by A. C. Arthur
Yes, it was the same, he thought. The feeling that he’d always had when he was there. Warmth spread throughout his chest without his permission. Sounds of little boys rolling toy trucks up and down that porch while little girls took turns on the tire swing that used to hang from that huge oak tree to his left echoed in his mind. Food would be cooking by now because it was close to dinnertime. On the grill in the backyard, because that’s where Dad liked to stand and show the cameras how he prepared a BBQ supper for his family. That was only one of the falsehoods that Theodor Taylor perpetuated.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Morgan said as she came up to stand beside him. “I’ve got a key if you don’t have one. Millie gave it to me yesterday when I met with her.”
It took a moment for Gray to remind himself of the present. His quick look into the past left a bitter taste in his mouth.
“Does the head of your chamber of commerce always give citizens keys to properties that don’t belong to them?” he asked and bristled at the chill in his tone.
Morgan pursed her lips and replied, “Millie’s husband, Fred, owns the property management company that’s been keeping this place from falling down over the years. When I told her I planned to show you around town, she was the one who suggested I start here. Fred agreed and offered me the key.”
Disappointed in the fact that he seemed to be taking his bad mood out on her, Gray only nodded at first. He looked up to the house again—even in the growing darkness he could see the loose shingles on the roof.
“I don’t have a key, so I suppose their foresight works out,” he said.
“I suppose it does” was Morgan’s response as she moved past him and started up the steps.
She wore jeans tonight, dark ones that fit quite nicely over the curve of her backside, and a white puffy coat that made her look like a snowball at the top. Gray followed behind her and only hesitated slightly before walking through one of the two red doors. He’d never liked that stark and bold color against the pale blue of the house, but ignored it now as he stepped inside, the old wood floors squeaking beneath his weight.
“They keep the power on,” Morgan said as she switched on the lights. “Fred said they’d been in contact with someone from your father’s legal team last year. They were talking about converting the house into a museum.”
Gray was busy looking around. On either side there were archways leading into separate rooms. The room to the right served as their playroom, while the space on the left was the formal living room. Large area rugs had covered the majority of the wood floors—which at that time still gleamed from his mother’s care.
“What? A museum? Are you serious?” he asked as her words finally registered.
She unzipped her coat while skirting around him to close the door that he’d left open behind them.
“Yes,” she said. “Apparently, your father wanted to commemorate all that he and your mother had gone through to get pregnant. There was supposed to be a new wing at the hospital dedicated to the study of obstetrics, employing doctors who specialized in fertility options and multiple births.”
“My brother Gage specializes in that area,” Gray said, still frowning as he tried to understand exactly what she was telling him.
Morgan began walking ahead of him. She moved farther through the foyer, passing the stairs that were still lined in the forest green carpet. As children they’d always wanted to slide down the railings, but since the steps turned sharply to the left, it had been out of the question.
“In addition to the new wing at the hospital, your father’s plan was to have this house show all the milestones you and your siblings made while you were here. Apparently, there’d been a deal in the works with another television network, to do a sort of where-are-they-now segment.”
“Why didn’t I know about this?” Gray asked as they made their way toward the back of the house. “How can they do something like this, using our name and likeness, without consulting any of us?”
They were in the dining room now and Gray had moved to stand near the fireplace. Dark oak columns stretched to the ceiling, guarding the old brick that surrounded the actual fire pit. The mantel was still there, even though it looked as if it had seen better days. Above hung a huge mirror, now marred with dust.
“I would think your father or someone from the network would have reached out to you and your siblings at some point,” Morgan said, reminding him that he wasn’t on this tour alone.
“Before his death, I hadn’t spoken to my father since my high school graduation,” Gray confessed.
He lifted a hand to run his fingers lightly along the dusty mantel. His thoughts traveled back to that day. They’d all gone to the same school, a public school because his mother hadn’t wanted them to feel separated from the other children in town. Olivia never wanted her children to feel segregated or ostracized as she’d suspected they’d begun to feel while on the television show. The last time they’d seen their father before then was at their tenth birthday party, when Theodor also had business in the area. He’d dropped by their house just in time to sing “Happy Birthday” and drop off his gifts. Then he was gone. At the graduation he’d been there for the entire ceremony, telling each one of them how proud he was at the end, and then leaving again. That time he’d had a woman with him. Gray believed that was the moment his mother had truly become ill, even though she would live another four years before dying from complications of pneumonia.
“He didn’t come around much after he left us,” he continued.
“Why did he leave?”
Her voice was quiet, but close, as if she was standing right behind him. Gray didn’t turn around to see, he simply took a deep breath before speaking words he’d never spoken before in his life.
“My father had an affair,” he said solemnly. “It was with one of the production assistants on the show. My mother didn’t find out, the way most clichéd cheating husbands meet their fate. No, my mother was oblivious. My sister Gemma used to say she was in love with her husband and her children, as if that was an excuse.”
