Kathleen Creighton - Undercover Mistress

It was like seeing himself in the mirror at Art Milos’s party all over again. After that, he pretty much accepted the fact that Betty Starr’s little boy Roy was no more-at least until the current operation was over.

But, while the operation put little or no pressure on him personally, he was well aware that the same could not be said of Celia. After all, she’d claimed-bragged, really-she could get the two of them invited on board al-Fayad’s yacht. No doubt she would, eventually, but the problem was, it had to be sooner rather than later. According to Max, intelligence chatter was growing ever more insistent about a major west coast “event” planned for sometime during the “holidays.” And Celia and Roy had had no contact whatsoever with the prince and his retinue since the night of Art Milos’s party.

No one nagged-it wasn’t Max’s way, or Roy’s, either-but it was obvious to Roy that Celia was feeling the pressure. He was certain that was the reason for her growing moodiness, and her habit of sneaking out of the house at night to go for long walks alone on the beach, maybe even the way her smile faded whenever she looked at him…the way her eyes darkened and slid away from his. She’s afraid, he thought, that she might fail.

What surprised Roy most was, for reasons having nothing to do with terrorist threats against a sleeping city, he didn’t want her to fail.

In any event, as the Christmas holiday approached, Roy’s and Celia’s social calendar got busier and busier. The parties were bigger and glitzier, and nerves more and more on edge.

“Why can’t you just impound the damn boat?” Roy exploded one day to Max as they sat drinking beer on Celia’s deck. “I don’t know…make up a reason.”

“Wish we could,” said Max with a gloomy shrug. “But the man hasn’t broken any laws. Technically, he’s a member of the ruling family of a country friendly to ours. We can’t just confiscate a hundred million dollars worth of yacht on a hunch.”

“What about the guys that roughed me up-the bodyguards?”

“Nothing on them, either. Sorry.”

“Sorry?” Roy jumped up to pace in the confines of the deck, arms folded and shoulders hunched in spite of the fact that three straight days of Santa Ana winds had pushed the temperature into the low eighties. “What’s ‘sorry’ gonna do? Christmas is…what, four, five days away? And what am I doing? I’m going to parties.” He made a disgusted noise, then rounded suddenly on Max. “Send me back in. Let me check out the damn boat. Look at me-my wound’s pretty well healed, I’m strong…I’m fine. Getting caught last time was a fluke-I’ll be more careful this time. Come on, man…”

Max was shaking his head. “Even if I was willing to let you, you’d never make it. Security’s too tight-you found that out. The only way to put that yacht out of commission-other than her way-” he tilted his head toward Celia, who they could see on the other side of the sliding glass door, talking on the telephone “-would be with several well-placed packs of C4. And don’t even think about it,” he added, with a wry smile at the look on Roy’s face, “because we can’t just blow up a hundred million dollars worth of yacht on a hunch, either.”

“Why on earth would you want to blow up Abby’s yacht?” Celia asked innocently as she joined them, placing the cordless phone on the table among the beer bottles, as if it were a gift she’d brought them. She waited, returning their frowns with a maddeningly angelic smile.

Finally, when neither one of them asked who was on the phone, she relented, first helping herself to a sip from one of the beer bottles-Roy’s, as it happened. She wiped her lips, then said, “That was my-” she coughed delicately “-a reliable source, who tells me on good authority-” her smile came out like an irrepressible child playing peekaboo “-that Abby is planning to attend the premiere party tomorrow night.”

Max looked at Roy. “I take it this is one on your agenda?”

Roy nodded. “Yeah. I get to wear a tux. Can’t wait.” But a strange little quiver was running through him. Excitement? Foreboding? Anticipation? He lifted his bottle to Celia in a silent toast and saw warmth bloom in her cheeks.

At the time, he was sure he understood why.

“You look nice,” Celia said.

Under the circumstances she thought she might be forgiven the enormity of the understatement; Lord help her-help both of them-if Roy ever found out how her body warmed at the sight of him…how her heart stumbled and her skin prickled with the dangerous impulse to step close and feel his arms around her…

Instead, she gave his lapel a pat and moved one pace back, tilting her head judiciously to one side as she gazed at him. Amazing, she thought. Nude, his naturally thin, hard-muscled body had made her think of Greek statues and portraits of martyred saints. Clad in a classic tux, that same wiry grace assumed a natural elegance that brought to mind images of fairy-tale princes.

“You sure this thing’s okay?” he asked, tugging at his neck-wear in a potentially destructive way. The white silk cravat was a compromise; he’d absolutely refused to wear a bow tie.

She slapped at his hand. “Leave it alone. You’ll probably set a trend.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said with a mock-serious frown, staring over her head like a soldier at inspection. Then his gaze flicked downward and his features relaxed. “You look nice, too,” he said softly.

“Thank you.” She smiled as she looked into his eyes, remembering he’d said those same words the night of Art Milos’s party, the first they’d attended together. And when he smiled back, she knew he was thinking of that night, too. His teeth gleamed in the lights that cast a daytime brilliance over the theater’s entrance and the crowd of celebrity watchers gathered there, and though the silvered hair and blue contact lenses softened his pirate looks somewhat, her heart gave a queer little bump just the same.

His smile slipped, became crooked. “So,” he growled under his breath, “we gonna do this, or what?”

She drew a meager breath. “Ready when you are, R.J.”

He offered his arm. Celia tucked her hand into the bend of his elbow and when his hand came to cover hers, felt a shiver ripple through her. Behind them, the limousine purred quietly away, and they stepped together onto the red carpet. She felt the cool tickle of her mother’s favorite diamond-and-topaz earrings on her neck as she lifted her head to smile at the waving, cheering crowd.

