Undercover Mistress

Chapter 4

“I’ve answered your questions,” she said, lifting her chin. “I think it’s time you answered some of mine. It’s only fair.”

The thought flashed into Roy’s mind: Now it begins.

Her dilated eyes, black pools surrounded by narrow rings of blue, stared into his. Mentally bracing himself for the lies he was about to tell, he tilted his head toward her, ignoring the thundering pain that small movement induced. “Fire away. Although,” he added as her lips were parting, before she could speak, “I have to tell you, I don’t remember much. About what happened to me…how I got here. Or there-where you found me. In fact, nothing actually.”

“Nothing at all?” She watched him, her gaze slanted and narrow with disbelief.

He found it unexpectedly exhausting, fighting the thrall of those eyes. He leaned his head back on the pillows and in self-defense, closed his. “Not a thing. Sorry.”

“How ’bout your name? Do you remember that?”

Her tone was sardonic, but from underneath his lashes he saw that her lips had tilted up at the corners in an oddly demure little smile. Something stirred deep down in his belly, making him think once again how glad he was to be alive and able to appreciate the wonder of a beautiful woman. Warmed by that, he chuckled and gave in. “That I can do. It’s Roy. Roy Starr.”

“Roy…” She tilted her head and touched her tongue to her lips, as if tasting the word. The stirring in his belly became a drumbeat. “You have an accent. I’m thinking…Georgia?”

He gave a huff of laughter and closed his eyes. “You have a good ear,” he murmured, thinking he’d better get himself under better control, that he was going to have to watch his step with this lady, whoever she was. Apparently not much got by her.

“Yes.” She said it, not in a smug way at all, just stating a fact, then added, “You pretty much have to, in my business.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“I’m an actress.”

“Huh. Shoulda guessed.”

“Why?”

He’d had his eyes closed, drifting closer than he’d realized to the edges of sleep, so he wasn’t prepared for the defensive, almost belligerent tone in which she shot that back at him. Which was maybe why he let his guard down for a moment, just long enough to tell her the God’s honest truth.

“Because you’re so damn beautiful,” he said in a slurred voice, opening his eyes and looking straight into hers. “I figure, anybody looks like you has got to be.”

And she surprised him again, this time giving a little shake of her head and looking away for a moment, with a twist of that expressive mouth of hers that wasn’t a smile. If he had to guess, he’d have said the look was disappointment, but given his state of exhaustion and track record at reading the lady so far, he wasn’t ready to bet on it.

“So,” she persisted after a moment, bringing her eyes back to him, “are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Are you from Georgia?”

His lips curved in a smile of surrender and his eyes drifted closed once more. “Born ’n raised. Florida, now…”

He was so damn tired. Hell, he figured he had a right to be. He’d come closer to dying last night than he ever hoped to and lived to tell about it, and the last thing he felt like doing was answering questions. Anybody’s questions, but particularly not those of a beautiful woman who seemed to be following some mysterious agenda of her own.

As if aware of his thoughts, the woman in question adopted a voice with a coy and disarming lilt. “And, what brings you all the way to Malibu, California?”

As a Southern boy born and bred, Roy was accustomed to that particular feminine tactic. He wanted to laugh, but the attempt took more energy than he had to expend. When the laugh turned into a cough, he was jolted with reminders of the pain in his throat and his chest and too many other places to count. He thought, Serves me right, getting sidetracked by a pretty face.

“Truth is,” he muttered with a frown of effort, “I was s’posed to see a man about a boat.”

“A boat.”

And he was glad he happened to be looking at her then, because if he hadn’t been, he’d never have caught that flicker of…something in her eyes. Something sharp and wary, something that made his battered body summon, from God knew where, enough adrenaline to banish, for just a moment, the fog of exhaustion from his brain.

Riding the wave, he produced a smile he meant to be disarming-charming, too, if he could hope for that much. “Yeah, I run a charter fishing boat business down there on the Gulf-my partner and I do. He’s my brother-in-law, too, as of a couple months ago. We just have the one boat, but we were thinking about expanding-getting another boat. Fellow out here had one for sale, so I came out to take a look at it. That’s what I was doing…at least, I think…” The adrenaline crested and subsided. Back in the trough, he let his eyes drift closed. His forehead furrowed, and he didn’t have to feign exhaustion and frustration…much. “Damn. Can’t…remember.”

