Kathleen Creighton - Undercover Mistress

“Or…maybe a goatee? No-wait! I know…” Something flared in her eyes, then smoldered. “A scar-right here.” Her fingers traced a line down the side of his face, from his cheekbone to his chin, her eyes never wavering from his as she said softly, “The thing about a scar, you see, is that it draws the eye, and people tend not to look past it. They see the scar, not the person. That’s what makes it the perfect disguise.”

She whirled abruptly back to Max, leaving Roy shell-shocked. A little humiliated. Definitely weak in the knees. “What do you think?”

“Sounds doable to me,” Max said, not even trying to hide his grin of delight.

After a moment, maybe in response to the murderous look Roy threw him, he coughed and got serious again. “Okay-what about a background story? We’ll need to get our people going on the paperwork as soon as possible.”

“I don’t see why I have to be old,” Roy muttered, picking up his coffee cup and scowling into it. He didn’t know quite what had just happened to him, but he felt like an invalid who’d been out of bed too long. Not to mention itchy and out of sorts, and vaguely abused. “What am I supposed to be, your father?”

“Of course not,” Celia said, giving him her kitty-cat smile. “You’re going to be my sugar daddy.”

Max guffawed. Roy choked on a swallow of coffee. “Like hell! Who’d believe that, anyway? You’re the one who’s rich, maybe you should be my…my-what the hell would you call it-my sugar momma?”

“Obviously,” said Celia dryly, ignoring Max, who was laughing so hard he had tears rolling down his cheeks, “you don’t read the tabloids. If you did, you’d know I’m supposedly broke.” Both men stared at her. “Oh, yes-after having squandered the fortune my parents left me on drugs and fast living. Trust me-showing up on the arm of a mysterious older man who also happens to be a millionaire will fit the public’s expectations of me to a T.”

“So,” Roy said gruffly after a moment, folding his arms on his chest and glaring down his ruined nose at her, “I’m a millionaire?”

She prowled closer. “Billionaire, probably. Nowadays, millions aren’t all that impressive. Canadian, I think-”

“Canadian!” Gun-shy, this time he reared back from her like a nervous horse. “Woman, you’re forgetting. I’m from Georgia-and I’ve got the accent to prove it.”

She paused, her smile flickering…and were the shadows of uncertainty in her eyes for real, or the products of her art…or merely his imagination? “Only a slight one, actually-most of the time. Anyway, we’re supposed to be disguising you, right? You want your new background to be as different from your real one as possible.” She tilted her head and studied him thoughtfully. “The real problem is going to be your actual voice. Voices are harder to disguise than faces.”

“She’s right,” said Max.

“I know-how’s this?” Though she was obviously speaking to Max, her voice was low and intimate, and her eyes never left Roy’s. “He can’t talk. He can only whisper. He was injured-in an accident. A hunting accident-in the Northwest Territories. That’s how I met him, you see-in rehab. We helped each other through…difficult times…and of course, it was inevitable that we should fall in love.” She whirled away from him, leaving him with the sensation of a man teetering on the edge of a cliff.

“And it explains the nose and the scar, too,” she said breathlessly to Max. “Oh, this is perfect. Americans don’t know anything about Canada, so any accent he might have, any odd habits, they’ll just think it’s because he’s Canadian.”

“You’re something else, you know that?” Roy said with half a laugh, desperately trying to ground himself. “Forget acting-you should be writing fiction.”

“I’ve thought about it, actually,” she said, throwing him a look that seemed to be serious-as if she really did want him to understand. “They’re not that different, writing and acting. Both are about making up characters and then crawling inside their skin. Getting to know them. Figuring out what makes them tick. Then, you figure out ways to let the audience in on the secret.” She gave a half shrug, along with a faint smile. “That’s all acting is. And maybe fiction writing, too.”

“Got it all figured out,” Roy said in a grating voice.

He wasn’t sure when his heart had begun to beat so fast, when he’d begun to feel like a hunted man, dodging through the woods, looking for a place to hide. He knew he didn’t much like the idea of anybody getting inside his skin…figuring out what made him tick…knowing him that well. And as for a woman like Celia…it scared him to death. Just as well the character she was trying to crawl inside of was only some fictitious Canadian billionaire and not the real him. So, fine, he thought, let her do that-so long as she lets Roy Starr and his secrets the hell alone.

The momentary fog of panic cleared from his vision slowly. He found that he was staring down into Celia’s eyes-dangerous waters if ever there were any-and a new question seemed to be lurking in those mysterious depths. He could hear echoes of it vibrating in the waiting silence.

“What?” he muttered thickly.

“A name,” Max said patiently. “You need to pick one.”

“Oh.” He frowned, thinking about it, but the only name in his mind seemed to be the one he’d been answering to for thirty-five years.

“I rather like…Cassidy,” Celia murmured, again not taking her eyes from Roy’s, but smiling this time. “It has a nice outdoorsy ring. Rugged.”

“Cassidy? Not bad…first or last?” It was Max’s voice, coming from far away.

Roy shook himself. “Last,” he said crossly. “Why can’t I use my own first name?” It was what he usually did when he was under deep cover-less chance of slipping up that way.

Both Celia and Max were shaking their heads decisively. “What’s your middle name?” Max asked him.

“Jackson,” Roy said, eyeing him warily. “As in, General Stonewall.”

“Initials,” Celia said, with a smile like a burst of sunshine. “R.J.-how’s that? R. J. Cassidy, Canadian millionaire.” She stood back to look at him, like an artist surveying her creation-which, in a way, she was.

She clapped her hands over her mouth, stifling giggles.

“What?” Roy glared at her, unreasonably affronted. Then he looked down at himself.

