by A. C. Arthur
He shook his head. “If you hadn’t insisted I look at those buildings, I wouldn’t have. Then I would have never found out about what my father had planned all these years. I wouldn’t have learned more about a man I thought I never wanted to know.”
Morgan took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t know what’s going on anymore,” she admitted. “Things have just been going so fast. One minute I’m going along with life as usual and the next you’re here and I’m showing you buildings like I’m some real estate agent and you’re making snowmen with my kids.”
He’d come to stand close to her then. “You forgot the part about the great sex,” he said with that grin that never failed to warm her.
She shook her head. “I don’t think either one of us can forget that.”
“Not on your life,” he said, reaching out to touch a finger to her chin. “It’s good, Morgan. All of this feels right. I didn’t expect it, either. It’s not something I planned or would have even believed if somebody had told me this was where I’d be one year ago.”
“No,” Morgan told him with a tilt of her head. “You thought you’d be in Miami, maybe going to a corporate holiday party, or perhaps you would have taken a trip for the holidays. You’d lie on some beach all Christmas Eve and then spend a very quiet Christmas with room service.” The thought sounded lonely to her, but it was exactly how she pictured Gray’s holiday celebrations.
He shrugged. “Sometimes I think you know me better than I know myself.”
She didn’t know what to say to that.
“But this is so much better, Morgan. This is more of what my mother would have wanted for me, for all of her children. I’m a little tired after helping Fred, Lenny and John with the final setup for tonight. Discovering that half the chairs in the hall were broken and having to transport ones from the hospital in the Porsche was a little grueling. But I loved every second of it,” he told her.
“Yeah, Nana Lou was pissed that Harry didn’t show up like he’d promised,” she said and then frowned.
“Don’t do that,” he told her with a shake of his head. “That’s not your fault. Harry Reed is a grown man. Grown men get rejected by women every day. It’s been happening since the beginning of time. There’s no excuse to act like a jealous ass.”
Morgan knew that but it didn’t mean she couldn’t feel bad about how things had turned out. “I’m too tired to argue,” she said with a little chuckle.
Jack and Lily came running out at that moment.
“Can we open one gift tonight?” Jack asked.
“Yes, Mama, can we?” Lily begged.
Morgan shook her head. “Now, you know we open gifts on Christmas morning after Santa comes.”
“That’s the old way, though,” Lily continued. “Can’t we do something new?”
“Yeah, like we built a snowman and named him George. We didn’t do that last year. So this should be the year of new stuff,” Jack added.
“That’s right, we should. Right, Mr. Gray?” Lily asked.
Then her daughter leaned over to whisper—which was very loud because at five years old, Lily had not perfected her inside voice. “We asked the right way, didn’t we? That’s what you told us to say, right?”
Morgan looked at Gray, who instantly looked away from Lily and then grinned. “You did it perfectly. Both of you should have had bigger parts in the play, instead of just being the children playing in the street.”
“So this was an audition for them to be in next year’s play?” Morgan asked skeptically.
Gray shook his head and moved over to the tree. He reached down and retrieved a slim box.
“No. I just had this idea that since I was doing something new this year, that maybe we all should,” he said before reaching out to hand her the box. “Merry Christmas, Morgan.”
She didn’t take the box. In fact, Morgan had slipped her arms behind her back, where her hands were now clenched together.
“Open it, Mama,” Jack told her. “Open it so we can see what he got for you!”
Her son was bouncing from one foot to the other, always the impatient one, she thought as she tried to ignore the rapid beating of her heart. When Morgan realized that Gray intended to stay for Christmas she’d known she had to get him a gift, from the kids, of course. They’d picked out socks and a Temptation T-shirt so that he’d remember them when he returned to Miami. It was a simple gift, one that she would have purchased for any friend. Only there hadn’t been a male friend in Morgan’s life to buy gifts for in a very long time.
“Take it, Mama. It’s rude to give a gift back,” Lily said, interrupting her thoughts.
Morgan had told her daughter this same thing when Bert Valley had given Lily a live frog for her birthday last year.
“Take it, Morgan,” Gray said. “I want you to have this.”
With hands that betrayed her, as they shook and showed how nervous she was feeling, Morgan took the box. She saw her kids watching her expectantly, so she shook it and they laughed, as she knew they would.
“You can’t guess what it is like that. You gotta open it,” Jack told her with another giggle.
“Well, maybe I should sit down first,” Morgan said, trying to buy time and to get off her feet because her knees felt wobbly.
“Come on,” Gray said as he helped her over to the couch.
“You’re loving this, aren’t you?” she said, looking up at him, unable to keep her own grin at bay.
“It’s great,” he told her. “Just like you.”
Her stomach did another flip-flop and Morgan dropped onto the couch. She hurriedly opened the box because having three sets of eyes on her in anticipation was more pressure than worrying about whether or not she should be taking gifts from Gray. That worry was magnified when she finally lifted the top of the box to see the sparkle of blue sapphires glinting in the lights from the Christmas tree.
