blink of an eye.
Amazingly Mrs. Wellhaven was not intimidated. “No parents. Out. You, too, little redheaded girl’s mother.”
Morgan should point out she was the teacher, not a parent,