“Oh, great. Thanks a lot, Miss McGuire! When I really want an answer, you don’t have one. What good is a know-it-all without an answer?”
Morgan was amazingly unoffended. In fact, she felt she could see this man as clearly as she had ever seen him. She suddenly saw he was restless. And irritable. He had needed to do something tonight to offset this loss of control.
“Is this the first night you’ve been apart since the accident that took her mom?” she asked softly.
He stared at her. For a moment he looked as though he would turn and walk away rather than reveal something so achingly vulnerable about himself.
But then instead of walking away, he nodded, once, curtly.
And she stepped back over the fallen tree, motioning for him to follow her, inviting him in.
Morgan knew it was crazy to be this foolishly happy that he had picked her to come to, crazier yet that she was unable to resist his need.
But how could anyone, even someone totally emancipated, be hard-hearted enough to send a man back into the night who had come shouldering the weight of terrible burdens? Not that he necessarily knew how heavy his burdens were.
He hesitated, like an animal who paused, sensing danger. And what would be more dangerous to him than someone seeing past that hard exterior to his heart?
And then, like that same animal catching the scent of something 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.
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