Rescued by his Christmas Angel by Cara Colter Page B

where he spent Christmas since he had married Cindy and his mother still cried when it wasn’t her year to have him and Ace.
    The idea of your own family not wanting you was foreign to him. He felt so shocked and saddened by it, he had to fight back an urge to scoop her up and take her on his lap and rock her, like the lonely child he heard in her voice.
    â€œIt’s actually been good,” she rushed on bravely. “I’m doing all these things for the first time by myself. Before my mom decided to be a world traveler, she always did Christmas. And she was elaborate about it. Theme trees.New recipes for stuffing. Winning the block decorating party. Christmas was always completely done for me. In fact, God forbid you should touch anything. Then it might not look perfect. So, I don’t know how to do anything, but I’m happy to learn. You don’t want to go through life not knowing how to do things like that. For yourself.”
    She was not a very good liar. She was not happy to learn. But he went along with her.
    â€œNo,” he said soothingly, without an ounce of conviction, “you don’t.”
    â€œOf course, I probably won’t cook a turkey,” she said.
    â€œFor myself. That would be silly.”
    â€œYou aren’t going to be alone on Christmas.” He wasn’t quite sure why he said it like that. As if he knew she wasn’t going to be alone at Christmas. When he didn’t. At all.
    She was silent. Too silent.
    He shot her a look. Her face was scrunched up, and not in the cute way it had been when the chocolate had gone cold.
    â€œAre you going to cry?” he asked with soft desperation.
    â€œI certainly hope not.”
    â€œMe, too.”
    He fought again that impulse, to pick her up and lift her onto his lap, to pull her head against his shoulder and hold her tight.
    Instead, and it was bad enough, he reached out and took her hand in his, and held it. It was a small gesture. Tiny against the magnitude of her pain.
    Nothing, really.
    And yet something huge at the same time. She clung to his hand as if he had tossed her a life preserver.
    That should have been enough to make him let go. But it wasn’t. He was leaving his hand there as long as she needed to hold it.
    Nate understood instantly that something had shifted in him. He had come out of the cave of his pain just enough to reach out to someone else.
    A shaft of light pierced the darkness he had lived in.
    And he saw the truth: all evening the dark place had called him to come back. And he almost had obeyed that call.
    There was something comforting and familiar about that place of pain where he had been. Save for Ace, it made few demands on him. He did not have to feel anything, he did not have to truly engage with life. It certainly did not ask him to grow or to give.
    But now, now that that shaft of light had pierced him, he was not sure he could go back to living in darkness. He was not sure at all.
    Morgan took a deep shuddering breath.
    â€œLet’s put up the lights on the tree,” he suggested. If there was one thing personal pain had taught him, it was that sitting around contemplating it was no way to make it go away. Action was the remedy.
    â€œOkay,” she said, her voice wobbly with the tears she had not shed. She let go of his hand abruptly and leaped to her feet. “I guess that means I have to find the star.”
    Nate noted that everything she owned was brand-new, and there was a sadness in that in itself.
    His childhood might have been poor, but both sidesof his family had given him Christmas relics that went on his tree every year. He was pretty sure his lights, the color cracked off them in spots, predated his birth by several years. He had antique ornaments that his grandmother had carried across the ocean with her, acorn ornaments that Cindy had made when she was Ace’s age.
    Morgan’s lack of anything old in her Christmas decoration boxes made him