“Marley’s coming! Marley’s coming!” Alana, a six-year-old playing one of Bob Cratchit’s children, yelled from where she was sitting at the end of the stage.
“It’s not time yet,” Ethan complained. “I’m not finished saying ‘bah, hamburger.’”
“He needs to shut up,” Lily said with a sigh.
“You’re not adding the chains this time, Mama,” Jack stated loudly. As if the noisier he said it, the faster she would start doing it.
Usually, when it was time for Jacob Marley—played by Malcolm Washington, who was missing one of his front teeth—to make his ghostly appearance, Wendy, who was her part-time assistant whenever she wasn’t on duty at the hospital, would knock on the desk to make the footstep sounds and rattle the bike chains in her bag. But Ethan was right, it wasn’t time for Jacob’s appearance quite yet.
Still, Morgan could not deny the sound of footsteps coming fast and almost furiously down the hallway toward the hall where they were rehearsing.
“Hush, children,” she said as she stood.
Morgan was walking toward the door, or rather tiptoeing like she actually expected to see the ghost of Jacob Marley come through that doorway, just like she knew the now-quiet children were. The footsteps continued and so did Morgan. She was wearing her bright orange-and-fuchsia tennis shoes today, along with her black running suit, which Wendy said made her look more like a teenage track star than a grown woman. Morgan tended to ignore her older sister when it came to dressing because Wendy was a proud member of the single, sexy and seriously looking club. Whereas Morgan was a mother and a teacher and she was perfectly content with that.
“Oh!” she yelled.
“Sorry,” a voice said as he reached out to grab her shoulders and keep her upright.
She’d bumped into what felt like a concrete wall and was embarrassed to discover it was simply a man’s chest. Well, there was really nothing simple about this man or his chest, which she figured out the moment she stepped back and looked up at him.
He was tall with a honey-brown complexion, a strong jaw, a precisely cut goatee and seductive dark brown eyes. His shoulders were broad, the suit he wore expertly cut. His hair was wavy and black, his lips of medium thickness.
Morgan almost sighed. If this was the ghost of Jacob Marley, then she was seriously going to consider crossing over to the land of the walking dead, because standing before her was one fine-ass black man.
* * *
Gray removed his hands from her instantly. He had no choice. The warmth that had immediately spread up his arms and to his chest was so intense he thought of the heart attack that had killed his father two months ago. Sure, Gray visited his internist once a year for a physical, so he knew that he was in perfect health, but the feeling had shocked him.
She had shocked him.
“Are you all right?” he asked. She’d taken a step back from him, looking as if she’d seen a ghost.
A number of children had almost instantly flocked around her, as if offering their juvenile protection, should he be there for some nefarious reason. He wasn’t, or at least he didn’t think of it that way. Still, they were all glaring at him. Something else that made Gray uncomfortable.
“I’m fine,” she answered, clearing her throat. “Can I help you with something?”
Gray didn’t need anyone’s help. He hadn’t for a very long time, but that was not his response. At thirty years old, Gray had been running his own company for fifteen years, supervising billion-dollar deals and working with brilliant tech minds to create the most innovative products in the world. He could certainly travel back to the small, dilapidated town that had torn his family apart and take care of the sale of three measly buildings without anyone’s help. Hence the reason he had secured a limited power-of-attorney document from each of his siblings. There was no need for all of them to come back to the place they all hated. He was the oldest and, as usual, he’d decided to bear the brunt of an unpleasant task.
“My name is Grayson Taylor,” he told her. “I own this building.”
“Oh,” she’d said, taking another step back as if she was afraid he’d reach out and touch her again.
Gray frowned.
“I’m just stopping by to take a look around as I’ll be selling the building hopefully in the next couple of months.”
“Christmas is next month,” the little girl holding tightly to the woman’s hand told him matter-of-factly.
He nodded. “Yes. It is.”
She was a cute little girl, with an intense stare that shouldn’t have unnerved him, but just like touching the woman had, it did.
“Even though the sales probably won’t be official until after the first of the year, I need to do a walk-through before then. I’ll send my lawyers a report and they’ll get started with the listing. If you don’t mind, could you show me around?” he asked, returning his gaze to the woman.
His question was met with immediate silence and after a few seconds she shook her head. “I’m rehearsing with the children. We’re just getting started with regularly scheduled rehearsals and the play is in four weeks. They have school during the day. We only have the weekends and an hour and a half in the evenings to rehearse.”
Gray presumed she was telling him “no.” That wasn’t a word women usually used with him, but his ego wasn’t bruised. This was business after all.
“Fine. I’ll wait until the rehearsal is finished,” he said. “Can I sit over here?”
There were chairs scattered about the spacious room, some lined directly in front of the small stage, where he suspected they were rehearsing their little play.
“You can watch me be Scrooge,” a boy wearing a frizzy white wig and an oversize black tuxedo jacket with tails told him.
He’d stepped away from the woman and her entourage and motioned for Gray to follow him. Admiring the child’s initiative, Gray walked behind him, leaving the still-leery gaze of the woman behind.
She didn’t say another word, but moved across the room and gave instructions for the children to resume their places and continue. The little girl who had been holding her hand still stood right beside her, but the child peeked back at Gray more than once. She had questions, he thought. Who was he? Why was he here and what did that possibly mean for them? He’d stared into her pensive eyes and felt the urge to answer all her questions in a way that would make her stop looking at him with such sincere inquisitiveness. It was the strangest thought he’d ever had, especially since Gray wasn’t known to get caught up in anyone’s emotions about anything.
He was the strongest of the Taylor sextuplets, the first one to be born on that humid July evening thirty years ago. His brothers and sisters all shared his birthday, but none of them had ever shared the weight of being the first baby born of the first set of multiples in the town of Temptation. That had been his title for the first seven years of his life—“the first born of the first Temptation sextuplets.” The Taylors of Temptation was what they’d named the reality show that featured his parents as they brought home their six bundles of joy and lived in the huge blue-and-white Victorian with the river at its back. As Gray recalled, the show would have been more aptly named if it had been called Terror of the Taylors instead.
“Do you like Christmas?”
He