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.

Chapter 15

Looking back on it, Roy couldn’t recall a Christmas Day so full of emotional ups and downs. A real roller-coaster ride.

First, there was waking up and finding himself where he had no business being, with Celia in his bed, all tangled up in warm and sinful ways, with an unforgivable smile of well-being on his face and a faint queasiness of guilt lying ignored in his belly.

After that, his first thought-okay, maybe his second or third thought, probably because, after the murmured and kiss-interrupted good mornings and Merry Christmases, it was the first coherent word out of Celia’s mouth-was the turkey!

They found it sitting in an inch or so of chilly water, maybe half-thawed.

“Don’t panic,” he ordered, after she gave him a stricken look, as if he’d let her down, somehow, and it was all his fault. “We’ve still got time.”

He filled up the tub with fresh water and left her to shower and dress while he went downstairs to make coffee and start clearing away the debris in the living room. After he’d got most of the wrappings mashed into a plastic trash bag and the empty boxes stowed in the garage, and about half a bushel of pine needles swept up off the rug, he went and got the gold foil bag with the wind chime in it and put it under the tree.

He was standing there looking at it, thinking how lonely it seemed there all by itself after the mountains of presents he was used to seeing, when Celia came down the stairs. She was wearing red, some sort of bathrobe-that was all he knew to call it, though he imagined it probably had some other, fancier name-and her hair was tied up on top of her head with a red ribbon, with a sprig of some kind of greenery-holly?-stuck in it. She was carrying a box in her hands, wrapped in Christmas paper and ribbon, and she sort of checked when she saw him, as if she’d been hoping to sneak it under the tree when he wasn’t looking.

Caught, she came to him instead, pink and excited as a child. She handed over the present, then stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek and whisper, “Merry Christmas,” in his ear.