Linda Lael Miller Bundle

by Linda Lael Miller

  The room that had been Shay’s was empty, of course. The built-in bookshelves were bare and dusty, the French provincial furniture and frilly bedclothes had been removed, along with the host of stuffed animals and the antique carousel horse, a gift from Riley Thompson, that had once stood just to the left of the cushioned windowseat. The nostalgia Shay had braced herself for did not come, however; this had been the room of a child and she felt no desire to go backward in time.

  She wandered across the wide hallway and into the suite that had been Rosamond’s, in a strange, quiet mood. The terrace doors were open to the rising rain-and-sea misted wind and Shay crossed the barren room to close them. She smiled as she stepped over the tangled sleeping bag that had been spread out on the floor, and a certain scrumptious tension gripped her as she imagined Mitch lying there.

  He was downstairs, waiting for her, but Shay could not bring herself to hurry. She reached down and took a pillow from the floor and held it to her face. Its scent was Mitch’s scent, a mingling of sun-dried clothing and something else that was indefinably his own.

  Shay knelt on the sleeping bag, still holding the pillow close and, unreasonably, inexplicably, tears filled her eyes. She couldn’t think why, because she didn’t feel sad and she didn’t feel happy, either. She felt only a need to be held.

  It was as though she had called out—in the future Shay would wonder many times whether or not she had—because Mitch suddenly appeared in the double doorway of the suite. “Are you all right?” he asked, and Shay knew that he was keeping his distance, honoring his promise that she would be safe with him.

  And she didn’t want to be safe. “No,” she answered. “Actually, no.”

  Mitch crossed the room then, knelt before her, removed the pillow from her grip and cupped her face in his strong hands, his thumbs moving to dry away her tears.

  Shay was reminded of that other time when he’d held her, before the party, when she had dissolved over a bucket of take-out chicken at the backyard picnic table. “I’m not usually such a c-crybaby,” she stammered out. “You must think—”

  “I think you’re beautiful,” he said. It was what any healthy man on the verge of a seduction would say, Shay supposed, but coming from Mitch Prescott it sounded sincere. A tremulous, electric need was surging through her, starting where his hands touched her face so gently, settling into sweet chaos in her breasts and deep within her middle. She couldn’t think.

  “Hold me,” she said.

  Mitch held her and she knew that the line had been irrevocably crossed. He kissed her, just a tentative, nibbling kiss, and the turmoil within her grew fierce. This facet of Shay’s womanhood, denied for six years and largely unfulfilled before that, was now beyond the realm of good judgment: it was a thing of instinct.

  But Mitch drew back, his hands on Shay’s shoulders now, his expression somber in the shadowy half light of that enormous, empty room. “Remember what I said earlier, Shay? About both of us being ready?”

  Shay couldn’t speak; her throat was twisted into a raw knot. She managed to nod.

  The low timbre of Mitch’s voice resounded with misgivings. “I don’t want this to be something you regret later, Shay, something that drives a wedge between us. Being close to you is too important to me.”

  Shay swallowed hard and was able to get out a soft, broken “I need you.”

  “I know,” came the unhurried answer, “and I feel the same way. But for you this house is full of ghosts, Shay. What you need from me may be something entirely different than what I need from you.” As if to test his theory, he held her, his hands strong on her back, comforting her but making no demands.

  She rested her forehead against his shoulder, breathing deeply, trying to get control of herself. “You’re wrong,” she said after a long, careful silence. “I’m not Rosamond Dallas’s little girl, haunting this house. I’m—I’m a woman, Mitch.”

  He chuckled, his breath moving warm in her hair, his hands still kneading the tautness of her back. “You are definitely a woman,” he agreed. “No problems there.”

  Shay moved her hands, sliding them boldly beneath his sweater so that she could caress his chest, and her touch brought an involuntary groan from him, along with a muttered swearword.

  Shay laughed and fell to the down-filled softness of the sleeping bag, and Mitch descended with her, one of his hands coming to rest on her thigh with a reluctant buoyancy that made it bounce away and then return again, albeit unwillingly.

