Undercover Mistress

Chapter 14

“I’m serious,” Celia said, and her eyes gleamed bravely. “I, Celia Cross, am going to cook us a traditional Christmas dinner. With all the trimmings-whatever that means.”

“Tell me the truth, you poor little Hollywood princess, you,” he said, grinning skeptically at her. “Do you even know what a traditional Christmas dinner is?”

She gave him an insulted look. “Of course, I do-I’ve read A Christmas Carol. I know all the songs. Aren’t you supposed to cook a goose? And roast chestnuts, right? Then there’s something called figgy pudding-I have no idea what that is, but I bet I could find a recipe for it online. Did you know, there’s this wonderful thing called Google…”

“Turkey,” he said with a sigh.

“I beg your pardon?”

“That’s what we always had-turkey, roasted in the oven. Sometimes a ham, too, with pineapple rings and those little cherries stuck all over it. And candied yams with little marshmallows melted over ’em, and corn bread stuffing and mashed potatoes with giblet gravy. Collard greens…little baby peas. Cranberry sauce, and Grannie Calhoun’s homemade rolls…pumpkin and apple and mince and pecan pies with real whipped cream…”

Celia stared at him in pretended horror, but the truth was, the look of hunger and yearning on his face made her skin shiver and chest warm as if she’d swallowed brandy. “Oh, my God,” she breathed, coughing a little, then laughing a little…all to cover the fact that she wanted very much to cry.

She wrapped her arms around herself and drew a shuddering breath. “What’s it like-for you?” she asked with desperate brightness. “Christmas, I mean. Normally.”

For a moment or two he was silent, watching the shoreline and the little spindle-legged birds running in and out, chasing the retreating waves. Then he smiled crookedly and lifted his head, and the wind feathered his hair back from his forehead so that, in spite of the silver in it, he looked impossibly young.

“Well, let’s see… Most times, everybody gathers at Momma’s. The ones that live some distance away, like I do, generally stay at her place, or with one of the brothers that live close by. Momma’s place is a mess-wrapping paper and decorations all over the place, and the kitchen…let’s just say it’s a place you want to steer clear of, unless you’re into choppin’ up stuff and crackin’ pecans and the like, because Momma’ll put you to work, right quick. The ones that get there early usually have to help her with the tree-trimmin’, too, and puttin’ the leaves in the table, because she never gets it done on time.” Celia laughed softly when he did.

“Christmas Eve, Momma goes to church. Usually some of us go with her, because it makes her happy. Christmas Day, that’s when it gets crazy. Momma’s got to have everybody on the premises put out a stocking, which she gets up at the crack of dawn to fill, so first there’s that. Then people start showin’ up, everybody bringing some kind of food, plus armloads of presents, not to mention kids. There’s a whole lot of kids. When the weather’s nice, they can run around outdoors, but if it’s not, then they’re just pretty much underfoot. The menfolk wind up out on the porch no matter what the weather, just to escape the noise. The women, naturally, they gather in the kitchen and catch up on the gossip-everybody talkin’ at once, it always sounds like.

“’Round about noontime, the house gets to smellin’ so good, you just about want to die. Sometime in the midafternoon, things finally get sorted out and the food on the table-tables, I should say, because there’s always too many to fit in the dining room, so there’s card tables set up in the living room, and then the little kids, of course, they eat in the kitchen, because of the mess.

“Then in the evening, after the food’s packed up and the dishes done, and the kids and the menfolk have had their naps, everybody gathers in the living room, which is jam-packed with the tree and presents and everybody, kids sitting on the floor, people overflowing out into the dining room, wherever they can find room. Momma likes everybody to sing Christmas carols, so we do that for a while, because it makes her happy. After that…well, somebody starts passing out the presents-it’s mostly ours to Momma and hers to us, because the families have their own Christmas at home, too-and it’s noisy, and messy and crazy, and…after a while everybody packs up their stuff and their half-asleep kids and heads for home.” He shrugged, eyes on the crimson-washed horizon, the last slanting rays of the sun casting sad purple shadows across his face. “That’s about it.”

That’s about it? As if, she thought, it was nothing much at all. And to her it seemed like a Christmas fantasy…a holiday special on TV, a painting by Currier & Ives. She tried to imagine herself part of it-really part of it, not playing a scene, and any minute the director was going to holler “Cut!” and she’d return to her real life. Living it.

An impossible fantasy, she thought. Never happen.

