sure—when the lights suddenly went out. Screams were immediate and should have been expected since Gray didn’t think there was anyone in this room over the age of six or seven, besides him and Morgan.
“Stay calm,” he heard Morgan say over the growing chaos of children’s voices. “It’s probably just a blown fuse again. I’ll take care of it.”
Gray slipped his phone from his jacket pocket and turned on the flashlight app, but when he attempted to take a step toward the stage, he found his moves hampered. Gray was six-two and he weighed two hundred and thirty-five pounds, which consisted of mostly muscle thanks to the ten to twelve hours a week he spent at the gym. Last year he’d run in the 5K marathon to fight diabetes and finished in under fifteen minutes, so there should have been no problem with him walking across this room to assist Morgan in whatever was going on. Except for the two sets of arms that had wrapped tightly around each of his thighs, holding him down like weights.
“Here’s the fuse box,” Morgan stated about two seconds before Gray’s hands brushed over hers.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said, moving her hand to the side.
“You don’t know anything about this building,” she snapped. Her hand was still warm from where he’d touched her and Morgan rubbed it against her thigh as if she thought that would erase her reaction to his touch.
He was holding his phone, with its glaring light, pointed toward the fuse box, but Morgan could see the shadow of his face as he turned to look at her.
“I own this building,” he replied.
Morgan huffed. “That doesn’t mean you know your way around it, or how much it means to the people of this town,” she quipped.
It was really hot in here. They were in the basement and Morgan tried to take a step back, but there was only a wall behind her. To her right was a door that led to the crawl space. To her left, the wall with the fuse box. Directly in front of her, the man with the flashlight and delicious-smelling cologne.
“But I do know how to turn on,” he began, still watching her and, if she wasn’t mistaken, moving a step closer.
Morgan tried to shift to the side, but she stumbled on some cords that were lying on the floor and ended up against his chest, again. The light from the phone wavered as his hands dropped to her shoulders, sliding down slowly as he kept her from falling. Embarrassed and irritated by the heat that had spread quickly from the hand that he’d touched moments ago to the rest of her body, Morgan tried to pull away from him. She slammed her back into the wall.
He shone the light in her face at that point, then looked at her as if he was going to...no, he wasn’t, Morgan thought quickly. He wouldn’t dare.
“It’s the last circuit breaker,” she said, hastily pointing over his shoulder. “That’s the one that usually blows. It’s been doing that for the past couple of months. Harry said he was going to look at it, but he hasn’t had a chance.”
Harry Reed owned the hardware store and worked part-time at his family’s B and B. He also did handiwork around the town in his spare time, for which Morgan knew a lot of people were very grateful.
Now Grayson looked confused, which was just fine because that’s exactly how Morgan was feeling.
“You just open the box and—”
He backed away from her and said, “I know how to flip the circuit breakers and turn on the lights.”
The phone’s flashlight moved and she could see him opening the box now.
“You’re right,” he told her as he began flipping the first breaker off and then on. “I don’t know about this building, but I do know about fuse boxes. Turn everything off and hopefully, when you turn it back on...” He let his voice trail off as that last fuse clicked off and then...
“All power is restored,” he said the moment the tight hallway they’d been standing in was once again illuminated.
Behind him, the kids who they couldn’t leave in the dark room alone cheered.
“Great,” Morgan replied. “Thank you.”
She let out a whoosh of breath as she hurriedly slipped past him. It was a weird move, she knew, as she flattened against one wall and shimmied around the spot where he still stood, but Morgan didn’t care. She simply needed to get out of that corner with him.
“That was fun,” Ethan said immediately as she approached. “Can we do it again?”
“I’m hungry, Ms. Hill,” Daisy Lynn added with a baleful look.
Morgan had a headache.
She looked at her watch and let out a sigh. “It’s almost time for your parents to pick you up anyway. So let’s get back upstairs and clean up our props. We’ll rehearse again tomorrow after Sunday services,” she told them.
She led the group up the basement steps and through the double doors. When they’d come down moments ago Morgan had instructed them to hold hands and onto the railing. This time, since the lights were on and probably because Morgan’s thoughts were somewhere else, she hadn’t instructed them to do the same. The lights were brighter in the upstairs hallways and the children ran to the main hall, where they’d been rehearsing. She was walking and thinking about him, but somehow completely forgetting that she’d left Grayson Taylor down in the basement.
“Considering running away before giving me the tour of the place?” he said from behind her.
“What?” Morgan said as she spun around to face him. Her feet almost twisted as she did, but luckily she was able to right herself. Why had she become so clumsy around this man? “I’m not running anywhere. I have to tend to the children first,” she told him.
He nodded, but didn’t seem to believe her. That irritated Morgan and her headache throbbed more insistently.
“Look,” she said with a sigh, “I may not be the right person to give you this tour. I’m pretty attached to this building. And to the hospital, since I was born there. That means I’m going to be pretty irritated when you knock down the buildings or sell them off to some developer who’ll knock them down to build a strip mall or some other big-city franchise that we don’t need around here.”
Damn. She hadn’t meant to say all that, at least not to his face. He slipped his hands into the front pockets of his pants and watched as she wondered what to say next. Nothing about her personal feelings, she decided. Temptation was her home. These buildings, the landmarks and the people all meant something to her. She understood that it would be difficult for outsiders to understand that connection, but Grayson Taylor wasn’t an outsider. At least, he shouldn’t have been.
“Millie Randall works with the chamber of commerce. Her office is in city hall. She’ll be the better person to show you around. They open Monday at nine,” she said with finality and turned to walk away.
“It’s not my intention to knock anything down,” he told her. “I plan for a quick sale.”
“That’s