He paused, hearing the edge to his tone. “I don’t blame her. In fact, I admire her for accepting and moving on the way she did. My father wanted to build a new life with this woman who had made her name from filming him and his family. So one night he told my mother he was leaving. The next morning, before my mother could even figure out what to do or say, he was gone. News spread like wildfire and many of the townspeople turned on my mom, blaming her for forcing the pregnancy and then having so many babies.
“It was a terrible time, that week following my dad’s departure. My mother cried a lot. We stayed in the house with all the doors locked, the shades pulled down tight on the windows, as if we were being held hostage. There were lots of phone calls and arguments with the network executives. My mother didn’t want to continue with the show. She hadn’t wanted to do it after the first year anyway. The original plan had been to make enough money to start college funds for her children. But the demands of being in front of a camera nonstop and the subsequent promotion of the show were more than she wanted for herself or us. So she wanted out of the contract. If my father could get out of the marriage, then she felt like she could walk away from everything else. And she did.”
“How old were you then?”
“Seven.”
But Gray remembered feeling like he was a grown man with the amount of information he’d retained in that week alone. He’d heard the one-sided arguments as his mother spoke on the phone and stood outside the door of the sunroom while she’d talked to her grandfather. “She always sounded so strong when she talked of the plans for our new life. But I knew she cried at night. I heard her. We all did.”
“That’s so sad,” Morgan whispered.
Gray turned then and saw that she was, in fact, standing right behind him. She hadn’t turned on
any lights in the room, but the old curtains were open at the windows and the lampposts right outside provided a hazy glow of illumination. She looked ethereal as she stood there, her gaze trained on his. Her hands were clasped in front of her and Gray knew that she was feeling the same disappointment he’d experienced as a young child.
“What makes you sad, Morgan?” Gray asked, even though he wasn’t totally sure why.
Whenever he looked at her that happened. He found himself wanting to know more about her, needing to touch her, or to taste her once more. There was this tugging between him and her that had been there since that very first night and he was damned if he could explain it.
She licked her lips quickly and shook her head. “I try not to think of sad things,” she replied.
“But it’s inevitable, isn’t it? Life happens and more often than not it brings sadness. I want to know what hurts you, so that I can never do those things.”
Those words could not have sounded any more foreign to Gray than if he’d spoken them in another language. But he couldn’t take them back now, nor did he want to.
“I—” she began and then paused. Her hands unclasped, arms coming up to cross over her chest. “I was sad when my parents moved away to Australia.” She took a deep breath and let it out quickly. “I know it was a good opportunity for my father, and my mother, too—she’d never been anywhere but Temptation. But I wanted them to stay here with me. I was only in the tenth grade when they left me and Wendy with my grandmother. It hurt.”
“But you got over it,” Gray concluded for her. “Then you fell in love. Was that a feeling that made you happy? Did it make you forget the pain you’d felt when your parents left?”
He wanted—no, needed—to hear her answers to those questions. Maybe it was because he’d been going through his entire life trying to figure out if there was an ever after to the pain he’d felt and witnessed. His mother’s heartbreak had been real and had lasted until she’d taken her last breath. One man had done that to her and Gray swore he’d never forgive his father for it.
“James was like a breath of fresh air,” she said and Gray noted the light that entered her eyes.
“He was everything that every guy I’d ever met in Temptation was not. Worldly and ambitious and at the same time a gentleman. I didn’t think about him romantically at first because I was just so amazed at the things he knew and the places he’d been. But then slowly that changed and just when I thought I couldn’t love any one person any more, I had the twins.”
She shook her head and looked out the window, then back to Gray. “There are no words to describe how I felt after giving birth. The only word to accurately depict how I felt with two-year-old babies, and the announcement that my husband was dead, would be devastated. That pain was just all consuming.”
Just like Gray’s mother had experienced when his father left. He gritted his teeth and turned away from her again. Placing his hands on the mantel, he dropped his head and tried to let those thoughts go. He was too old for this. All of the things that had happened to hurt him in the past were over and done with. He couldn’t change them even if he’d tried. This was the present, he continued to tell himself. This was the house that needed to be sold so that he and his siblings could get on with their lives.
There was no other choice—no matter what Morgan did or said, Gray knew what he had to do.
Chapter 6
“The first Christmas after James’s death, Wendy and I drove to the outlet mall. There was a Santa village there and Wendy thought the twins were old enough to see Santa in person for the first time and not be afraid. So we walked through the small village and I remember there were trellises covered with artificial snow-tipped garland. There were four or five of them that stretched the length of the walkway until they reached Santa’s chair and the elves’ station. At the center of each of the trellises was a bundle of mistletoe. Wendy had been the one to remind me of something our grandmother had always insisted we do during the holiday season. So I wished upon the mistletoe. Just one wish under each bunch that I repeated every time I stood beneath it. Then the babies saw Santa and they laughed happily, taking the most adorable picture ever. It was the most perfect day,” Morgan said before sighing.