Celia forced a breath through the heaviness inside her. “You must miss it.”

“Yeah,” he said quietly, still not looking at her, “I do. It’s kinda hard, you know, this year… I haven’t been able to contact anybody. Let ’em know I’m okay. They’re used to me being gone from time to time, but…” He looked over at her with a jerky motion, as if shaking himself loose from the thoughts in his head, and gave her a dogged smile. “What about you?”

The smile was too painful; if she went on looking at him, she was going to lose it for sure. She looked away and said lightly, “I don’t really have any Christmas traditions. Can’t miss what you’ve never had.”

“Even when you were little? When your parents were alive?”

She shook her head. “Every Christmas was different. Sometimes we’d be where it was cold-lots of snow…skiing-I don’t know, Switzerland, maybe? Other times we’d be someplace warm-like Hawaii, or Palm Beach. Or exciting, like Paris. Once, I remember, we were in New York City for Christmas. I remember we went to see the tree in Rockefeller Center. My dad carried me on his shoulders.” She caught a quick, hurting breath and gave him a smile she knew must be as bad as his. “That was cool.”

“What about now?”

“Now?” She shrugged. “Usually I spend the day with friends… Whoever I’m…” she smiled wryly “…with at the time. We either go to some restaurant, or maybe somebody’s house. Exchange a few gifts. You know-the usual stuff.”

The usual stuff. Yeah, right, Roy thought. Skiing in Switzerland…surfing in Hawaii…Christmas in New York…Paris…who knows where. Christmas, Hollywood-style. Fantasy stuff. Try as he would, and in spite of the role he’d been playing the past few weeks, he couldn’t see himself ever being a part of all that. It wasn’t him. R. J. Cassidy, maybe, but not Roy Starr. Never would be.

Even if he did decide to settle down…someday…it wasn’t going to be with someone like Celia. Couldn’t possibly be. So it was just as well they had a good reason to call a halt to…whatever this game was they were playing. Because that’s what it was-all it could ever be-a game. A fantasy. And both he and Celia were too damn old for games.

The next day was Christmas Eve, and Celia was up at the crack of dawn. When Roy wandered into the kitchen to make the morning coffee he found her already sitting at the counter making out her list, all got up in her grocery shopping outfit-meaning sweats and T-shirt, baseball cap and sunglasses, which she thought made her unrecognizable, but which in Roy’s opinion just made her look like somebody beautiful and rich trying to look like a beach bum.

After breakfast, she drove off in her SUV with the list and a credit card in her pocket, a determined set to her chin and a fanatical gleam in her eye.

After she’d gone, Roy hauled the wind chime he’d bought for her at an artisans’ fair in Topanga Canyon during one of their “outings” as R. J. Cassidy and mistress out from under the bed. Actually, he supposed it was both a wind chime and a prism, consisting of a bunch of little crystal teardrops hanging from a big crystal heart, and everytime the wind blew they made tinkling sounds and scattered little tiny rainbows all over everything. He’d told Celia at the time he was buying it for his momma, but he’d intended it for her all the time. He didn’t know why, but it just seemed right for her, somehow.

Since he had an idea wrapping paper was probably one of the items on Celia’s shopping list, he wandered over to Doc’s to see if he had any he could borrow. To his surprise, considering it wasn’t noon yet, Doc was up and about, sort of, dressed in his purple silk bathrobe and looking, as folks would say where Roy came from, as if he’d been rode hard and put up wet.

After rustling up some tissue paper and a gold foil gift bag that was shaped suspiciously like a wine bottle, Doc asked if Roy wanted to join him in a breakfast glass. Roy declined the wine, but maybe because he knew it was apt to be before Celia got back from her shopping trip, he felt inclined to hang around and shoot the breeze with Doc a while.

For some reason Celia’s house this morning seemed unbelievably empty without her in it. He told himself it was because it was Christmas, and he was used to a whole houseful of people and noise. He’d talked about it yesterday, which had made him think about it, and now he missed it. Simple.

So, after Doc had lit up a cigarette and poured himself his breakfast glass of wine, and the two men had settled themselves on the deck in the warm December sunshine, Roy asked Doc what he was doing for Christmas.

Doc looked at him with bleary-eyed amusement. “Having dinner with you two, actually.”

“Ah.” Aware he’d missed something and trying to cover for it, Roy frowned and said, “That’s great. Uh…she called you?”