“This man you were supposed to see.” Her voice sounded stubborn, which took away a lot of its lilt and most of its charm. “His name wouldn’t happen to be Max, would it?”

He felt his insides go cold. How does she know that? How could she possibly know about Max? What else does she know?

This time, his exhausted brain, unable to give him answers to those questions, did the next best thing it could do for him, under the circumstances. It brought down the curtain.

No! No, damn you, don’t you dare! Celia silently protested as she watched the haggard face on the pillows go slack with sleep. Her curiosity was a burning ball in her stomach, but what could she do? She was pretty sure the guy wasn’t faking this…sleep or unconsciousness or whatever it was, and she was equally sure Doc wouldn’t be pleased if he knew she’d been grilling his patient while he was still in a weak and vulnerable state. But she had so many questions!

Vulnerable…

She probably wasn’t ever going to get a chance like this again. Taking a calming breath, she placed the mug and spoon on the tray and the tray on the floor. Then, straightening, she sat and once again intently, minutely studied the battered face so incongruously framed in a delicate pattern of violets.

Is he handsome? She remembered she’d thought he might be, at first. And although at the moment it was difficult to see why, given the beard and the bruises, the battered nose and dry, cracked lips, she still thought he’d be more than presentable, under the right circumstances-cleaned up, spruced up, properly groomed, the wild and scruffy look tamed in GQ haircut and clothes.

But handsome? She disliked the word-it had always seemed to her the masculine equivalent of pretty, meaning something pleasant to look at but not terribly interesting. Celia was accustomed to handsome and pretty people. She’d been surrounded by them all her life and linked romantically with a few. More than a few, actually. Way more. Anyway, handsome faces held no great fascination for her. So, what was it about this man’s face that commanded her interest? More than commanded-she couldn’t seem to tear her eyes away.

He said his name is Roy. Roy Starr.

A nice enough name, but in Celia’s opinion it didn’t suit him. It had a gentle, heroic, good-guy quality-like Roy Rogers, maybe?-that didn’t seem to match up with the dark, battered face on the pillow. All that face needed, she thought, was a scar on one cheek and a cutlass clenched between the teeth, and he’d be the perfect pirate. Straight from central casting.

But, how did she even know if Roy Starr was his real name? What if he’d lied about that? And about being from Florida and owning a charter fishing boat business and all the rest of it?

Easy enough to check. She bent to pick up the tray and, after a moment’s consideration, set the cup of tea on the nightstand, then rose and carried the tray into the kitchen. She left it on the counter and climbed the stairs-slowly, as had become her recent habit, but for a change not even noticing the tug of muscles and tendons on newly knitted bones.

Upstairs in the master bedroom she almost never used now, she seated herself at the large executive-type desk that sat before the sliding glass balcony doors like an island in a sea of sunshine. The morning sun coming through the glass highlighted the layer of dust on the desktop, and when she took the plastic cover off the computer, swirls of tiny particles danced into the light. She removed a stack of scripts from the chair and placed them on the floor, setting free a new flight of those tiny, joyous motes. A long-ago memory flashed into her mind: as a child, she’d imagined they were fairies and had tried, enthralled, to capture them in her hands.

She sat in the chair and powered on the computer. While she waited impatiently for the computer to work its way through the process of booting up, she tried to remember the last time she’d turned the thing on. It had been a while-she considered the computer, more particularly the Internet, just one more source of public intrusion into the cocoon of privacy she’d built around herself during the past year.

She could barely remember which icon to click to connect with the Internet but after a couple of false starts, managed to get online. She remembered watching something on one of the TV news magazine shows about something called Google-and, yes, there the word was, in big multicolored letters right up near the top of the Home Page, next to a box like a tiny blank movie screen.

She thought for a moment, then typed in the words, Roy Starr fishing charters Florida in the box. Feeling clever and venture-some, she clicked with a flourish on Search Web, then sat back to wait for results.

An instant later she jerked upright. The computer screen had already flashed back a blue bar with the words, Searched the Web for Roy Starr Fishing Charters Florida. Results 1-10 of about 115,786. Search took 0.18 seconds.

She gave a huff of astonishment and whispered, “Wow.” Then, clamping her teeth on her lower lip, she leaned forward and began to read through the entries on the screen.