“Santa doesn’t always bring you what you want,” Gray said quietly.
Morgan nodded, trying to keep her fingers from fidgeting, they wanted to reach up and touch him so badly. He’d sounded so depleted when he talked of his family and what had happened to them. Since the moment she’d met him Morgan had been convinced he was an arrogant, narrow-minded rich guy, but as she got to know about his past, she’d seen there was more to him. Deep inside there was an agony that he struggled with, a past that he was both embarrassed and hurt by. She could relate to the pain, but only in the basic sense of loss. No way could she imagine what it was like for a seven-year-old to watch his family fall apart and to witness his mother’s heart breaking until she died. It was one of the saddest stories she’d ever heard, which probably made her all kinds of naive and overly sensitive, but she didn’t care at the moment.
“That’s mostly true,” she replied. “But that’s when you grow up and learn that what you want is not always what’s best for you. I wished that I could get over James and move on with my life, that I could not hurt anymore, not for another minute. It didn’t happen. But I learned to live with it.”
“Really?” he asked.
He then moved quicker than she’d anticipated and before she could stop him, he’d wrapped his arms around her waist and pushed her back against the wall. She gasped. The motion was so fast and so shocking. Not because his touch had sent instant heat soaring throughout her body and the proximity of his face to hers made her want more than she ever had in her life. At least, she was really trying to convince herself that wasn’t the reason.
“What if I said I want you?” he asked, his breath fanning warmly over her face.
“For—for Christmas?” she asked and felt like a colossal idiot.
He didn’t smile, but shook his head, his hands slipping under her coat to rub along her back. “No. Right now. I want you, Morgan.”
He moved again and Morgan saw his arm lifting. He was going to touch her. No, wait, he was already touching her. She should move. She should put lots of distance between them to keep whatever was about to happen from happening. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. His fingers grazed her jaw, came over her chin, then up to tap her bottom lip.
“You can’t want me,” she said, her body beginning to tremble even though it was the last thing she wanted to do.
“I can and I do,” he told her, his other hand falling softly to her hip. “I want to take you right here against this wall. What does wishing on mistletoe tell you about that?”
She wanted to moan, but that wasn’t an answer. Dammit, she couldn’t think of any words and she certainly wasn’t thinking about mistletoe at a time like this. Morgan tried to breathe in deeply and exhale slowly—a known relaxation technique that usually worked...but not this time. His scent permeated every pore of her body and she actually felt dizzy with arousal.
“Gray,” she whispered and the tip of his finger touched her tongue.
His other hand went lower, gripping the curve of her bottom and pulling her up close to his arousal. He was thick and hard and she licked his finger, because what else was she supposed to do?
“Don’t,” he said. “Please, just don’t deny this. There are so many things going on, I just need for this to be real. Whatever this is between us needs to be real and not some wish.”
If a huge sprig of mistletoe was dangling over their heads right at this moment, Morgan knew exactly what she’d wish for. Now, whether or not that wish would come true...she didn’t have another second to contemplate.
Gray’s lips took the place of his finger as he kissed her deeply. Her hands
went to his shoulders, grabbing the leather of his jacket in a tight grip. He pressed closer as his tongue delved deeper into her mouth. The kiss was a scorcher, burning her from the tip of her tongue to the heels of her feet. She came up on tiptoes to meet him, and his hand continued to knead her bottom, until she finally lifted her leg and he wrapped it around his waist. Morgan finally gave in to the moan as he devoured her mouth and she accepted every delicious stroke of his tongue. The room was spinning, a kaleidoscope of lights pouring into the dark space. Heat surrounded them even though the furnace in the house was not lit.
Gray thrust his hips into her and Morgan trembled in his arms. The feel of his arousal pressed against her center had her quaking with need, even though the connection was hampered by their clothes.
“Now,” he whispered. “I need you now.”
Her body screamed yes. Her nipples were so hard pressing against his chest it was almost painful. How long had it been? Morgan had actually forgotten. The need was so great, her hunger so potent it almost choked her. Yes. Just say it, she told herself. Say it and let go.
“Stop,” she whispered. “Please stop.”
He did, immediately.
Morgan pulled away from him, breathing heavily as she made her way out of the dining room and back through the house the way they’d come. She was running, she knew, but didn’t give a damn. He’d scared her. The need that was so great inside her for him was terrifying. It had surpassed anything Morgan had ever felt before, for anyone. Even James.
Digging into her jacket pocket, she fumbled for her keys as she ran down the front steps of the house and over the lawn until she reached the spot where she’d parked her car. Finally unlocking the door, without looking back or caring where Gray was, she jumped inside and put the key in the ignition. Turning it, she called herself every type of idiot in the book, but prayed just to get home. She would get her kids, put them to bed and then find herself a glass...no, a bottle of wine to drink. Completely. It was going to be that kind of night, she thought as she turned the key in the ignition again, and waited.
