Kathleen Creighton - Undercover Mistress

She heard his soft sigh and responded with a single bright bubble of laughter. “See? That wasn’t so bad. Have some more.”

He didn’t answer, not with words, but the eyes that flicked toward her held a spark she hadn’t seen there before and his lips, before they opened to accept the spoon, seemed to carry at least the promise of a smile.

“I thought you were going to die, you know,” she said in a conversational way as she watched the spoon make its journey from the mug to his mouth and back.

“Yeah, me, too.” The voice was sandy, still, but seemed to her to be getting stronger.

“Well, I’m very glad you didn’t.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

She laughed again. “I’m sure. Really, though. I don’t know what I’d have done if you’d died. I’d sure have had some ’splainin’ to do. Doc and me both.”

“Yeah?” He let his head relax back against the pillows, as if the effort of swallowing had exhausted him, though his eyes still studied her warily from under lowered lashes, like some wild thing watching from shadowed woods. “Why’s that?”

“For bringing you here, obviously. Instead of-”

“Where, exactly, is here?” His voice, less whispery, less sandy, now, had a gruff and growly quality that made Celia’s own throat feel in need of clearing.

“My house, of course,” she said, pausing the spoon just shy of its target. “My bedroom. Actually, that’s my bed you’re in.”

“How?” He growled the question, then watched her with narrowed eyes as he opened his mouth like an impatient nestling for the tardy spoonful.

“We carried you,” Celia said as she delivered it, watching her hand to avoid meeting his eyes. “Doc and I did. Let me tell you, you weren’t exactly light, either.”

“Umh.” It was his only comment, since a trickle of broth was making its way down his chin.

Unthinkingly, Celia snatched up the napkin from the tray and dabbed at it…and in the next instant her hand was slowing…pausing…as a strange little frisson of awareness raced across her skin. She felt frozen in time and place, unable to move her hand, the napkin or her eyes away from the place where it touched his mouth and chin.

The lips moved, forming a single word. “Why?”

She jerked, cleared her throat, and dropped the napkin back on the tray. “Why what?”

He spoke slowly, separating each word. “Why…bring…me…here?”

She shrugged. Her hand shook slightly as she picked up the spoon again. She could feel those eyes… Black coffee or chocolate…not at all sweet… “It was the closest place.”

He accepted a spoonful of broth, licked his lips, then murmured, “Why not a hospital? You didn’t call paramedics?”

Celia took a breath, placed the spoon and mug on the tray. She felt herself bracing as if to meet a physical force. “You asked me not to,” she said finally. “Begged me…actually.”

She thought, as a shiver of nameless excitement raced through her: Here’s where it begins.

“I’ve answered your questions,” she said, lifting her chin. “I think it’s time you answered some of mine. It’s only fair.”

The thought flashed into Roy’s mind: Now it begins.

Her dilated eyes, black pools surrounded by narrow rings of blue, stared into his. Mentally bracing himself for the lies he was about to tell, he tilted his head toward her, ignoring the thundering pain that small movement induced. “Fire away. Although,” he added as her lips were parting, before she could speak, “I have to tell you, I don’t remember much. About what happened to me…how I got here. Or there-where you found me. In fact, nothing actually.”

“Nothing at all?” She watched him, her gaze slanted and narrow with disbelief.

He found it unexpectedly exhausting, fighting the thrall of those eyes. He leaned his head back on the pillows and in self-defense, closed his. “Not a thing. Sorry.”

“How ’bout your name? Do you remember that?”

Her tone was sardonic, but from underneath his lashes he saw that her lips had tilted up at the corners in an oddly demure little smile. Something stirred deep down in his belly, making him think once again how glad he was to be alive and able to appreciate the wonder of a beautiful woman. Warmed by that, he chuckled and gave in. “That I can do. It’s Roy. Roy Starr.”

“Roy…” She tilted her head and touched her tongue to her lips, as if tasting the word. The stirring in his belly became a drumbeat. “You have an accent. I’m thinking…Georgia?”

He gave a huff of laughter and closed his eyes. “You have a good ear,” he murmured, thinking he’d better get himself under better control, that he was going to have to watch his step with this lady, whoever she was. Apparently not much got by her.

“Yes.” She said it, not in a smug way at all, just stating a fact, then added, “You pretty much have to, in my business.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“I’m an actress.”

“Huh. Shoulda guessed.”

“Why?”

He’d had his eyes closed, drifting closer than he’d realized to the edges of sleep, so he wasn’t prepared for the defensive, almost belligerent tone in which she shot that back at him. Which was maybe why he let his guard down for a moment, just long enough to tell her the God’s honest truth.

“Because you’re so damn beautiful,” he said in a slurred voice, opening his eyes and looking straight into hers. “I figure, anybody looks like you has got to be.”

And she surprised him again, this time giving a little shake of her head and looking away for a moment, with a twist of that expressive mouth of hers that wasn’t a smile. If he had to guess, he’d have said the look was disappointment, but given his state of exhaustion and track record at reading the lady so far, he wasn’t ready to bet on it.

“So,” she persisted after a moment, bringing her eyes back to him, “are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Are you from Georgia?”

His lips curved in a smile of surrender and his eyes drifted closed once more. “Born ’n raised. Florida, now…”

He was so damn tired. Hell, he figured he had a right to be. He’d come closer to dying last night than he ever hoped to and lived to tell about it, and the last thing he felt like doing was answering questions. Anybody’s questions, but particularly not those of a beautiful woman who seemed to be following some mysterious agenda of her own.