A few minutes later she was triumphantly connected to a Web site for STARR CHARTERS, and gazing at a picture of a rather ungainly-looking white boat afloat on impossibly blue water. Plainly visible on the boat’s bow were the words, Gulf Starr. Below the picture, the company’s name and logo were featured artistically, along with mailing and e-mail addresses and an 800 telephone number. Below that were the words, Roy Starr and Scott Cavanaugh, captains-experienced, trustworthy, professional.

There were links to other pages and other pictures-a good many of them. It took some time, but Celia visited and studied them all. Most of the photographs featured happy sunburned fishermen displaying their catch, but several afforded glimpses of the crew, as well. The one most often shown was a big, burly man with honey-brown hair cut short in a distinctly military style. The brother-in-law, obviously. He looked to be in his mid-forties, and had a nice smile-a very nice smile, Celia decided, the kind that made the man wearing it look as if he might actually be trustworthy and professional.

The same could hardly be said of the other man in the photographs. This one had a lean and untamed look, with a whisker shadow and longish dark hair that flirted with the wind. And, far from inviting trust and confidence, his smile held a hint-just a delicious shivery touch-of wickedness.

So he was telling the truth-about this, at least, Celia thought, shaking off the shivers-though her heart went tripping on in double-time, oblivious to her will. But it doesn’t explain how he came to be shot and washed up half-dead on my beach.

It didn’t explain the nightmare babbling about boats and bombs and millions of people dying. It didn’t explain about a luxury yacht called Lady Of The Night. And who was Max?

Since the answers to her questions didn’t seem likely to magically appear on the computer screen she was staring at, she turned it off, huffed a frustrated breath and went downstairs.

In her bedroom, the stranger-Roy Starr, alleged charter boat captain from Florida-slept on, his breathing raspy and rhythmic, not quite a snore. Celia tiptoed past him to her dresser, then to the closet, gathering clothes and clean underwear. From the bathroom she collected makeup and toiletries, and then, arms full, trudged back up the stairs, pleased once again to note that her legs barely protested.

The master bathroom felt chilly and unfamiliar to her when she first entered it-hard to believe it had been almost a year since she’d used it last. In some ways, she thought, a very long year…and in others, the night of the accident seemed like only last week. Like yesterday.

Nausea twisted coldly in her belly. She slammed the door on those memories and turned on the water in the shower.

She unbelted her robe and let it fall, as was her habit, in a heap on the floor, and as she did that the thought flashed into her mind: Ohmigod, I’ll have to call Mercy!

Normally, the robe would stay where it had fallen until Mercy the cleaning lady or one of her helpers picked it up and either put it in the laundry hamper, or, if it was the day for it, in the washing machine. But, of course, the cleaning service was going to have to be cancelled, at least temporarily, since it would be hard to explain to Mercy and her girls the presence of a wounded stranger in her bed.

It occurred to Celia for the first time, as she stepped into the shower, that the man downstairs was likely going to change her life more than a little. Last night, what she’d done-getting Doc to help her, picking him up, bringing him here-she’d done in the dark and fog and loneliness of a sleepless night. The wee hours of the morning. People did crazy things in the wee hours of the morning-ask anybody! It hadn’t occurred to her then what it was going to mean, practically speaking. Such as the fact that, apparently, she was now going to have to do her own cleaning.

And cooking! What about that? Celia did not cook. She’d never learned how to cook, and it was a bit late to start now. Before the accident, she’d seldom eaten a meal at home, if you didn’t count breakfast-which she didn’t. As far as she was concerned, mowing down yogurt, fruit and coffee while barely conscious wasn’t really eating. During the past year she’d discovered the wonders of the local market’s deli and meat sections, and why, with all the ready-to-serve gourmet stuff available, would anybody ever need to cook?

Now, it appeared, she was going to be shopping-and preparing meals-for two. At least for a while. As long as it takes him to get back on his feet. How long might that be?

Her fingers, following the trail of soap over the familiar contours of her own body, paused and lingered, feeling the still-alien ridges of scar tissue that wandered drunkely across her lower abdomen. A spasm shook her, something akin to grief.

I thought I was over that.

Closing her eyes, she put her head back and let the warm water sluice over her, carrying away the soap and the last of the sand that had been transferred from the stranger’s body to hers in the course of the night. That strange, unbelievable night, while she’d held him and given him her warmth, and with her body-this body-had probably saved his life. This body, that had once been a source of pride-even arrogance?-to her, and which she could hardly bear to look at, even now.