  “We’re both going to regret this,” he grumbled, but his hand was beneath her sweater now, caressing the inward curve of her waist.

  That remark made sense to Shay, but she was beyond caring. There was only the needing now. “It was inevitable….”

  Mitch was kissing the pulsing length of her neck, the outline of her jaw. “That it was,” he agreed, and then his mouth reached hers, claiming it gently.

  Shay shuddered with delicious sensations as his hand roamed up her rib cage to claim one lace-covered breast. With a practiced motion that would have been disturbing if it hadn’t felt so wonderful; he displaced her bra and took her full into his hand, stroking the nipple with the side of his thumb.

  She felt a shudder to answer her own move through his body as he stretched out beside her, the kiss unbroken. A primitive, silent whimpering pounded through Shay and she was glad that Mitch couldn’t hear it. She wriggled to lie beneath him, needing the weight and pressure of him as much as she needed the ultimate possession they were moving toward.

  He groaned at this and ended the kiss, but only to slide Shay’s sweater upward, baring her inch by inch. She felt the garment pass away, soon followed by the skimpy bra beneath. She wondered why she’d worn that bra, when she’d dressed to fend off just what was happening now. Or had she dressed to invite it?

  “Oh,” she said, gasping the word, as Mitch’s mouth closed boldly around her nipple and drove all coherent thought from her mind. His hand found the junction of her thighs, still covered by her slacks and panties, and the skilled motions of his fingers caused her hips to leap in frenzied greeting. Just when she would have begged for closer contact, he gave it, deftly undoing the button and zipper of her slacks, sliding them away into the nothingness that had taken her sweater and all her inhibitions. Her panties and sandals were soon gone, too.

  “God in heaven,” Mitch muttered as he drew back to look at her. He stripped off his own clothes and returned to her unwillingly, as though flung to her by forces he could not resist.

  Mitch’s hands caressed and stroked every part of her, until she was writhing in a tender delirium, searching him out with her fingers and her mouth, with every part of her. Finally he sat back on his muscled haunches and lifted Shay to sit astraddle of him, and she cried out as they became one in a single, leisurely stroke.

  Even at the beginning, the pleasure was so great as to be nearly unbearable to Shay; she flung her head back and forth in response to the glorious ache that became greater with every motion of their joined bodies, and her hair fell from its pins and flew about her face and shoulders in a wild flurry of femininity.

  All that was womanly in Shay called out to all that was masculine in Mitch and they moved as one to lie prone on the tangled sleeping bag, their bodies quickening in the most primal, most instinctive of quests. And then there was no man and there was no woman, for in the blinding explosion of satisfaction that gripped them and wrung a single shout of triumph from them both, they were one entity.

  Afterward, as Shay lay trembling and dazed upon that sleeping bag, she tried to brace herself for the inevitable remorse. Incredibly she felt only brazen contentment. It was fortunate, in her view, that she didn’t have the strength to talk.

  Apparently, Mitch didn’t either. He was lying with one leg thrust across hers, his chest moving in breaths so deep that they must have been carrying air all the way to his toes, his face buried in the warm curve where Shay’s neck met her shoulder.

  Long minutes had passed bef
ore he withdrew from her and crossed the room to take a robe from the closet and pull it on. The wrenching motions of his arms were angry, and the glorious inertia that had possessed Shay until that moment fled instantly.

  Mitch left the room without speaking and Shay was too proud to call him back. She sat upright on the sleeping bag and covered herself with his shirt, chilled now that the contact had been broken not only physically, but emotionally. She waited in a small hell of confusion and shame, willing herself to put on her clothes and leave but unable to do so.

  Finally, Mitch returned. He flipped on the lights, revealing the starkness of the room, the scattering of Shay’s clothes and his own, the reality of the situation. Shay closed her eyes and let her forehead fall to her upraised knees.

  He nudged her shoulder with something cold and she looked up to see that he was offering a glass of chilled wine. Blushing, Shay took it in both hands, but she could not meet his eyes.

  “You’re angry,” she said miserably.