Doc chuckled dryly and nodded. “Last night. Quite late. But don’t let it trouble you. We’re fellow insomniacs, Celia and I.”

Roy gave him a sideways look and decided to let the inference go by. “She tell you she’s cooking dinner?”

“She did.” Looking even more amused, Doc lifted his wineglass in a sort of salute. “Should be an interesting holiday.”

“Yeah…” Interesting was one way of describing it, Roy thought. He stared at the gold foil bag lying on the chaise lounge beside him, then gave it a nudge. “Hope this is okay. Didn’t know what to get her. I mean, she’s pretty much got everything.” What did you get someone who spent her Christmases in places like Paris, New York or Hawaii?

Doc blew a stream of smoke sideways as he stubbed out the cigarette. “Don’t worry, she’ll love it.” He shot Roy a look, still half-amused, but half…something else. “She will, you know-whatever it is. Celia’s not about things. Thought you’d have figured that out by now. Doesn’t care a fig about things-tends to give them away, in fact. Be prepared-she’ll give you something marvelous for Christmas, but odds are it won’t be something she paid a pot of money for.” He waved a hand toward the house. “I, for example, have a small fortune in Frederick Cross memorabilia in there, things she’s given me over the years. Things that would make any entertainment museum green with envy.”

Roy picked up the gold foil bag and stared at it as he turned it over in his hands, seeing instead all the expressions on Celia’s face that had mystified him during the past few weeks…thinking about all the times he’d caught…something in the depths of her eyes, just before she’d turned them away from him. “What is she about?” he asked gruffly. “You tell me.”

“In a word, my boy.” Doc paused for a swallow of wine and another soft, ironic chuckle. “What Celia’s about is feelings.”

Roy waited, expecting more. When it didn’t come, he scowled and said, “That’s it?”

Doc shrugged. “That’s it. Keep that in mind, and you’ll have a fairly good idea what makes our girl tick.”

Celia returned in the early afternoon with the back seat of the SUV piled full of shopping bags. Tied onto the luggage rack was a large scraggly-looking Christmas tree. When Roy untied it and stood it up and gave it a kind of thump, the way you do with a tree, it dumped roughly a third of its needles on the doorstep.

“It was the only one they had left,” Celia said defensively before he could say a word. “It’s a Charlie Brown tree-you know, from the Peanuts TV special movie? It’s going to look great once we get the decorations on it. I got lots of decorations-everything was on sale,” she added happily. “Half price-can you imagine? Come on-leave it a minute and help me unload all this stuff.”

What could he do? Something about the way she was grinning, and the flush on her cheeks and the wisps of blond hair falling out from underneath the baseball cap made him want to grab her and kiss her breathless, then roll her onto the nearest friendly surface and make love to her, laughing and carefree as a couple of kids, and afterward, feeling warm and happy, hold her in his arms and talk about whatever came to mind…

“Be careful of this one,” Celia said, handing over a large plastic bag. “It’s-” he took the bag from her, not expecting the weight of it, and it sank to the pavement with an ominous clunk, as she finished, “-the turkey.”

It was, too. About twenty pounds worth, by Roy’s estimate, and frozen solid as a chunk of concrete.

He stared down at it, then looked at Celia. “It’s frozen.”

Her mind on the packages she was gathering from inside the SUV, she gave a distracted sigh. “I know, but it was the only one they had left.” She paused, laden, to smile at him. “Don’t worry-I’ll defrost it in the microwave. I’ve gotten really good at defrosting.”

Roy hastily grabbed up the turkey along with several other bags and followed her into the house. “I don’t want to rain on your parade, darlin’,” he said when he caught up with her in the kitchen, “but unless you’re thinkin’ about goin’ after this thing with a hacksaw, it’s never gonna fit in that microwave.” To illustrate his point, he hoisted the bag containing the turkey onto the countertop beside the microwave oven, where it rocked back and forth with a quiet, rhythmic thumping sound.

She looked at the turkey, then at the oven. Her mouth popped open, but no sound came out. After a moment she turned to him, the watermark frown wrinkling the center of her forehead. “So…what do we do? How long does it take to thaw a turkey?”

“One this big? I’m no expert, but I seem to recall…days.”

“But we haven’t got ‘days.’”