And his body…lithe and lean in the photographs…young and tan and unmarred…

With her eyes closed and the water pouring over her face she saw it again the way she’d first seen it last night-bruised and crusted with sand, and the ragged hole high on his chest where a bullet had burst through. Like her, he’d carry a scar there, for the rest of his life.

In a thoughtful mood, a calmer mood, Celia turned off the water and reached for a towel. She dried and dressed in jeans, T-shirt and sandals, tied her wet hair up in a haphazard ponytail and put on a baseball cap over it. This was her grocery-shopping outfit. Celia knew how to dress if she wanted to be noticed, and once upon a time she’d enjoyed playing the celebrity…loved the attention, the adulation. Now, the thought of being recognized in public made her sick to her stomach. Dressed like this, she was almost guaranteed not to be recognized by anyone among the hoards of surf bums and sun worshippers that swarmed over Malibu in all seasons of the year.

Pausing only to add the finishing touch-a pair of sunglasses, no makeup-she went downstairs to look in on the sleeping stranger one more time. Then she went outside, locking the house behind her, and got into the modest American-made SUV she’d bought last summer when she’d finally gotten the doctors’ okay to drive again. She was still getting used to it-it seemed tall and ungainly after her beloved Mercedes roadster, which she’d turned into a twisted mass of metal on the Pacific Coast Highway just over a year ago. The fact was, she was still getting used to driving at all and wondering if the day was ever going to come when she could get behind the wheel of a car without feeling that cold clenching of fear in her stomach.

This morning, mentally focusing on the task ahead of her the way she’d once prepared for a particularly challenging scene, she fought down the fear, backed the SUV carefully out of her driveway and headed slowly up the narrow winding street toward the Pacific Coast Highway.

Roy dreamed he was being chased. He dreamed of running, running, running, with his lungs on fire and his breath coming in tearing gasps. Then suddenly he wasn’t running, he was swimming, but his lungs were still on fire.

Sharks. Sharks were chasing him, so he couldn’t stop swimming, but his chest hurt so badly he was pretty sure he was going to die from that, anyhow. Hell of a choice-get eaten by sharks or have his chest explode. Since it was an impossible choice to make, he woke up.

He discovered that he was lying in a bed under a mountain of comforters, in a tangle of damp sheets, drenched in sweat and shivering with cold. And his chest was still on fire.

But no sharks.

Yeah, he remembered now. He’d been shot. He’d escaped from the yacht Bibi Lilith by diving overboard into the Pacific Ocean, but he’d been shot in the process and somehow, by some miracle, he’d wound up here. A gorgeous blonde and a chubby little guy named Doc had brought him here and put him in this bed, and for some strange reason hadn’t called the cops or the paramedics to come and deal with him.

And the blonde had asked him about Max.

Max! I have to get hold of Max. Have to let him know… Let him know I blew the mission. Screwed up. Failed…

The house seemed profoundly quiet. He thought about calling out for someone to come and help him, but his head was pounding and his mouth felt like the Sahara Desert. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth and managed to hitch himself up onto the pile of pillows behind him. The pain in his chest seemed to ease some, so he lay still for a minute or two, resting up for the next big step. He didn’t know how he was going to manage it, but somehow or other he was going to have to get himself to a bathroom.

While he was trying to psych himself up for the ordeal, he let his gaze travel around the room, getting a good look at the place he’d come to, trying to get a fix on the kind of people into whose clutches he seemed to have fallen. An actress and a doctor? An odd couple, for sure-but no, the doc had said they weren’t a couple. Roy was pretty sure he remembered that much.

The first thing that struck him about the room he was in was that it didn’t look like a bedroom-at least, not the kind of bedroom he’d have associated with a gorgeous single woman. The walls were mostly covered with bookcases, the built-in kind, custom-made and expensive, from real wood finished in warm honey tones, some with leaded glass doors. Where the bookcases weren’t, the walls were paneled with the same golden wood, and hung with framed photographs and movie posters, though not of the blonde, as he might have expected. These looked like old-style Hollywood. Many were black-and-white, and the people in them, a man and a woman, looked familiar to him, though he couldn’t immediately think of their names.

The shelves and glass cabinets held books, a lot of them, but other things, too. An intriguing assortment of things, from what looked to Roy like just about every corner of the world: a kachina doll, a lacquered box painted with brightly colored birds, an elephant carved from something that looked like real jade. There was a stuffed bear that looked old, and one of those Russian dolls made of wood that have dolls inside of dolls, each one smaller than the one before, and a model sailboat, and a zebra, exquisitely carved from dark wood.