  “Shocked would be a more appropriate word,” he answered, sitting down nearby and clinking his own glass against hers.

  Now, Shay’s eyes darted to his face. She was stung to an anger that made her forget the one she had sensed in Mitch. “Shocked? You? The adventurer, the sophisticate?”

  His expression had softened; in his eyes Shay saw some lingering annoyance, but this was overshadowed by a certain perplexity. “I wasn’t casting aspersions on your moral character, Shay, so settle down.”

  “Then what were you doing?”

  He only smiled at the snap in her voice, setting his wineglass aside with a slow, lazy motion of one hand. “From the moment I met you, you’ve been trying to keep me at a distance. You might as well have worn a sign saying Look, but Don’t Touch. Yet tonight, you—”

  She couldn’t bear for him to say that she’d seduced him, though it was true, in a manner of speaking. “I’m a woman of the eighties!” she broke in, shrugging nonchalantly and lifting her wineglass in an insolent salute, though in truth she felt like sliding down inside the sleeping bag and hiding there.

  “Yes,” Mitch replied wryly. “The eighteen-eighties.”

  “I resent that!”

  He took her wineglass and set it aside. “Strange. That’s one of the most interesting things about you, you know. Despite what we just did, you’re an innocent.”

  “Is that bad or good?”

  He took the shirt she’d been clutching and flung it away, giving her bare breasts a wicked assessment with those quick, bold eyes of his. “I haven’t decided yet,” he said, and then they made love again, this time in the light.

  6

  The box containing what remained of the Rosamond Dallas legend was a silent reprimand to Mitch. He rolled his head and worked the taut muscles in his neck with one hand. You’ll be safe with me, he’d told Shay. No heavy scenes, he’d said.

  He heard that ridiculous old car of hers grind to a start in the driveway and swore. She’d come there to have dinner and to work and instead she was making a getaway in the gray light of a drizzling dawn, afraid of encountering his housekeeper.

  Mitch shook his aching head and swore again, but then a slow, weary smile broke over his face. He regretted buying the house and he regretted ever mentioning Rosamond Dallas to his agent, but he couldn’t regret Shay. For better or for worse, she was the answer to all his questions.

  He walked to the middle of the library floor, knelt on the carpet and began going through the photographs, diaries and clippings that made up Rosamond Dallas’s life.

  At home Shay took a hot, hasty shower and dressed for work. She kept waiting for the guilt, the remorse, the regret, but there were no signs of any such emotion. Her body still vibrated, like a fine instrument expertly played, and her mind, for the first time in years, was quiet.

  While she brushed her hair and applied her makeup with more care than usual, Shay remembered the nights with Eliott and wondered what she’d seen in him.

  She paused, lip pencil in midair, and gazed directly into the mirror. “Hold it, lady,” she warned her reflection out loud. “One night on a man’s sleeping bag does not constitute a pledge of eternal devotion, you know. Don’t forget that you threw yourself at him like a—like a brazen hussy!” Shay frowned hard, for emphasis, but even those sage words, borrowed in part from one of her mother’s early movies, could not dampen her soaring spirits. She was in love with Mitch Prescott, really in love, for the first time in her life, and for the moment, that was enough.

  Of course, it made no sense to be so happy—there was every chance that she’d just made a mistake of epic proportions—but Shay didn’t let that bother her either. Mitch’s feelings, whatever they might be, were his own problem.

  She drove to Reese Motors and soared into her office, only to find Ivy waiting in ambush. Even though the phones were ringing and Richard’s camera crew was crowded into the reception room, Ms. Prescott sat quietly on Shay’s couch, her legs crossed, her hands folded in her lap.

  Shay smiled and shook her head. Love was marvelous. Richard’s crew was proof positive that she was going to have to film another commercial that very day and here was Ivy, waiting to grill her about the evening with Mitch, and she still felt wonderful. “I hate to pull rank, Ivy,” she said brightly, “but get out there and take care of business. Now.”