Dammit, he couldn’t stand it. The tension in her body…the pinched look of disappointment around her eyes… Well, hell. He could feel his stomach knotting up and his breath coming short and shallow. He didn’t know why it was so all-fired important to her, but at that moment he’d have taken a blowtorch to the damn bird if she needed him to.

He ran a hand over his face, “Uh, look, don’t panic, okay? I sort of seem to remember my momma, one time, puttin’ a bird in the bathtub to thaw-in water, you know? Don’t know how long it takes that way, how much faster it’d be, but we can try it.” The way she looked at him then made him feel as if he were eight feet tall and wearing shiny white armor. His heart did a little happy dance against his breastplate as he gave her an “aw, shucks” shrug. “What’ve we got to lose, right?”

She handed over the turkey without a word, those incredible dark-fringed blue eyes of hers full of trust, never leaving his face. He carried it upstairs to her bathroom-unknown territory for him, and filled with her own unique scent and all her mysterious feminine lotions and potions and secrets.

“Cold water, not hot,” he cautioned her as she knelt beside the Jacuzzi tub and flipped the switch to plug up the drain.

She gave him a look but didn’t question his judgment, just turned on the cold tap full blast. He knelt down beside her and carefully lowered the frozen turkey into the water. Then they waited, side by side on their knees, gazing at the fat, plastic-wrapped bird like two besotted parents bathing a baby, for the bathtub to fill.

At one point Celia looked over at Roy and smiled. He felt an alarming quiver inside his chest, and it flashed through his mind that he was incredibly happy. About the happiest he could ever remember being, in fact. Didn’t make sense, but there it was, no getting around it: it was Christmas Eve, he was down on his knees on a hard tile floor in a soap opera star’s bathroom, baby-sitting a giant naked frozen bird, with a dangerous mission and the fate of millions of innocent people hanging over his head, and he, Roy Starr, was happy.

If that meant what he thought it did, what in the hell was he going to do?

“What did I tell you?” Celia stood back to survey the tree with what was admittedly a not very critical eye. My first completely do-it-yourself Christmas tree. She drew a breath and let it out carefully, so as not to disturb the big untidy lump of emotion that had been gathering in her throat all day. It had grown harder, as the evening advanced toward midnight and the dawning of Christmas Day, to keep it buried there, just beneath her surface veneer of holiday cheer. “Looks great, doesn’t it?”

“Great?” Roy threw her a lopsided grin. “You just better hope nobody comes within twenty feet of it with anything resembling an ignition source. This thing’s so dry it’d go up like a torch.”

“Nobody’s going to. Doc’s not allowed to smoke in here. And we’ll take it down right after Christmas-or anyway, before we leave to board Abby’s boat, so we have nothing to worry about.” She turned from the tree to rummage through the piles of boxes, bags and packaging materials that were scattered over every surface of the living room. “One last thing. Now where did I…okay, here it is.” She pulled a box from the chaos, plucked away an errant strand of tinsel and for a moment just held it and gazed at the cellophane display window.

Mystifyingly, the knot in her throat seemed to grow even bigger, and her vision wavered. A memory floated into her mind: a towering Christmas tree, glittering with a thousand lights…snowflakes falling onto her upturned face as she laughed…

She drew a quick, sharp breath. “This goes on the top. Will you do it? I can’t reach.” She thrust the box at Roy. “It’s not what I wanted,” she said as he took it from her with a curious glance, then began to open it. “I wanted a star, like the one on the tree in Rockefeller Center, but this was all they had left.” Because she felt shivery, she folded her arms on her chest.

“Nothin’ wrong with this,” Roy said as he drew the angel from its box.

She watched him separate it from its wrappings and give its wings a couple of straightening tugs, then step close to the tree, reach up and carefully place the stiff white folds of the angel’s gown over the spindly twig at the tip-top of the tree. She watched him adjust it when it wanted to flop to one side, until he had it standing just…right.

She watched him with stinging eyes and aching throat, with a heaviness in her chest and a shivering in her skin…and it came to her as she watched him that what she wanted…desperately…was to be held.

“That should do it…” He’d turned from the tree to look at her. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She managed to produce a brilliant smile, gazing up at the angel, not at him. She didn’t dare to look at him. “It looks pretty good, doesn’t it?”

“Looks great.” They stood together, studying the angel. She could feel him, feel the heat from his body, though they weren’t touching.

Hold me, she thought. Please hold me. It’s Christmas.

“Actually,” he said, glancing over at her, “she looks kinda familiar.”

