irresistible, he moved slowly forward. He stepped over her tree, and she wondered if he knew how momentous his decision was.
If he did, he was allowing himself to be distracted. He surveyed the strings of lights strewn around her living room floor, the boxes of baubles, the unhung socks. For a moment it looked as if he might run from the magnitude of what he had gotten himself into.
But then he crouched and looked at the tree stand, a flying-saucer-type apparatus, that was still attached solidly to the trunk of the tree. It just hadn’t kept the tree solidly attached to the floor.
“Is this what you expected to hold your tree?” he asked incredulously.
It was the kind of question that didn’t really merit an answer. Though it had been the most expensive tree stand at Finnegan’s, a tree nearly crashing down on top of her was ample evidence that the design was somewhat flawed.
“It’s worse than your hammer,” Nate decided, with a solemn shake of his head. Still, he looked pleased that he had found something in such dire need of his immediate attention.
“I bought a new hammer,” she said.
After his last visit, she had decided she wasn’t having her hammer choice keep her from the promised bliss of the single woman.
Though somehow, in this moment, Morgan knew she had missed the point because she felt ridiculously eager to show it to him, secretly, weakly wanted his approval of her choice.
“Really?” But he hardly seemed interested in her new acquisition of a hammer. He had already moved on to other things.
With raw strength that made her shiver, he yanked the stand off the trunk of the tree and scowled at it, looked at it from one way and then another.
“I think I can fix it.” He began to whistle through his teeth, a song that sounded suspiciously like “Angel Lost” though she decided against pointing that out to him, because he was so obviously pleased to have things to look after since Ace was out of his reach for the evening.
Morgan told herself she was duty bound to resist this beautiful gift of a man coming to help her. Duty bound.
So, naturally she didn’t.
“I’ll go make cocoa,” she said, and then, in case that might be interpreted as far too traditional, she let the independent and blissful woman speak up, too. “And I’ll get my new hammer, too.”
“THIS IS YOUR HAMMER?” he asked. Nate tried not to laugh. Good grief. She was an all-or-nothing kind of girl. She had gone from the toy tapping tool that had looked more like an instrument her first graders would use in a percussion band, to this, a 23-ounce Blue Max framing hammer with a curved handle. It looked like a hatchet.
“What’s wrong with it?” Morgan asked.
“Nothing.”
“It was very expensive.”
“I’m sure it was. I’ll bet that tree stand was, too.”
“Don’t take that ‘there’s a sucker born every minute’ tone with me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered her schoolmarm tone of voice.
But she wasn’t fooled. Not even a little bit. “You think my new hammer is funny. I can tell.”
It probably wasn’t a good thing that she was getting so good at reading him.
“No, no, it’s not funny.” Despite saying that a snort of laughter escaped him. And then another. Then he couldn’t resist. “When are you building a house?”
“A house?” she asked, flabbergasted.
And he dissolved into laughter. He had not laughed, it seemed, for a very long time. Oh, little chuckles had been taking him by surprise here and there. But it had not been like this. A from the belly, caught in the moment, delight-filled roar of genuine laughter.
It felt good to laugh again. Maybe too good. It almost made him forget he had other worries tonight, like Ace and her new little pal, who could at this moment be gooping on makeup, or eating popcorn in front of an unblocked Playboy channel.
“A big hammer is called a framing hammer. It’s used for framing a house.”
“I’m sure it can be used for other things.”
“Yeah. If you can lift it. And swing it. Have you seen house framers? They have wrists nearly as big as your thighs.”
Shoot. Was she going to guess he’d been looking at her thighs? Maybe not, because she suddenly seemed distracted by his wrists. She licked her lips. He decided it might be best to avoid mentioning body parts from now on.
Or looking at them. For a prim little schoolteacher, she had lips that practically begged to be kissed, full and plump.
He wasn’t going to be held responsible for what happened next if she licked them again.
“You don’t buy a hammer you can barely heft,” he said, a little more sharply than he intended. His sharpness had nothing to do with her hammer choice, not that she ever had to know.
She reacted to the tone, which was so much better than lip-licking. Rather than looking educated, she looked annoyed. Annoyance was good!
“I like that hammer,” she said stubbornly.
“Really?” he challenged her. “What do you like about it?”
She hesitated. She looked at the hammer. She looked at him. She looked at her toes. And the fallen Christmas tree. It was written all over her that she wanted to lie, and that she was incapable of it.
“The color,” she finally admitted, giving him a look that dared him to laugh. It was a look designed to intimidate six-year-old boys and it was effective, too.
Or would have been effective if she hadn’t started laughing first. He liked it that she could laugh at herself, and then they were both laughing. Laughing with her, for the second time in just a few minutes, was a worse temptation than sneaking peeks at how those prisonissue sweatpants hugged her thighs.
Because it invited him back toward the Light. Nate was aware he was walking way too close to the fire.
He reined himself in. “I’ll just put up the coat hangers now,” he said. To himself he added that he would put up the coat hangers—that was what he had come here to do—and go. Immediately.
“Show me how to do it,” she said, setting down the cocoa she had brought in. “Next time I need something done, you might not be here.”
Not might not, he corrected her silently. Won’t. A week ago, he would have said it out loud…Why not now? Because, despite his vow to stay away, he kept coming back to her, magnet to steel.
Because there was something about her that was funny and sweet and even a hard man such as himself could not