It was something she’d done-oh, many times before, the first when she was all of five years old, decked out like a princess and clinging proudly to her father’s hand. But how, she wondered, must Roy be taking all of this? Surely, the glitz, glamour and celebrity must be a little overwhelming to someone from…where was it? Oglethorpe County, Georgia?

She glanced nervously at him. He said something out of the side of his mouth, something she couldn’t hear, and she whispered, “What?” and leaned closer.

“I said, this reminds me of my senior prom,” he growled, showing his teeth like a ventriloquist.

She gave a laugh, half surprise and half…something else. Envy, perhaps? “I’ve never been to a prom,” she whispered, gazing at him as new layers of awe, of emotions unnamed, wrapped themselves around her heart.

“I’ve never been to a premiere. Guess we’re even.”

She felt heavy inside…half-suffocated. She thought, This is terrible. What am I going to do? I adore this man…

Then they were inside the theater, making their way through a vast, crowded lobby decorated in the plush-carpeted, gold-painted opulence of recreated “Old” Hollywood and, of course, some larger-than-life statues of the movie’s major characters. Ushers came to show them to their seats. The theater darkened, the audience grew quiet and the movie began.

Roy hoped nobody asked him what he thought of the movie, because the truth was, he didn’t remember one thing about it.

Maybe it had something to do with what he’d said to Celia about the whole thing reminding him of his senior prom. For some reason, sitting there beside her in that dark theater, it was as if he were back there again, in high school, sweating through a Friday night movie date, and his mind more on what he might manage to convince the girl to let him do with her later on than anything up on the screen. There’d been a lot of girls…

His prom date-what was her name? Jennifer…something. Jen…Jennie Dooley-that was it. He recalled they’d done some fooling around that night-not as much as he’d have liked, probably more than she’d intended-and he’d taken her out a few times after graduation. But evidently she’d been saving herself for somebody with more to offer her than some sultry summer nights, because she’d gone off to college in the fall unsullied-at least by him. Last he’d heard, she was married to a state senator in Atlanta and had three or four kids.

He thought about the girls he’d known, where they were now…what they were doing. Sitting there in the dark theater, remembering them the way they’d been, it didn’t seem all that long ago. When had he got to be thirty-five?

It hit him then-if it hadn’t been for the woman sitting next to him, his life would have ended right there, at thirty-five years old. And what had he got to show for it?

A tiny frisson of…something…rippled through him-loneliness, maybe? Regret?

Not regret-I made my decisions, chose my path with my eyes wide-open. I’ve done good things…made some difference, maybe. And maybe I’m gonna make some more. So, no-no regrets. But loneliness? Okay, maybe. But hey-that’s life. Right? Sometimes you have to make sacrifices.

He shifted restlessly and glanced over at Celia. He wondered what she’d think if he were to put his arm across the back of her seat…then let it sort of slide…forward…onto her shoulders…take her hand and pull it over onto his thigh, the way he used to do back in high school.

Yeah, right. Smiling to himself in the darkness, he faced the giant movie screen again.

After the movie, an endless line of limos moved in to whisk everybody off to the party, which was being held in some swank hotel in Beverly Hills, in a huge ballroom fixed up like a set from the movie, with pillars and palm trees, ferns and fountains, and a whole lot of fancy food and champagne. It was loud with music and congratulatory chatter, bright with dazzlingly beautiful people and bathed in a rich golden light.

In the midst of the splendor, Roy stood like one beleaguered, with his back to a pillar that looked like marble but he was pretty sure was actually made of something lightweight, like Fiberglas or maybe plastic foam. He was sipping champagne-which he’d never liked, much-and supposedly keeping an eagle eye out for the prince and his retinue.

Instead, at the moment, he was watching Celia. Small wonder. Even in the company of beautiful people, she caught the eye…ensnared it…commanded it.

Taken piece by piece, he supposed, she wasn’t that much more striking than any of the dozens of gorgeous women there. Her dress was slinky and all but backless, but elegant rather than sexy, her hair upswept…elegant…leaving her long neck bare. Her hair and her dress were both the exact color of the champagne in his glass, come to think of it, and shimmered like it, too, and the jewelry she wore…diamonds and some kind of deep golden stones-topazes, maybe?-caught the light and threw it back like sparks. Her body, of course, was perfection in his opinion, all long slender lines and dizzying curves.

All those things taken together…bright…beautiful…rich… elegant… She was, he thought, like a shaft of golden sunlight slashing across a landscape of muted purples and grays.

He pushed the fantastic thought away. To help it stay there, he drained his champagne glass in one angry gulp and went back to scanning the ballroom for Prince Abdul Abbas al-Fayad. That was what he needed-to keep his mind on his job. Just let me find him, he thought…let Celia work her magic-or, as Doc puts it, her wiles-get us invited on board the damned yacht, then we can go home.

At least he no longer felt so much like a fish out of water, paralyzed with worry about somebody recognizing him from his former life. Actually, except for the fact that, at the moment, his feet were killing him, he’d grown fairly comfortable in his new role. It happened like that in undercover work. If he stayed in a situation long enough, sometimes the lines between his undercover life and his real one got blurred, his old identity slipped further and further away. Sometimes it even got misplaced temporarily, shoved into the back cupboards of his memory. Until he happened to stumble across it again, the way he had tonight. Those were the danger times, when the memories, voices, people he loved from his past life nagged at him, distracted him, made him feel restless and off balance. Maybe guilty, too, for letting himself get sucked too far into the new life. For forgetting who he was…what was real and what was not.