  Ivy looked hurt but nonetheless determined as she stood up and smoothed the skirt of her blue cotton dress. “At least promise to have lunch with me,” she said with dignity. “You did say that you’d tell me all about everything, you know.”

  Shay thought about “everything” and blushed. There was no way she was going to tell everything. “We may not have time for lunch today, Ivy. There’s another commercial scheduled, isn’t there? And by the way that phone is jumping around on the desk, I’d say it’s going to be a crazy day.”

  Ivy was sulking and just reaching for the doorknob when the door itself suddenly sprang open, the chasm filled by an earnest and somewhat testy Richard. “I know we planned to wait a week before we filmed the second spot, but something has come up and—”

  Shay smiled placidly, knowing that the advertising executive had been prepared for a battle. “Come in, Richard,” she said in a sweet voice. “Don’t bother to knock.”

  Richard looked sheepish and somewhat baffled. He ran one hand through his already mussed hair and stared at Shay in speechless bewilderment.

  She laughed. “Which one are we doing today?” she prompted lightly as Ivy dashed out and began answering the calls that were lighting up all the buttons on the telephone.

  “The one you hated.”

  Shay was still unruffled. “That figures. When are they airing yesterday’s artistic triumph?”

  “Next week,” Richard answered distractedly, glancing at his watch and frowning as though it had somehow displeased him. “Do you want the makeup done here, or down on the lot, in the RV?”

  “I don’t want it done at all, but I know wishful thinking when I see it. I’ll be on down there in five or ten minutes.”

  Shay’s intercom buzzed and she picked up the telephone receiver. “Yes, Ivy?”

  “Hank’s on line two,” the secretary said pleasantly, her ire at being put off having faded away.

  Delighted, Shay punched the second button on her telephone. “Hi, tiger!” she cried. “How are you?”

  The sound of Hank’s voice was the reward, Shay supposed, for some long-forgotten good deed. “I’m great, Mom! We’re at this lake in Oregon and we caught two fish already!”

  “That’s fantastic!” Shay ignored Richard Barrett’s alternating glares of impatience and consultations with his watch and turned to the windows. The sky was gray and drops of rain were bouncing off the cars in the rear lot. It was strange, she reflected fancifully, that she hadn’t noticed the weather on her way to work. “Is it raining there?”

  The conversation with her son was sweetly mundane and when it ended, five minutes later, Shay stoically
followed Richard through the outer office and down the stairs. Due to the rain, the RV had been parked close to one of the rear entrances and the showroom itself would be the set.

  Inside the roomy motor home, Shay was helped into a neck-to-toe bodysuit with metallic bolts of thunder stitched to it, and glittery cartoon superheroine makeup was applied to her face. As gooey styling mousse was poured into her hair, she tried to be philosophical. This was the silliest commercial of the lot, but it was also the easiest. She had only to say one line, and the remainder of the spot would show used cars with prices painted on their windshields.

  “I bet you hate having your friends see you like this,” commiserated Richard’s assistant, she of the fluffy bangs and ever-present clipboard, as she pulled Shay’s mousse-saturated tresses into points that stuck straight out, all over her head.

  Shay only rolled her eyes, telling herself that the girl was young.

  “I’d die,” insisted the little helper.

  “If you keep working for Richard,” Shay replied, “your life will probably be short.”

  “Huh?”

  “Here but for the grace of God go you, my dear.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “Never mind,” Shay said with a sigh. The mousse was drying and her scalp itched. The bodysuit was riding up in all the wrong places. She told herself that that was why she suddenly felt so uncharitable.

  The door of the RV squeaked open and made the hollow sound typical of all motor homes when it closed behind Richard. He looked at Shay as though he’d just beaten her at some game and his mouth twitched. “I,” he said with quiet pomposity, “am a genius.”

  “Don’t press your luck, Richard,” Shay snarled. Her body was no longer vibrating, and there was a headache unfolding behind her right temple.

  “I said I’d die if I had to dress like that and she said my life might be short if I went on working for you,” broke in the assistant in a breathless babble. “What’d she mean by that, Richard? She won’t tell me what she meant!”