Kathleen Creighton - Undercover Mistress

She whispered soundlessly, “Oh, my God…”

Out there in the dark and the fog, he’d been only…well, a body. A human being, obviously. A man, sure-but anonymous. Impersonal. Even not quite real. But now…oh God, now he had a face. An arresting face, even by the standards Celia was accustomed to-Hollywood standards-with strong bones and symmetrical features. Awake and healthy, she thought, he’d probably be a very handsome man. Though matted with sand, she could tell his hair was dark, and so was the beard stubble that covered his chin and jaws and nicely chiseled upper lip. Dark lashes made crescent shadows on his cheeks. She wondered what color his eyes would be.

The hair on his body was dark, too, and frosted with sand…clotted with sand that was mixed with something darker in two places-one low on his side, the other, larger and less evenly defined, high on his chest, above the bulge of pectoral muscle and below the collar bone. His skin must be deeply tanned, she thought, for his deathlike pallor to have turned it such a dreadful shade of gray.

He was a person. A badly hurt person. A person even she could see was in real danger of ceasing to be one, forever.

“Celia, love…” Doc prompted. There was a note of desperation in his voice.

She shook herself. “Yeah, well…I suppose…” She hesitated, chewing her lip while she tried to think. Dammit, there really was no choice. “My bedroom-”

“No way I’m climbing those stairs. Perhaps the couch? It’s going to be the floor, if you don’t make up your mind quick.”

“My bedroom’s downstairs,” Celia said shortly, nodding toward the hallway beyond the stairs. “The den-slash-guestroom’s upstairs now. I had to move after the accident.” Her lips twitched wryly. “Tough to climb stairs with two broken legs.”

“Ah. Yes. Right. Okay, fine. Lead the way.”

The doctor shuffled sideways, Celia changed places with him in a clumsy do-si-do, and together they managed to maneuver the unconscious and increasingly cumbersome body down the hallway and into the room that at one time had served her as an office, library, memorabilia storage closet and guest room. Now, the queen-size adjustable bed she’d had installed after the accident occupied a great deal of it, along with a comfortable leather armchair that had belonged to her father, a huge plasma screen TV set, and the bookcases and glass-fronted cabinets that held the things that were most precious to her-books and photographs, of course, her three Daytime Emmys, and the assortment of odds and ends, ranging from priceless to quaint to totally silly, sent or brought back to her from movie locations all over the world by her legendary parents. Only the desk and the computer, which she’d never used much anyway, had been banished.

Now, Celia hoisted her burden’s sagging midsection onto the armchair, draped his legs over the wide, curved arm and left Doc to hold up his half while she hurried to turn on lamps, remove the assortment of throw pillows and fold back the lavender velvet comforter that covered her bed.

Resisting a nervous and completely uncharacteristic housewifely impulse to tug and tuck and straighten, Celia turned and regarded the limp form draped across the chair. “I don’t know, do you think we should try to get some of the sand off of him first?” Now that the man was actually in her room, she was beginning to have serious doubts, cold-crawly-under-the-skin, lead-weight-in-the-stomach doubts, about what she’d just done.

Doc gave her a withering look. “Dear heart, if we don’t get the poor fellow warmed up and some fluids into him and that wound tended to now, sand is going to be the least of your worries. Come, come-pick up your end and let’s get him into that bed-and do try not to jostle him any more than you have already. Don’t want to get that wound bleeding again. Assuming he’s got any blood left in him…”

Sand…and blood. In my bed. Great. Letting out her breath in a determined gust and steeling herself against an unreasonable and queasy reluctance to touch that chilled flesh again, she thrust her arms under the man’s legs. Which she couldn’t help but notice were bony and muscular, with not an ounce of fat on them, and moderately adorned with coarse dark hair. Quite nice legs, actually; under different circumstances she’d even have said they were attractive.

“Celia…love-”

“Okay, okay.” She braced herself and lifted, took two shuffling steps with her ungainly burden, heaved, lifted and dropped it. Then she straightened and stood staring down at the incredible sight before her: the dusky-skinned, sand-encrusted, battered and bruised body of a man, sprawled on her clean white delicately violet-sprigged sheets.

Doc Cavendish, unimpressed by the strangeness of the vision, shoved her briskly out of the way and bent over the injured man, lifting an eyelid, feeling for a pulse. Throwing her a glance over his shoulder, he snapped, “Bleeding seems to have stopped. Hypothermia’s the most critical condition. More blankets-electric, if you have one. Heating pads. Hot water bottles. Failing that, you might soak some bath towels in hot water, wring them out and bring them to me. Now-chop-chop!”

Celia’s heart was pounding, her insides quivering with a strange excitement as she hobbled up the stairs, snatched blankets and comforters from the linen closet there, then carried the pile down the stairs to her room where she dumped it on the armchair. In the downstairs bathroom, across a narrow hallway from the room she’d taken over as her bedroom, she grabbed an armload of towels and, from under the sink, the flat rubber hot water bottle she’d brought home with her from the hospital and never used again. She ran the water scalding hot and filled the bottle, then dumped the towels in the shower and left the water running over them. They were beginning to send up billows of steam as she ducked back across the hall.

Out of breath, she watched Doc slide the rubber bottle inside the cocoon of blankets that now encased the unconscious man. “Shall I…I don’t know, boil some water?”

He gave her a sardonic look as he straightened. “He’s not a lobster, dear heart. Warm will do. Plain water, tea, bouillon, chicken soup, I don’t care-just get as much warm liquid into him as you can whilst I go and fetch my doctor stuff.”