“Gray,” she whispered. “This is way too much.”
“It was in the envelope,” he told her. “The one my father left with my name on it. He’d planned to give it to my mother that year for their anniversary. The year he left.”
Morgan shook her head and pushed the box back toward him. “I can’t take this. It belongs to you and your family. I can’t.”
“You can because I’m giving it to you,” he told her, reaching down to take the necklace out of the box.
“It’s so pretty,” Lily exclaimed. “Shiny and pretty and your favorite color is blue, Mama.”
“You should have gotten her a deck of cards,” Jack said with an unimpressed look on his face. “She likes to play solitaire more than she wears fancy stuff.”
Jack was right—Morgan never went anywhere that she could wear something like this. She was about to use that as her excuse for giving it back to Gray when her house phone rang. Saved by the bell, she thought as she hurriedly moved away from Gray, who had been waiting to put the necklace on her.
“Hello?” she answered. “What? When? How?” she asked, her heart thumping wildly. “...Right...Fine. Get here fast!”
“What is it?” Gray asked the moment she turned around.
“That was Wendy,” she said, still clutching the phone. “The community center is on fire.”
Chapter 13
It was gone.
As Gray stepped out of his car and raced across the street to follow Morgan, he knew the moment they were stopped by police officers. Morgan gasped, covering her mouth with her hands, her head shaking as tears filled her eyes. Inside Gray raged, but he put a steady arm around Morgan and held her close.
The sight was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. Black smoke billowing up into the night sky, bright and angry flames licking over what was left of the building’s structure, destroying everything in their wake.
“It�
�s too hot to put out right now, Mr. Taylor,” a man dressed in a fireman’s uniform said as he came to stand beside Gray.
“Call me Gray,” he said to the man, who nodded.
“I’m Chief Alderson. But call me Dave.”
“I want to know what caused this fire as soon as you know, Dave,” Gray told him.
Dave nodded once more, his solemn gaze focused on the fire, just as Gray’s remained.
“It’s damn hot in there. I pulled my men out after about ten minutes. We couldn’t get past the first thirty feet inside. Offhand, I’d say some sort of accelerant,” Dave reported.
The man had said the last sentence in a hushed tone and he’d leaned in a little closer to Gray as he spoke. Morgan was on Gray’s other side and with the noise of the fire and the people still coming onto the scene, Gray hoped she hadn’t heard what Dave had said. Gray, however, clenched his teeth in anger.
“Oh, my lord, it’s burning,” Millie said as she came running over to them. “What could have happened?”
Morgan had shifted so that she now faced Millie and Fred, who were standing close.
“You turned off everything when you left, didn’t you?” Millie instantly questioned Morgan.
“Of course I did,” Morgan replied with much irritation, rightfully so.
Gray looked at Millie with only partial disbelief. He’d been around town for weeks and in that time he’d watched Millie talk friendly with some townspeople and in the next instant cut them close with her sharp tongue. She was a force to be reckoned with, someone that most citizens of the town did their best to steer clear of. Gray had no intention of being like the majority.
“We checked everything before we left, Millie. Even that faulty fuse box in the basement. Fred, you’re paid a monthly fee to manage this property. When was the last time you had the electrical wiring checked?” Gray asked.
“Now look here, you can’t come here and start accusing my husband. We take our jobs and life in this town seriously, Gray,” Millie insisted.
Fred was nodding beside his wife. “I got some reports that there was a problem. Harry told me he’d been over to fix it a couple of times so I thought it was fine.”
As if hearing his name had conjured his presence, Harry walked up. Gray wasn’t thrilled to see the guy, but he definitely was not prepared to see Kym walking right beside him. Gray hadn’t seen her in days and had presumed she’d left town like he’d told her to do.
“I did check out the fuse box and like I told you last month, it was fine,” Harry said, his angry glare toward Gray evident.
“The power went out again a month ago,” Morgan said, more to Gray than to anyone else.
He nodded. “I remember. The first night I was in town I had to go down and flip the fuse for the power to switch back on,” Gray said.
“I can’t fix a problem I didn’t know about,” Harry insisted. “Maybe if you’d called me instead of letting this suit-and-tie guy try to meddle in things that weren’t his business, this could have been prevented.”
“Hold on, everyone,” Dave interjected. “I haven’t given a cause for this fire yet. So let’s put a cap on all this blame you’re tossing around. Now, I’m gonna have to ask that you all go home, or get across the street because the building’s frame is gonna start breaking off any minute now.”
Morgan looked over to the building, shaking her head once more. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “After all the worrying and contemplating what you were going to do with this building and now it’s just gone.”
“When one building goes, you build another,” Kym quipped. “I know of two developers who would love this spot. You know them, too, don’t you, Millie?”
At Kym’s words both Gray and Morgan looked to Millie to see what her response would be.
“You ten-cent whore!” Millie spat. “I warned you not to come to my town with your drama. Yet you’re still here and now you have the nerve to push this in my direction.”
