Kathleen Creighton - Undercover Mistress

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.

Babbling, “Oh God, oh God,” Celia pressed shaking fingers to the side of the man’s neck.

Then, remembering how little success she’d had finding a pulse the last time she’d tried that, she clutched his shoulders and shook him instead. And all the while she was shaking him, her mind was screaming: Damn you-Roy Rogers, or Blackbeard, whatever your name is-wake up! Don’t you dare die on me now-don’t you dare!

She heard a groan and went limp with relief. She even allowed herself to feel a bit silly, now, for thinking the worst. He wasn’t dead-of course he wasn’t. It was obvious what had happened-he’d tried to get up to go to the bathroom and had fainted. The idiot.

The man on the floor stirred. He lifted his head, then one hand. Touched a spot in the center of his forehead and uttered a puzzled but distinct, “Ow.”

“You fainted,” Celia said flatly, relief making her cranky.

His eyes jerked toward her, as if he’d only just realized she was there-which was about the same moment it occurred to her that he was stark naked.

With studied unconcern, concentrating on keeping her eyes focused on his face, she ploughed on. “What were you trying to do, kill yourself? After all I went through to save your life?”

His brow furrowed. In a slurred voice, barely audible, he mumbled, “Had to…needed…the bathroom.”

She made a scolding sound. “You couldn’t wait for me to get back? What were you thinking? You could have hurt yourself.”

Teeth flashed white in his beard-shadowed face, and her heart gave a queer little bump. It was unexpected, the first time she’d seen him smile. “Imagine that,” he said in his soft, sandy whisper, and her skin shivered as if a breeze had brushed over it, but in places no breeze could have touched.

“Yeah, well.” She coughed and shifted around so that her eyes wouldn’t be so tempted to stray along the lean, dusky length of him. “Anyway, now I have to get you back into bed somehow, don’t I? Can you get up? I suppose I can get Doc…”

This is déjà vu all over again, she thought, envisioning herself thumping up the stairs to Doc’s deck and pounding on his sliding glass door. She really hated to have to do that-Doc was almost certainly asleep, now, making up for the night he’d lost.

“Naw…I can make it. Gimme a hand…” The man was struggling to sit up, one leg flexing, his body bowing and abdominal muscles tightening, one hand going to his ribs to support his injury as his lips drew back from his teeth in an unconscious grimace of pain.

Celia gave up trying not to look at his body. As she scrambled to her feet and moved around behind him to give him what help and support she could, she was thinking he reminded her of classical statues and Renaissance paintings of tortured saints-lean, sinewy and battered, but with an elegance of line and proportion more often found in those old masters’ works than in life. He seemed completely unselfconscious about his nakedness, too, which could have meant either that the man had no natural modesty at all or else had forgotten all about the fact that he wasn’t wearing clothes. Or maybe, Celia thought, he was just too sick to care.

It was a sobering thought, and it helped to cool the heat in her face and dampen, though not completely banish, the drumlike pulse that had begun to throb in her belly.

She was sweating by the time she got him up on his feet and across the few yards of carpeted floor to the bed. He was shivering, noisily and violently, like a small child who’d played too long in the snow. The old-library-paste look of his complexion alarmed her. What will I do, she wondered, if he faints again?

She stood beside the bed gazing down at him, huddled with his eyes closed under the comforters she’d tucked tightly around him. She thought he looked worse now than he had when she’d first carried him in from the beach. He definitely seemed more pitiful than piratical, the swashbuckling thrust of beard-stubbled jaw and chin overshadowed by waving locks of dark hair plastered to his sweat-beaded forehead, where a mouse-sized lump was already blossoming. His eyes were blackened-from the injury to his nose, probably-and the skin below his lashes had a bruised and delicate look. Seeing that, she felt something twinge deep inside and drew a quick, startled breath.

I should get him something to eat, she thought, remembering Doc’s last orders. Food-that would be good.

