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 lessened her first impression of him standing alone bending iron to his will.
He was a warrior. Battle-scarred, self-reliant, his emotions contained behind walls so high it would be nearly impossible to scale them.
So, being Morgan, naturally she tried to scale them anyway.
She had been aware that she was trying to make him smile as they had traveled, deliberately using her worst singing voice, trying to get him to participate. She told herself it was so Ace could see a softer side of her father, but she knew that wasn’t the entire truth.
She had seen a tickle of a smile at his forge on their first meeting. She wanted to see if she could tempt it out again.
But she had failed. The more she tried, the more he had tightened his cloak of remoteness around himself.
Though Morgan had not missed how his eyes found Ace in the rearview mirror, had not missed he was indulging her antics because his daughter was enjoying them.
Really, Nate Hathoway was the man least likely to ever be seen at a Cheesie Charlie’s franchise, but here he was, tolerating a noise level that was nothing less than astonishing, his eyes unreadable when the menus were delivered by a guy in a somewhat the worse-for-wear chicken suit.
He ate the atrocious food without comment, slipped the waiter-chicken a tip when he came to their table and serenaded them with a song with Ace’s name liberally sprinkled throughout.
“Well, wasn’t that fun?” Morgan asked as they left Cheesie Charlie’s.
“Yes!” Ace crowed. Even she seemed to notice that nothing was penetrating the hard armor around her father. “Daddy,” she demanded, “didn’t you think that was fun?”
“Fun as pounding nails with my forehead,” he muttered.
“That doesn’t sound fun,” Ace pointed out.
“You’re right,” he said, and then sternly warned, “don’t try it at home.”
Morgan sighed as Ace skipped ahead to where they had parked. “How did you allow yourself to get talked into coming? I’m beginning to see you did not volunteer for this excursion.”
He hesitated, and then he nodded at Cecilia. “We always spend Saturday together. It’s our tradition. Since her mom passed. I was willing to forgo it, just this once. She wasn’t.”
“Somewhere under that hard exterior is there a heart of pure gold, Nate Hathoway?”
She finally got the smile, only it wasn’t the one she’d been trying for. Cynical. Something tight around the edges of it. His eyes shielded.
“Don’t kid yourself.”
Instead of scaling his wall, she’d managed to get him to put it up higher! And for some reason it made her mad. If she couldn’t make him laugh, then she might as well torment him.
“If you thought Cheesie Charlie’s was fun, you’re going to love The Snow Cave,” Morgan promised him.
He gave her a dark, lingering look that sent shivers from her ears to her toes.
The Snow Cave proudly proclaimed itself as haute tot.
If he had looked out of place at Cheesie’s, Nate Hathoway now looked acutely out of place in the exclusive girls’ store. He was big and rugged amongst the racks and displays of pint-size frilly clothing in more shades of pink than Morgan was certain the male mind could imagine.
Ignoring his discomfort, at the same time as enjoying it immensely, Morgan sorted through the racks until she had both her and Cecilia’s arms heaped up with selections: blouses and T-shirts, socks, slacks, dresses, skirts.
“Great,” he said when it was obvious they could not carry one more thing. “Are you done? Can we go?”
“She has to try everything on.”
“What?” He looked like a wolf caught in a trap. “What for? Just buy it all so we can leave.”
Not even a little ashamed for enjoying his misery so thoroughly, Morgan leaned close to him and whispered, “This store is very expensive. You should allow her to pick one or two items from here and we’ll get the rest elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere?” He closed his eyes and bit back a groan. “Just buy the damn stuff. I don’t care what it costs. I don’t want to go elsewhere.”
She waited to feel guilty, but given how easily he had resisted her efforts to charm, she didn’t.
Not in the least. This was a show of spunky liberation from needing