Within the next second, Millie was lunging for Kym. Fred and Gray both held her back while Kym stood with a sickening smirk on her face.
“Just tell them that you’ve been in touch with the developers trying to see how much money the town could make off the strip mall they want to build. Tell them how you were against the idea at first, but when one of the developers suggested that maybe Fred would be interested in managing the rental and maintenance of the outlet mall they proposed, your eyes turned from shifty brown to greedy green.”
Millie tried to go after her again and this time, Morgan stepped closer to Kym.
“Why don’t you just leave town. You don’t like it here and you obviously don’t like the people. So it would make all the sense in the world for you to go back where you came from,” Morgan told her.
“It would make all the sense in the world for you to grow a brain,” Kym stated.
Harry stood right beside her, looking as if he agreed with every ridiculous word that Kym said. For the first time in his life Gray wanted to physically harm someone.
“Let’s go,” he said, touching a hand to Morgan’s arm.
When she readily moved to stand beside him Gray could almost hear his mother’s words echoing in his mind. Jealousy and hatred are two emotions you can neither predict nor cure. Let the ones who suffer with it be, live your life in spite of.
With a shake of his head and a last look at both of them, Gray walked Morgan to his car and helped her inside.
* * *
Morgan held on to Wendy as she cried when they returned to Morgan’s house.
“It’s going to be all right,” Wendy told her. “Gray’s going to rebuild, aren’t you?”
He hadn’t given it a second thought. “Definitely. We were planning to add an additional building onto the back side anyway. This way we’ll do a completely new design. I know a wonderful and innovative architect that I can call as soon as the holiday is over. It’s going to be bigger and better, without any doubt.”
“See, it’s all going to work out,” Wendy said, pulling away from Morgan and giving Gray a grateful look. “As for that tramp and Harry’s punk ass, they’re going to get what’s coming to them. You know Granny wholeheartedly believes in karma.”
Morgan chuckled then as she wiped her eyes and Gray wanted nothing more than to hold her in his arms and tell her just what her sister had just told her. Everything was going to work out. He was going to make sure that it did.
When Wendy was gone, Morgan turned to Gray and said, “You know Granny also believes wholeheartedly in voodoo hexes and curses. I wouldn’t put it past her to be in her house now mixing up some concoction to make sure Harry and Kym got just what they deserved for being spiteful.”
“I’m not going to say that’s a bad idea,” Gray joked.
Morgan shook her head. Her stance was still tense, but a little smile came through. A very tired and weary one.
“Look, the children are asleep. It’s late and you’re tired. How about I run you a hot bath and put you to bed?”
She leaned against the closed door and sighed. “That sounds heavenly.”
“Then it shall be done,” Gray said immediately.
He went to the door, moved her gently to the side while he checked the locks and then walked her back toward the bathroom. While they walked he massaged her shoulders, hating all the tightness he felt there.
“Dave is going to find out how the fire started and we’re going to rebuild. I don’t want you to worry about any of that,” he told her.
She remained silent while they moved into the bathroom. He turned on the water and waited until the temperature was right, then said, “Now, let’s get you bathed and ready for bed.”
She’d been staring at him, her arms folded over her chest. “I’m not one of the children, Gray. And I’m not one of your
business deals that you’re fixing.”
He moved to stand in front of her. “Never mistook you for either,” he said.
“This was exactly what I was afraid of all along,” she said with a sigh. “I don’t like this feeling and I know it sounds silly and probably unrealistic, but I don’t like loss. It’s just too heavy for me to deal with. My kids are at the community center all the time. When it wasn’t this play it was arts-and-crafts night, or story time. There was always something there for them to do and now it’s gone.”
He cupped her cheek and shook his head. “That old building is gone,” Gray told her. “There will be a new building and all those activities and many more will resume. Remember, you planned some of the things that will take place there. We can plan even more.”
She was still shaking her head and when she looked up at him there were tears in her eyes once again. “The only thing that was here for me after James died was this town. That community center and the people there saved me plenty of nights when I thought I would go crazy with loneliness and the kids would hate me for being such a boring mother. This is exactly what I was afraid of when you first came to town. And I know that you said you’re going to rebuild, I just still feel this sense of loss.”
“Stop it,” he said sternly, but not angrily. “I know about loss, too, Morgan. I lost my mother when all I ever knew was to count on her. I lost my father long before that and I still don’t think I ever understood why. So I know all about that lonely feeling that grows so big and so heavy inside of you until you think there’s no way you can take another breath. I know about not being sure what you’ll do the next day and the day after that, because you’ve lost someone.” He cupped both hands to her face now and stared intently into her eyes.
“But what I also know right now, standing in this space with you so close to me, is that I’ve never felt more complete in my life. The here and now is what’s important. Nothing else. And I’m right here with you, right now. Jack and Lily are sleeping soundly in their beds waiting for Santa to drop off all their goodies and that tub is about to overflow with the hot bath you requested.”
