and pure need to protect his daughter. It felt as if that love Nate Hathoway had for his daughter could melt Morgan as surely as that fire blazing in the background melted iron.
“Mr. Hathoway, you just need to take a few small steps at home to help her.”
“Since you are unable to help her at school?”
The sensation of melting disappeared! So did the tongue-stuck-to-the-roof-of-her-mouth feeling. She was not going to be attacked!
“That’s unfair!” She was pleased with how calm she sounded, so she continued. “I have twenty-two children in my class. I can’t be with every single one of them every single second, monitoring what they are saying among themselves, or to Cecilia.”
“What are they saying?”
There were old incidents she could bring up: the fun they had made of Cecilia’s hair before he had cut it, how someone had cruelly noticed how attached she was to a certain dress. Though it was always clean it was faded from her wearing it again and again. With boys’ hiking boots, instead of shoes. They were situations that had caused teasing. Cecilia was no doormat. She came out fighting, and looking at the man before her, Morgan was pretty sure where she’d learned that!
Still, Morgan had prided herself on creatively finding a remedy for each situation. Only it was becoming disheartening how quickly it was replaced with a new situation.
Morgan had to get to the heart of the problem.
“Just for an example, this morning Cecilia arrived with a very, er, odd, hairstyle. I’m afraid it left her open to some teasing even before she revealed her secret holding ingredient.”
“She told me it was hair gel.”
“It was gel, but not hair gel.”
He looked askance at her.
“She didn’t know gel wasn’t gel. She used gel toothpaste.”
He said a word people generally avoided using in front of the first-grade teacher. And then he ran a hand through the thick darkness of his own hair. Her eyes followed that motion helplessly.
“Didn’t you say anything to her about her hair before she left for school?” she managed to choke out.
“Yeah,” he said ruefully, the faintest chink appearing in that armor. “I told her it looked sharp.”
It had looked sharp. Literally. But if she planned to be taken seriously, Morgan knew now was not the time to smile.
“Mr. Hathoway, you cannot send your daughter to school with a shark fin on top of her head and expect she will not be teased!”
“How do I know what’s fashionable in the six-year-old set?” he asked, and a second chink appeared in the armor. A truly bewildered look slipped by the remoteness in his dark eyes. “To be honest, her hair this morning seemed like an improvement on the raised-by-wolves look she was sporting before she finally let me talk her into cutting her hair.”
Remembered hair battles flashed through his eyes, and Morgan found her gaze on those hands. It was too easy to imagine him trying to gentle his strength to deal with his daughter’s unruly hair.
But the last thing Morgan needed to do was couple a feeling of tenderness with the animal pull of his male magnetism!
“It was not an improvement,” she said firmly, snippily, trying desperately to stay on track. “The children were merciless, even after I made it clear I wanted no comments made. The recess monitor told me Cecilia got called Captain Colgate, Toothpaste Princess and Miss Froggy Fluoride.”
“I’ll bet the froggy one was Bradley Campbell’s boy,” he said darkly. “Ace told me he’s called her Miss Froggy before, because of her voice.”
“Her voice is adorable. She’ll outgrow that little croakiness,” Morgan said firmly. “I’ve already spoken to Freddy about teasing her about it.”
Nate glowered, unconvinced.
Morgan pressed on. “To make matters worse, today at lunch break someone noticed her overalls. They said she had stolen them, that they belonged to an older sister and they were missing.”
“Somebody accused Ace of stealing?”
Morgan thought he was going to have problems with the joint in his jaw if he didn’t find a different way to deal with tension.
“Cecilia said she had taken the overalls from the lost-and-found box.”
“But why?” he asked, genuinely baffled.
“When’s the last time you bought her clothes?” Morgan was aware of something gentling in her voice. “Mr. Hathoway, I sent you a note suggesting a shopping trip might be in order.”
“I don’t read your notes.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t need a little fresh-out-of-college snip like you telling me how to raise my daughter. Oh, and I also don’t do shopping.”
“Obviously! And your daughter has suffered as a consequence!”
He glared at her. A lesser woman might have just touched her forelock and bowed out the door.
But blessed—or cursed—with the newfound strength of a woman who was working her way through Bliss and making careful notations in the margins, and who had purchased a sofa in a rather adventurous shade of purple, she plunged on.
“Cecilia told me that’s why she took the overalls from the lost-and-found box…to spare you a shopping trip. She doesn’t have anything that fits properly. She wears the same favorites over and over. She wears hiking boots with skirts, Mr. Hathoway! Haven’t you noticed that?”
He said that word again, and something besides hardness flickered in those eyes again. It was worse than the hardness. Pain so deep it was like a bottomless pool.
“I guess I didn’t notice,” he said, the warrior stance shifting ever so slightly, something defeated in his voice. “Ace could have said something.”
“She seems to think if she asks nothing of you, she’s protecting you in some way.”
The smallest hint of a smile tickled across lips that had the potential to be so sexy they could make a woman’s heart stop.
“She is protecting me in some way. Grocery shopping is tough enough. I have to go out of town for groceries to avoid recipe exchanges with well-meaning neighbors.”
Whom, Morgan was willing to guess, were mostly female. And available. She could easily imagine him being swarmed at a market in a small town where everyone would know his history. Wife killed, nearly two years ago, Christmas Eve car accident. Widower. Single dad.
“The girl’s department is impossible,” he went on grimly. “A sea of pink. Women everywhere. Frills.” He said that word again, softly, with pained remembrance shadowing his eyes. He shook his head. “I don’t do shopping,” he said again, firmly, resolutely.
“I’d