She risked a glance back and found his smile had gone crooked. Bravely holding on to her own, she said, “Familiar?”

“Yeah-I thought I saw an angel, you know-when I was…out of it. Thought I musta died, but…turned out the angel was you.”

“Oh.” To her dismay it came out not as a word, but like a cry, high and breathless…a complete betrayal. Unable to withdraw it, she could only stare at him, standing utterly still, knowing her need for him was naked in her eyes…in her face.

He stood still, too, looking back at her, Christmas tree lights gleaming in his silver-touched hair and his smile fading slowly, like a mirage.

Hold me…please.

And then-she hadn’t spoken it aloud, she was sure she hadn’t-all at once he was. She hadn’t moved, she was sure she hadn’t, but somehow his arms were around her, and the fabric of his shirt was soft against her cheek, her face nested in the warm curve of his neck, the scent of his aftershave in her nostrils and her heartbeat knocking against his in crazy, out-of-sync rhythms. Her arms went around his waist, and his arms held her close…closer…and she felt warm and protected and completely safe.

They stood like that for…she didn’t know how long. She felt his cheek resting on her head…just resting there, demanding nothing, giving only comfort, and she thought in mild surprise, He’s kind. Nothing like a pirate, really. A kind man. I wonder if he even knows how kind he is.

And then she thought, I love him. Oh God, I wonder if he knows. He must know. No wonder he’s being kind…

Shaking, now, with chagrined laughter, she turned her face upward and murmured his name, meaning to release him gently from that obligation. But his answer was her name, spoken gruffly, raggedly as he lowered his mouth to meet hers.

Though even the kiss was gentle, at first… His lips touched hers sweetly, tentatively, with a first-kiss kind of innocence, as if neither of them had done such a thing before. But, like a spark dropped in dry tinder, it flared in the next instant into something neither tentative nor innocent.

She felt the blaze of heat inside him and drew a gasping breath, as if the shock wave of that heat had just hit her full in the face. Her mouth opened and he drove the kiss deep-straight to her heart, it seemed-while his hand cradled her head and he rocked her with the slow, sensuous motion of his tongue.

Celia, you’re an idiot, she thought, before she gave up all thought. This definitely isn’t kindness!

He pulled back, panting as if caught up in a terrible struggle, and she clutched his shirt in desperate handfuls.

“Please,” she whispered, as shameless tears began to sting her eyes. “I know we said we wouldn’t do this. But…just this once…just for tonight? It’s Christmas.”

She felt a brief sharp quiver go through his taut body, like the twanging of a bowstring. “Just for tonight,” he growled. And in a whisper, just before his mouth found hers again: “Merry Christmas…”

His hands were gentle, pulling the bottom edges of her T-shirt from the waistband of her jogging pants, whispering over her skin to brush the sides of her breasts, holding her lightly as she leaned eagerly into his kiss. Her own hands were less gentle, too full of need to be gentle, as they dove beneath the waistband of his jeans, raked hungrily over his firm, warm flesh, fumbled with the buttons on his shirt. He drew her to him and as her nipples brushed…her soft breasts pillowed, then pressed against the hardness of him…the shock of it was so sweet, so exquisite, she whimpered and tears pooled in the corners of her closed eyelids.

She hardly felt it when he laid her down, sweeping and nudging aside boxes and wrappings to make a place for them on the couch. She barely noticed when he glided his hand over her taut, quivering belly, the pins-and-needles prickle of her scar when he touched it only one more small sensation in the dizzy, overwhelming circus of her senses. She didn’t open her eyes when he laid his warm and supple length along her body, when his strong hands skimmed down her back and under her to lift her to him…when she felt the weight and press and sweet-hot sting of his body’s entry into hers. She didn’t open them even when he took her face between his big, warm hands and gently kissed her tear-damp lashes and whispered her name again…and again against her fevered skin.

She kept them closed because she didn’t want to see his face…flawed and human and real. Roy’s face. She kept them closed and filled her mind instead with the fantasy of him…the pirate, the billionaire, the secret agent…because that, after all, was all this was. Fantasy.

Like Christmas. Like TV movies and daytime dramas. Like all the other times she’d fallen in love with an image, a vision, a make-believe hero, her leading man. Fantasy.

This would end, she knew that, from all the times it had ended for her before. But while it lasted, it would be sweet and beautiful and, in its own way, real.

For her, because she was Celia Cross, it would have to be enough.