On one shelf high up near the top, there was a row of golden statuettes he’d seen before, though only in pictures. The three in the middle were of an off-balance female figure holding up an open sphere. Flanking these like bookends were two pairs of statuettes most likely everybody on the planet would recognize-a sleek but rather stiffly posed bald guy named Oscar.

Roy breathed a soft, soundless whistle and thought, Wow, she said she was an actress, but she didn’t say she was famous! And he wondered why, if she’d won all those awards, he didn’t know who she was.

Celia, love…

The name popped into his memory along with images of a sleek and voluptuous curve of back and bottom and long, graceful legs walking away from him, and hunger-juices miraculously pooling at the back of his throat…

Doc called her Celia. Celia what? Didn’t ring any bells.

Summoning his strength and will, Roy pushed back the mountain of comforters and struggled to a sitting position on the edge of the bed, legs over the side, feet tingling on the carpeted floor. His head swam and nausea threatened, the pain in his head and chest, and all his joints and muscles-hell, even in his teeth-was so bad he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to keep from passing out. And he was so damn thirsty.

As he rocked himself slowly, waiting for the dizziness to pass, he noticed a ceramic mug sitting on the nightstand. It was nearly full of a brownish liquid of some kind, and it didn’t take much in the way of common sense to tell him it had been left there for him to drink. He picked it up and was shocked to discover how much strength it took to do that. Though his hands shook, he managed to get it to his lips. He sniffed, then tasted it. Ugh. Tea, tepid and unsweetened. But wet.

He drank it down clumsily, slurping and wheezing like a two-year-old, thanking God there wasn’t anybody to see him.

By the time he’d emptied the mug and returned it to the nightstand, he felt as beat as if he’d run a marathon. His body weighed a ton, and all he wanted to do was give in to the forces of gravity…keel over into that nice soft bed and sleep for about a week. But there was all that tea he’d drunk, making it that much more imperative he haul his battered carcass to the nearest bathroom, no matter what it took.

Roy had always considered himself a pretty tough kind of a guy, with guts and willpower enough to get him through just about anything, something he considered he’d just finished proving, in case there was anybody who might have doubted it before. But damned if he wasn’t ready to admit that midnight swim in the Pacific-after getting beaten half to death and shot besides-was nothing-a walk in the park-compared to what he was fixing to do now, which was drag himself a few yards across a room and one small hallway into a bathroom.

He did it, though. He got himself to where he needed to be, but by the time he’d finished his business, he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to make it back. Still, he tried and kept on trying, even while the cold, clammy walls were closing in and the darkness poured like ink into his field of vision. The last thing he remembered was centering himself on the rectangle of the bathroom doorway and lurching for it, as if it were the gate to paradise and about to slam shut in his face.

Celia was humming a song from Chicago-and wasn’t that a role she’d have given her soul to play-as she pulled the SUV into her driveway and turned off the motor. Who would have guessed picking out stuff to eat could be so much fun?

It had been a long time since she’d felt this motivated about going anywhere or doing anything. It came to her that she felt like she once had when she was starting a new role, learning a new script, getting into a new character. Eager, energized, excited. She felt…alive.

She was still singing and added a little hip bump for emphasis as she opened the back door and gathered up as many plastic grocery bags as she could carry. Juggling them into one hand long enough to unlock her front door, she went in and nudged the door shut behind her with one foot, then quickstepped across the entryway and into the kitchen, remembering to switch to under-the-breath humming in case her “patient” was still sleeping.

She lifted the grocery bags onto the counter and dropped her sunglasses and baseball cap beside them. Then, smiling to herself, warm with that lovely feeling she could only identify as excitement, she went to check on the man she still thought of as her stranger.

She turned into the hallway beyond the stairs, and it was an unmeasurable moment before her brain registered the object that lay across the far end of it, like a shadow stretching from the bathroom doorway toward the bedroom. Eagerness and reflexes continued to move her feet toward it, her smile lingering, bewildered, on her lips, even though her heart seemed already to have stopped beating.

Then, as the shock finally hit her, she uttered a horrified, “Ohmigod…” and hurled herself the remaining length of the hallway to drop to her knees beside the body that was sprawled, motionless, on the floor.