As if aware of his thoughts, the woman in question adopted a voice with a coy and disarming lilt. “And, what brings you all the way to Malibu, California?”

As a Southern boy born and bred, Roy was accustomed to that particular feminine tactic. He wanted to laugh, but the attempt took more energy than he had to expend. When the laugh turned into a cough, he was jolted with reminders of the pain in his throat and his chest and too many other places to count. He thought, Serves me right, getting sidetracked by a pretty face.

“Truth is,” he muttered with a frown of effort, “I was s’posed to see a man about a boat.”

“A boat.”

And he was glad he happened to be looking at her then, because if he hadn’t been, he’d never have caught that flicker of…something in her eyes. Something sharp and wary, something that made his battered body summon, from God knew where, enough adrenaline to banish, for just a moment, the fog of exhaustion from his brain.

Riding the wave, he produced a smile he meant to be disarming-charming, too, if he could hope for that much. “Yeah, I run a charter fishing boat business down there on the Gulf-my partner and I do. He’s my brother-in-law, too, as of a couple months ago. We just have the one boat, but we were thinking about expanding-getting another boat. Fellow out here had one for sale, so I came out to take a look at it. That’s what I was doing…at least, I think…” The adrenaline crested and subsided. Back in the trough, he let his eyes drift closed. His forehead furrowed, and he didn’t have to feign exhaustion and frustration…much. “Damn. Can’t…remember.”

“This man you were supposed to see.” Her voice sounded stubborn, which took away a lot of its lilt and most of its charm. “His name wouldn’t happen to be Max, would it?”

He felt his insides go cold. How does she know that? How could she possibly know about Max? What else does she know?

This time, his exhausted brain, unable to give him answers to those questions, did the next best thing it could do for him, under the circumstances. It brought down the curtain.

No! No, damn you, don’t you dare! Celia silently protested as she watched the haggard face on the pillows go slack with sleep. Her curiosity was a burning ball in her stomach, but what could she do? She was pretty sure the guy wasn’t faking this…sleep or unconsciousness or whatever it was, and she was equally sure Doc wouldn’t be pleased if he knew she’d been grilling his patient while he was still in a weak and vulnerable state. But she had so many questions!

Vulnerable…

She probably wasn’t ever going to get a chance like this again. Taking a calming breath, she placed the mug and spoon on the tray and the tray on the floor. Then, straightening, she sat and once again intently, minutely studied the battered face so incongruously framed in a delicate pattern of violets.

Is he handsome? She remembered she’d thought he might be, at first. And although at the moment it was difficult to see why, given the beard and the bruises, the battered nose and dry, cracked lips, she still thought he’d be more than presentable, under the right circumstances-cleaned up, spruced up, properly groomed, the wild and scruffy look tamed in GQ haircut and clothes.

But handsome? She disliked the word-it had always seemed to her the masculine equivalent of pretty, meaning something pleasant to look at but not terribly interesting. Celia was accustomed to handsome and pretty people. She’d been surrounded by them all her life and linked romantically with a few. More than a few, actually. Way more. Anyway, handsome faces held no great fascination for her. So, what was it about this man’s face that commanded her interest? More than commanded-she couldn’t seem to tear her eyes away.

He said his name is Roy. Roy Starr.

A nice enough name, but in Celia’s opinion it didn’t suit him. It had a gentle, heroic, good-guy quality-like Roy Rogers, maybe?-that didn’t seem to match up with the dark, battered face on the pillow. All that face needed, she thought, was a scar on one cheek and a cutlass clenched between the teeth, and he’d be the perfect pirate. Straight from central casting.

But, how did she even know if Roy Starr was his real name? What if he’d lied about that? And about being from Florida and owning a charter fishing boat business and all the rest of it?

Easy enough to check. She bent to pick up the tray and, after a moment’s consideration, set the cup of tea on the nightstand, then rose and carried the tray into the kitchen. She left it on the counter and climbed the stairs-slowly, as had become her recent habit, but for a change not even noticing the tug of muscles and tendons on newly knitted bones.

Upstairs in the master bedroom she almost never used now, she seated herself at the large executive-type desk that sat before the sliding glass balcony doors like an island in a sea of sunshine. The morning sun coming through the glass highlighted the layer of dust on the desktop, and when she took the plastic cover off the computer, swirls of tiny particles danced into the light. She removed a stack of scripts from the chair and placed them on the floor, setting free a new flight of those tiny, joyous motes. A long-ago memory flashed into her mind: as a child, she’d imagined they were fairies and had tried, enthralled, to capture them in her hands.

She sat in the chair and powered on the computer. While she waited impatiently for the computer to work its way through the process of booting up, she tried to remember the last time she’d turned the thing on. It had been a while-she considered the computer, more particularly the Internet, just one more source of public intrusion into the cocoon of privacy she’d built around herself during the past year.

She could barely remember which icon to click to connect with the Internet but after a couple of false starts, managed to get online. She remembered watching something on one of the TV news magazine shows about something called Google-and, yes, there the word was, in big multicolored letters right up near the top of the Home Page, next to a box like a tiny blank movie screen.

She thought for a moment, then typed in the words, Roy Starr fishing charters Florida in the box. Feeling clever and venture-some, she clicked with a flourish on Search Web, then sat back to wait for results.