Undercover Mistress

by Kathleen Creighton

  “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 th
e present, then stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek and whisper, “Merry Christmas,” in his ear.

  Touched and gravel-voiced, he said, “Hold on, I’ve got one for you, too,” and swooped down and snatched up the gold bag.

  Holding it in her hands, she stared at him, as stunned and openmouthed as if Santa Claus himself had presented her with the gift. With a smile of pure delight and a breathy, “For me?” she clasped the gold foil bag to her chest. Then: “Open yours first,” she ordered, clamping her teeth down on her lower lip to contain her excitement.

  Quailing a little, recalling what he’d been told about her gift-giving tendencies, Roy shook his head. “Uh-uh-you first.”

  She didn’t argue with him. Holding her breath, teeth clamped down on her lower lip, she opened the bag and peeked inside. The cry she gave when she pulled out the crystal heart about made his heart jump into his throat. She held it up, trailing all those little teardrops, then slowly turned, enraptured, as countless tiny rainbows splashed across the walls and the room filled with tinkling crystalline music. When she rotated back to him, he saw her eyes were bright with tears.

  “How did you know?” she said in a wondering, catching voice. “When I was really little, I used to think sunbeams-you know, those little specs of dust in sunlight?-were fairies. This reminds me so much of that. Oh, I love it! Thank you!”

  She sat on the couch and laid the wind chime carefully across the cushions beside her, then clapped her hands gleefully. “Now you.”

  Filled more with trepidation than anticipation, Roy tackled the gift-wrapped box. He untied the ribbon, peeled off the paper, took off the lid…and with hammering heart, lifted what was inside up from its nest of tissue paper. Then, for a moment, he simply sat and stared at it.

  “It’s your boat,” Celia said, her voice sounding small, vulnerable and far away. “Is it…all right? Do you like it?”

  “It’s…” He couldn’t look at her, so he went on gazing at the boat…the perfect miniature replica, obviously hand-made, of his boat, The Gulf Starr.

  It had hit him so hard, so suddenly. He felt like he was holding his other life…his real life…in his hands. Except somehow, at some point, this life-the one with Celia-had become his reality. Now, that life-his boat, his charter business, his buddy and partner, Scott, even his family-all that seemed like fantasy to him, far-off and unreal. When had that happened?

  He shot a blind look in her direction. “How did you…”

  “I got a picture off your Web site. There’s this old guy in Topanga Canyon-he makes all sorts of models, sailboats, mostly-I have one my parents gave me when I was small-but I gave him the picture and asked him if he’d make me one like it, and…” Hunched and breathless, she gave a shrug. “I hope he got it right.”

  He swiped a hand across his nose, then cleared his throat. “It’s perfect. It’s amazing. Thank you.”

  But he couldn’t look at her, or take his eyes off the boat. He was still sitting there staring at it when he heard her get up and go in the kitchen to start Christmas dinner.

  On the subject of which-Christmas dinner-Roy figured the less said, the better.

  He tried his best to help her, he really did. But she kept chasing him off, evidently hell-bent on fixing him that Christmas dinner with all the trimmings he’d told her about and without making him peel, cut up, crack or chop stuff the way his momma did. The turkey went into the oven around noontime-Roy didn’t know whether it ever had gotten defrosted all the way, and decided he didn’t want to ask. By midafternoon the good smell of roasting turkey was beginning to override the odor of things burning, and Roy’s hopes rose a little.

  Doc wandered in around that time, bringing with him two bottles of wine and some red roses for Celia. She stopped what she was doing in the kitchen long enough to give him his gift, which turned out to be a box made out of ebony wood, carved and inlaid with gold, lapis and mother-of-pearl.

  “It’s the one from Mother and Daddy’s movie Pandora’s Box,” she told him. “They had two of them made-I think the other one’s in the Smithsonian.”

  Doc gave Roy a “What did I tell you?” wink.

  After that, he and Doc retired to the den and the big-screen TV, and by the time Celia called them to the table, they’d both drunk enough wine that lumpy mashed potatoes, burned gravy, underdone turkey and various unidentifiable dishes probably wouldn’t even register on their tastebuds.

  Not that any of that mattered. As far as Roy was concerned, the vision he was going to carry with him for the rest of his life was Celia across the table from him, bathed in candlelight, flushed and sweaty in a food-spattered apron, with wisps of golden hair escaping from her red ribbon and a smudge of flour on her cheek, looking exhausted, radiant, happy…and more beautiful than he’d ever seen her look before. That image made everything else fade to insignificance.