She cleared her throat and watched the eyelashes flutter with the struggle to lift. Dark eyes, frowning vaguely, focused on her face. “Um,” she said, folding her arms across her front to contain the odd little current that had begun to vibrate in her chest, “do you think you can…I mean, can I get you something to eat? Doc said you need to eat. And fluids.” She added accusingly, as if it had been his fault entirely, “You lost a lot of blood, you know.”

Roy found he wanted to smile, if only he had the strength; she said it as if she were mad at him, glaring at him as fiercely as a woman who looked as angelic as this one possibly could. Meekly, he muttered, “S’more of that broth would be good.”

“Huh,” she said, in a lifting, surprised kind of way, “I’m amazed you even remember that. Okay-be right back.” She pointed at him as she turned, fierce again. “Don’t go to sleep, you hear me? I’ll be right…back.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Roy said in his best, well-raised Southern. Then he must have dozed off anyway, because it seemed only a moment before she was back with a tray, nudging him with her hip to make a place for herself on the edge of the mattress.

He batted at the quilts and tried to hitch himself up on the pillows, annoyed with himself for not having done that while he was alone and she wasn’t there to see him struggle. When she set the tray on the floor and leaned over him to help him sit up, her nearness, her fragrance made his heart bang with a force that seemed too much for the frail shell that contained it.

He’d never felt like this before, and it dismayed him. His hunger, thirst and weakness seemed to have combined into a vulnerability so unknown to him and so appalling he had to try to deny it. He glared at her with hot eyes and barked, “I can do it,” in a voice that was plainly fraught with pain and nausea.

“Fine,” she said with a coolness that shamed him, and placed the tray across his quilt-draped lap.

Then, what could he do but sit and stare at the steaming mug while the hunger and thirst pooled at the back of his throat, feeling like a grounded eagle gazing at a mouse just beyond reach of his talons. Shaking in waves, he remembered the mess he’d made with the tea.

“Guess maybe you’d better do it,” he mumbled, grudging and chastened. “I’d most likely spill half of it.”

She picked up the mug and spoon without saying a word, and he couldn’t bring himself to look at her face to see if there was a smile of triumph on her lips or lurking in her eyes. He focused instead on the spoon, watching as she lifted it first to her own mouth to test its temperature before offering it to him. She did that so casually, so naturally it didn’t occur to him until later what an intimate act it was.

The broth was the best thing he’d ever tasted. It both warmed him and made him feel stronger, and when, after several spoonfuls, the worst of the shivering seemed to have stopped, he said in a humble tone, “You’re pretty good at this. You sure you’re not a nurse?”

Concentrating on her task, she replied absently, “No, I only play one on TV.”

“No kidding?” His eyes flicked to her face, making him jerk just enough to dislodge a few drips of broth from the brimful spoon. Before when that had happened he’d felt embarrassed and ashamed; now he barely noticed. “What,” he asked as he lifted a hand to swipe at his chin, “are you on some kind of series?”

“Sort of,” She was leaning over to reach for something-a napkin-on the nightstand, and he couldn’t see her face. He gazed instead at her ear, the back side of it, the curve of the hair-line, the random wisps of blond hair that had escaped from her ponytail. It struck him how very young and innocent, even sweet, that part of her seemed.

Distracted, he asked, more bluntly than he’d intended, “So…who are you?” Then, because he thought that might sound a little rude, tried to amend it. “I mean…what’s your name? Should I-”

“Celia Cross.”

“Celia…” Celia, love… He tested the name on his tongue, and thought, I remember that. Not that it meant any more to him now than it had when he’d first heard Doc say it. “Are you somebody I should…recognize?” Because he didn’t.

She threw him an amused look, not quite a smile. “Probably not. The show I’m on is a soap.”

“Pardon me?”

“A soap opera-or, as we in the business prefer to say, daytime drama. It’s called Doctors and Lovers.” The amused look twitched into irony. “I play one of the latter. Who also happens to be a nurse-Suzanne Sullivan, in case you’re interested. Head surgical nurse at Rosewood Medical Center, Rosewood, Ohio.” Something-a shadow-took the light from her eyes as she lifted the mug of broth once more.