“I’m here to handle current business, not to rehash the past,” he told her curtly.
It was the best he could do, especially since instinct and habit were telling him to defend his mother and put this busybody in her place.
“Well, that’s fine,” she snapped and continued walking toward the building. “But we don’t rush around in Temptation. It’s not our way, so you’ll just have to get used to that.”
Gray frowned as he reluctantly walked behind her. He didn’t want to get used to anything in Temptation.
“You’re just not used to being close to men anymore,” Wendy said as she zipped the back of Morgan’s dress.
Morgan turned away from the full-length mirror and closed the closet door it hung on. “I don’t have a problem being around men, I just don’t like arrogant and snobbish men,” she replied.
After stewing about the issue all night she’d finally broken down and told Wendy about meeting Grayson Taylor last night. Lily and Jack were staying with her grandmother tonight, while she attended the annual holiday charity banquet at the hospital with Wendy. The event was to benefit the Widows and Orphans Fund, which had been started years ago by an anonymous mother who at one point had lost everything, but then came into a huge sum of money and wanted to give back. No one in town had ever seen this woman in person, but they’d accepted the money and agreed to continue the efforts, using each year’s proceeds to help support single mothers with young children.
Wendy had worked at the hospital for the past five years. So Morgan had been attending this event before becoming a widow herself. She’d always believed in its purpose, and now, being a single parent, she knew firsthand how important it was to have assistance. In her corner were Granny and Wendy. Her parents had been gone since Morgan was a sophomore in high school, when her father received a job offer in Australia.
“I hear he’s sexy as hell,” Wendy continued.
She was standing near Morgan’s dresser now, fluffing her loose curls. Her older sister was gorgeous, from her five-seven height to the generous curves she’d been blessed with and the bubbly personality that had landed her as captain of the cheerleading squad in high school. They shared the same creamy brown complexion and wide, expressive eyes, but that’s where the similarities ended. Where Morgan loved the fall and Christmas carols, Wendy wanted to swim in the lake every day of the summer and detested the cold.
“All of them,” she continued. “There are three boys and three girls. I don’t think any of them signed over the rights for the show to go into syndication or onto DVD, but Granny told me just the other day how good-looking they all had grown up to be.”
“And how would she know?” Morgan asked after she’d slipped her feet into the four-inch-heel platform red shoes that she’d treated herself to. “You know she hates the internet. That computer we bought her two years ago would have inches of dust on it if she wasn’t such a neat freak.”
Wendy shook her head. “And you know that’s the truth,” her sister agreed while laughing. “But you know her and Ms. Dessa love reading the tabloids down at the supermarket. She said there was a story about them a few months back when the father died.”
Morgan pulled at the hem of the dress that she’d already deemed too short. Wendy thought it was perfect—red, festive and flirty, she’d said. Morgan figured she was either going to freeze her buns off tonight trying to be cute, or fall flat on her face the moment she walked into the Olivia Taylor Hall at the hospital.
Olivia Taylor had been the equivalent of the Virgin Mary in Temptation. Thirty years ago, when she and her husband had been bold enough to travel to Maryland so that she could be artificially inseminated with multiple eggs, she’d shown every women in Temptation that it was okay to take their fate in their own hands. Morgan, and just about everyone who lived in Temptation, knew the story.
“They both need to find something else better to do during the day,” Morgan said, grabbing her shawl from the bed and heading for the door.
Wendy laughed as she followed her out. “They need a man! Two of them, or maybe one and they can share.”
Morgan shook her head. “You’re ridiculous,” she said.
The shawl would be for when she was inside the hospital. As for right now, her long wool coat was warranted as the temperature was expected to drop below freezing later that evening. While Morgan loved the season and the crisp cold winter air, she did not like shivering and shaking from the deep freeze that Temptation was known to receive this time of year.
“Not ridiculous, just practical,” Wendy said while slipping into her short leather jacket. “What woman wouldn’t want a nice handsome hunk of man to keep her warm on a night like this?”
Morgan stepped out into the evening air, recalling immediately how warm she’d felt each time Grayson had touched her. She continued walking to the car, feeling the cold breeze as it whipped through the air.
“I don’t have any problem keeping myself warm,” she told her sister as she climbed into the passenger side of Wendy’s SUV.
Still, she was shivering when she finally pulled the door closed, her traitorous body begging to differ.
* * *
“This wing of the hospital was named after your mother,” Millie told Gray.
Her voice had begun to grate on him, like nails sliding over a chalkboard. She’d been talking, mixing historical facts about the town with quick jabs of gossip and innuendo, like they were part of some insider tour. If they were, Gray didn’t want to partake—not a second longer.
“I think I’ve seen enough,” he told her. He was certain that the twenty minutes that she’d taken to walk him around the hospital had been nineteen minutes too long in her company.
Based on this tour alone, he knew exactly what he would do once he finally found a spot with internet access. Gray would tell his attorney to sell, sell, sell! This town was just as bland and behind the times as he’d recalled and he would be glad to leave first thing tomorrow morning. Actually, he thought as Millie touched her jeweled fingers to his arm for about the billionth time, he would be more than glad.
“So you see, it makes sense for you to be here tonight at the charity event,” she told him, blinking those unnaturally long lashes at him.
She’d been doing that as if she thought the action was somehow coercing him. It wasn’t. Instead, that action and Millie’s comments were beginning to irritate the hell out of him.
“I’m really not up for attending any type of event,” he began. “Besides, I’m not dressed for anything formal.”
“Oh, we rarely do formal here in Temptation. You should remember that,” she chided, slipping her hand right through his arm again and turning him toward glass double doors at the end of the hallway.
The tiled floor was old here, just as Gray had noticed throughout the rest of the facility. There were a number of areas that could be refreshed and updated, he’d thought as he walked through. Windows could have better coverings, computers at the main desk on all of the floors looked to be at least ten years old, which in any field these days was not good. A hospital especially should have the most up-to-date equipment possible.
“You see we kept your mother’s name right over the doors, just the way they were when we put them there years ago. She never did come back to see it, though. Her cousin, BJ, never understood that. She always thought Olivia was ungrateful, but you know how family can be,” Millie continued as she walked him closer to those doors.
“It was very nice of the town to dedicate this portion of the hospital to my mother. I’m