  That…and wondering how it was that the absolute worst Christmas dinner he’d ever eaten in his life could also be the very best Christmas present he’d ever received.

  The day after Christmas, Celia went for her morning jog, as usual. When she came back, she went straight to Roy’s room to ask him for help hanging her new wind chime. Surely, she reasoned, a man raised in the rural South who captained his own fishing boat must possess the necessary masculine skills for such a task. And, somewhere in the house, she was sure, there must be at least some basic, rudimentary tools.

  His bedroom door was pulled almost shut but not latched, the way it had been the night she’d almost gone to his bed. Remembering that night and all that had happened between them since, as she raised her hand to knock her heart had already quickened, though she sternly told it not to. I can’t think of him that way. Not now. Not until this is over.

  Her mind slammed shut on the tag-along question: And then?

  With her hand uplifted, she took a steadying breath-and froze. Roy was talking on the phone. His voice was pitched low but sounded tense and angry, and she could hear him clearly when he spoke following a prolonged listening silence.

  “I told you I drew the line at that. I told you I didn’t want her anywhere near that boat. That was the deal.” There was more silence. Then: “I know she has. I’m not arguing that. But she’s still a civilian, and she’s got no business being…dammit, Max, I don’t want her in the way when this goes down…yeah, well…uh-huh…” His voice dropped to a furious mutter.

  Celia realized she was still standing with her hand raised to knock on the door and that her whole body felt stiff and cold-literally frozen. From the other side of the door came a sharp explosive obscenity, then the thump of angry footsteps. And still she couldn’t make herself move. Her face and neck muscles hurt.

  The door swung open and Roy stood there, eyes black as midnight, hair wild, mouth set in a hard and angry line-once more a pirate, now poised on the gunwales of a ship, about to swoop down on the hapless crew.

  Uttering the same sharp obscenity, this time softly and under his breath, he gripped the doorframe, making of himself a barrier against her. “I suppose you heard.”

  Every instinct she had wanted to cut and run. Every nerve, sinew and muscle in her body cramped in protest against the iron will that held her there to face him down in icy, trembling anger. “You asked Max to take me off the…the…” Job? Mission? Operation? That she didn’t know what to call it, thus proving Roy’s point-that she was, in fact, a civilian-infuriated her. “How could you?”

  “Celia-”

  “After I told you how I felt about it.” After I told you things…feelings I’ve never told anyone else before. “You knew how much it meant to me.”

  “Dammit, that’s got nothing-aw, hell. Look, if it’s any consolation to you, Max said no…”

  The last part was shouted to her retreating back, as she finally found the strength to turn and walk stiffly and swiftly away and leave him there.

  In the living room, she paused, breathing hard, and pivoting back and forth in indecision. Upstairs to take a sho
wer? Or back to the beach to run off some of this excess adrenaline? Dammit, she didn’t need exercise. She needed someone to talk to.

  Out she went, across the deck, down her stairs and up Doc’s. She was pounding with her fist on his sliding glass door before it occurred to her that, by Doc’s reckoning, it was barely the crack of dawn. Too late to retreat; she could see him making his way toward her through the murky twilight inside the house like someone swimming through molasses.

  He squinted blearily at her through the salt-crusted glass, then swept the door open and croaked, “Celia-oh, good God, don’t tell me you’ve found another body.”

  “No-though I just may create one shortly.” She pushed past him into the house.

  “So, it’s only angry she is, then,” Doc muttered in a fake Irish accent as he pulled the door shut behind her. He shuffled over to a table covered with clutter, picked up a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, stuck it between his lips and lit it with an unsteady hand.

  Celia paused in her pacing to glare at him. “Let me have one of those.”

  “I will do no such thing!” He looked at her as if she’d suggested he give crack to a kindergarten class. He inhaled deeply, sighed through a stream of smoke and, thus fortified, coughed and said, “Now, love…tell your Uncle Doc-what has our Roy done to put your back so far up?”

  Celia told him. And was more than a little miffed when he merely shook his head and chuckled.

  “And you haven’t a clue, have you, why he would do such a thing?”

  “No. I haven’t. I don’t understand. I thought I’d done a brilliant job, quite frankly. I thought-” I thought we were good together.

  Doc shook his head and gave another sigh. “God, it is true what they say, isn’t it? Love truly is blind.”

  Once again she paused to glare at him. “What do you mean?”

  “My dear, the man is in love with you.” She was shaking her head. “Yes, I’m afraid he is-completely besotted. He’s only trying to do what strong men do when they love someone a great deal-he’s trying to protect you, of course.”