Well, hell-he supposed it did look a little ridiculous for a billionaire-Canadian or otherwise-to be wearing a pair of baby blue UCLA sweats several sizes too small for him.

“Max,” he said plaintively, “tell me you brought me my clothes.”

“She took me shopping,” Roy said morosely. “On Rodeo Drive.” He paused to take a swallow of beer from the longneck bottle he’d been cradling against his chest before continuing. “Do you know the last time a woman took me clothes shopping? It was my momma-I think I was ’bout eight.”

“She’s got good taste, you gotta admit,” said Max, nodding at the slacks, pullover and leather jacket Roy was wearing.

They were sitting on Celia’s deck and although the sun still had a ways to go before taking its nightly dive into the Pacific, there was a stiff wind blowing and a December chill in the air. The weather reports had said there was a storm moving down from the Gulf of Alaska that probably wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow, but in the meantime it had blown away the fog.

Roy looked down at himself and snorted. “I get a shock every time I walk past a mirror. Shoot-I look like my own daddy.” He didn’t, though. From what he recalled of his daddy, Joe Starr had been a man with considerably less hair and all the outward signs of a lifetime of good down-home Southern cooking.

Max studied him for a moment from behind his sunglasses. “What’s with all the complaints? You’ve been undercover before. You’ve put up with disguises a lot worse than this.”

“Yeah? I’ve never had to be somebody’s ‘boy toy’ before.”

Having been completely unsuccessful at stifling a snort of laughter, Max turned his head away, still snickering.

“Okay, laugh, but I’m tellin’ you, it’s not funny from where I’m sitting. Hell, I was supposed to be the millionaire-”

“Billionaire.”

“Whatever. She’s supposed to be my mistress-so how come I feel like I’m the one being kept?”

“Poor baby,” Max said with absolutely no sympathy. “By the way, is that your new set of wheels I saw out in the driveway?”

Perking up a bit, Roy said, “You mean, the Land Rover?” Then, since it was obviously a rhetorical question, he shrugged. “Celia’s idea-she seems to think it goes with my ‘rugged, outdoorsy image.’ Canadian…north woods…all that…stuff.” He snorted and took a swallow of beer, wondering what Celia would think of his damned image if she knew his idea of “rugged and outdoorsy” was hooking a marlin on a warm, sunshiny day on the Gulf of Mexico.

“I sure never expected I’d be driving a Land Rover,” he said, shaking his head in a wondering way. Then he looked over at Max and had to grin. “Never expected I’d be living with a soap opera queen, either. But what the hell-it’s just make-believe, right?” He lifted his beer bottle in a sardonic toast to the sparkling view.

“You sure about that?”

Roy snapped Max a look. Max nodded toward the small figure jogging toward them from far down the beach. “That’s one gorgeous and sexy woman you’re sharing a house with. Sleeping in her room-hell, in her bed. I won’t say I’d approve, given the fact that you’re working together, and the seriousness of the situation, but I couldn’t entirely blame you, either.”

“Come on.” Roy waggled his shoulders impatiently. “She sleeps upstairs, I sleep downstairs. Anyway, are you nuts?” He watched the jogging figure for a moment, and he could feel a heaviness building inside his chest. When he spoke again, his voice had grown gravelly. “Even if we weren’t in the middle of an operation-forget it. She’s from a different world. Hell, practically a different species. I’m a small-town Southern boy. She’s-you said it-she’s Hollywood royalty.”

“Can I ask you something?” Since that was such an unusual thing for Max to say, Roy nodded out of pure curiosity. “You’re…thirty-five, right? How many girls-women-would you say you dated in the past twenty or so years, while you were growing up…living in that small Southern town?”

His curiosity growing, Roy said warily, “I don’t know, quite a few, I guess-why?”

“And yet…you’re not married. Why is that?”

Feeling vaguely annoyed, Roy shrugged and wriggled around in his deck chair. He didn’t like the way the conversation was going. He’d been called to account on the subject of marriage by various members of his beloved family enough times that it was a sore subject with him. He gave Max the same answer he generally gave, which was the shortest and simplest, not necessarily the most truthful. “I don’t know-why does anybody not get married? Never met the right woman, I guess.”

“Ever think maybe that’s because those small-town Southern girls weren’t what you wanted? Maybe what you want is someone different. From a whole different world, even.”

Roy stared at him for a moment, then grunted and shook his head. He looked down at his beer bottle, but it had lost its appeal. For a moment, he toyed with the idea of telling Max how he felt about the choices he’d made in his life so far. How for him, choosing a career as an undercover agent pretty much meant there was never going to be a Mrs. Roy Starr and a bunch of little Roy Starr Juniors waiting for him back home, all cozy in a little house with a picket fence. From what he could see, undercover agents made lousy husbands and even worse daddies. He said, “That’s pure fantasy, man.”

“Maybe.” To Roy’s great relief, Max seemed to have finished with the subject. But a moment later, just when Roy was starting to relax, he said, with the air of somebody starting a whole new subject, “Ever think about the fact that actors, even Hollywood royalty, even soap opera queens, are just people, too?”

Roy couldn’t help it-he burst out laughing. “That is truly lame, you know it? You’re as bad as she is.”

Max gave him a long look he couldn’t read at all, thanks to the damn sunglasses. One thing he was sure of, though-it wasn’t even close to being a smile. “I’m serious. She’s just a woman, Roy. Okay-prettier and richer than most, but a woman all the same. Smart, too. And funny. Not to mention, nice…”

“Jeez,” Roy said, with a grimace of severe pain, “you sound just like my momma.” He made his voice high and singsong. “Roy, you know, Lena Grace Osmond’s youngest, you remember her-Jolene? She is just the nicest girl-pretty, too, and bright-”