Celia whirled to stare at his retreating back with alarm. “But-but…you’re not going to just…leave me here with him! What shall I do if he…if he-”

“If he dies?” Doc looked back at her, his jowly cheeks creased in a weary smile. “I’d be greatly surprised if he did, considering what he’s already survived. Don’t worry-I’ll be back in a jiff.” And he was gone.

With a frustrated whimper and one last wild look at the blanket mound on the bed, Celia headed for the kitchen, where, like the character she’d played for so long on one of the world’s most popular daytime soaps, she proceeded to follow the doctor’s orders. “Nurse Suzanne, another unit of O-neg-STAT!”

And, she fervently reflected as she filled a mug with hot water, dropped in a couple of bouillon cubes and set it in the microwave, she’d give just about anything right now for a few of those units of O-neg, not to mention the actual skills and training to know what to do with them.

Back in the den, she placed the mug of steaming broth on the nightstand, then took a deep breath and sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed. The mound of blankets beside her remained still as a corpse, and when she touched it, felt cold as one, too. Oh, God…I don’t want to do this!

Okay-she’d asked for this. It had been her idea to bring the guy here, right?

She hitched herself around until she was braced by the pillows piled against the headboard-carved mahogany, hand-carved in someplace exotic, India, maybe, she’d forgotten exactly where-that had been her mother’s. With a considerable amount of wriggling around, she managed to get herself wedged behind the unconscious man’s shoulders so that his head was propped on her chest.

His head…on her chest. Cold, damp, sand-crusted hair pressed against her bare skin…her bra…her breasts.

Suppressing a shudder and closing off that part of her mind, she stretched out her arm, groped for and found the mug. Carefully, she lifted it-and nearly let it slip from her fingers when she felt a moan vibrate through the man’s body. It seemed to penetrate through his skin and straight into hers.

She froze, quivering inside. She could feel her heart hammering against the cold, muscular back, feel the weight of that back pressing sand grit into her skin. His head rolled on her shoulder, sending new shock waves through her. She heard the faintest of whispers and, bending her head close to his lips, once again felt that stirring of air across her cheek.

“It’s all right,” she managed to say in a broken, gasping voice. “You’re safe now.”

“Max…”

“Yes, yes…it’s okay,” she murmured, soothing him while her mind was shrieking, Who the hell is Max? “Don’t try to talk-”

“Max…Max!” She could feel powerful muscles tense as he struggled to lift his head. A terrible shudder racked his body. Words like ground gravel strained to escape from jaws gone rigid as stone. “It’s…boats, Max. Could kill…millions. Don’t tell anyone. They can’t know!”

Fear rushed through Celia like a blast of cold wind.

One month earlier:

“Boats…” Roy Starr dropped the word like a lead weight into the silence as he stared across the vastness of the city that slumbered beneath an indigo blanket bejeweled with a billion points of light. Out there where the lights ended lay the Port of Los Angeles, one of the largest, busiest seaports in the world. Every year, millions of tons of cargo moved in and out of the harbor, on uncounted thousands of ships.

The man beside him, shorter by half a head and slighter by fifty pounds, aimed his gaze in the same direction and nodded. “According to the chatter, that’s where the next attack’s gonna come from. Not by air this time. By boat. What’s that line from…whoever it was-‘One if by land…two if by sea…’”

“Longfellow-‘Paul Revere’s Ride,’” Roy said absently. He’d been raised by a Georgia schoolteacher, so he knew those kinds of things. He glanced at his handler, the man he knew only as Max, and frowned. “They been able to narrow the target any?”

There was the hiss of an exhalation as Max pivoted and leaned his backside against the fender of his car. “Most likely west coast. That’s all they’ll say at the moment. Likely timed for the Christmas or New Year’s holiday, for maximum impact. We’ve stepped up security on the main ports of entry-Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles-checking all container ships from point of departure on, screening for radiation, and so on. We feel we’ve got the big ones covered pretty well.”

“Then…”

“It’s not the big ones we’re worried about.” Max paused. “You saw that segment on 60 Minutes a while back?”

Roy nodded, his lips twisting in a smile without much humor to it. “Yeah, I wish they’d quit giving the terrorists ideas.”

Max snorted. “I doubt there’s anything they could come up with Al-Qaeda hasn’t already thought of. This one, though…” He paused again, and Roy wondered whether it had been his imagination or whether a shiver had just passed through the man’s body. “Think about it-how many small-boat harbors do you suppose there are between San Diego and Santa Barbara? How many private fishing boats…yachts…sailboats? Wouldn’t take a very big one to carry a biological or chemical agent into a marina. With the right wind conditions…” His voice trailed off.

Roy nodded, fighting a wave of nausea. In Los Angeles, unless there was a storm moving down from the Gulf of Alaska, or the Santa Anas were blowing, the prevailing breeze blew from the west, straight in off the Pacific. It wouldn’t take much of one to carry a killing cloud into the basin, where eight million innocent souls lived and worked…and slept. “Jeez,” he said.

After a long, cold silence, he took a breath. “You must have a lead, or you wouldn’t have called me.”

Max straightened up and nodded. “Not sure you’d call it a lead. One name keeps popping up more often than it should. Abdul Abbas al-Fayad-know him?”

Roy frowned. “Sounds sort of familiar. Where’ve I-”

“He’s been on the watch list for a while, but you’d probably know him from the tabloids. Made the news a few years back when he bought a mansion in Bel Air from some old-time famous movie star, then proceeded to annoy the hell out of his neighbors when he turned the place into a cross between the Playboy mansion and something out of the Arabian Nights.”