Linda Lael Miller Bundle

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Wait outside, Chrissie,” Richard said, all but patting the girl on the head.

  Reluctantly, Chrissie obeyed.

  “Does your wife know about her?” Shay asked, just to be mean.

  Richard cleared his throat and pressed at his hopelessly old-fashioned glasses with one index finger. Despite this display of nervousness, he was not an easy opponent. “You have an audience outside,” he said. “Why, darlin’, your fame is spreadin’ like wildfire!”

  Shay stood up with a sigh. “That was the worst imitation of J.R. Ewing I’ve ever heard,” she snapped.

  Richard only shrugged, and when they entered the showroom moments later, Shay was even more annoyed to find that she did indeed have an audience. All of the salesmen were there, along with their wives and even a few children. It was the presence of the children that kept Shay from showing them that she was Rosamond Dallas’s daughter by making a scene.

  “Stand right there on your X, darlin’,” Richard drawled in the same bad Texas accent. “This’ll be over before you can say—”

  “Oh, shut up!” Shay grumbled, taking her mark.

  The lights were blaring in her face. She drew a deep breath and tried to be professional, which wasn’t easy in a thunderbolt bodysuit and outrageous makeup. Mentally she went over her line. Oh, to do this in one take and have it behind her!

  The clapboard snapped in her face and Shay smiled broadly, trying not to think of how her hair was standing out from her head in mousse-crusted points. She knew she looked as though she had just stuck her finger into a light socket, and that, of course, was the whole idea. “Come out and see for yourselves, folks,” she crowed winningly. “Our prices here at Reese Motors, 6832 Discount Way, are so low that they’ll shock you!”

  It was a wrap! Shay wanted to jump up into the air, Mickey Rooney-style, and click her heels together.

  “Do it again,” Richard said with exaggerated patience.

  Shay couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d doused her in cold water. “What?” she demanded. “Richard, that take was perfect!”

  “It wasn’t anything of the sort. I want more emphasis on the word ‘shock.’”

  He was repaying her for the barbs they’d exchanged inside the RV and that knowledge infuriated Shay. “I think this gunk in my hair makes that point on its own, don’t you?”

  “No,” Richard responded flatly.

  He made her go through the scene half a dozen times before he would admit to any sort of satisfaction with it, and that, when he gave it, was grudging.

  Shay muttered as she stomped back into the RV and slammed the door behind her. Refusing help from the vacuous Chrissie, she slathered cleansing cream onto her face and carefully wiped away the glittery makeup. After that, she squeezed into the vehicle’s miniature bathroom and took a tepid shower, muttering through shampoo after shampoo. A bathrobe that probably belonged to Marvin was hanging on the hook inside the door, and Shay helped herself to it.

  When she left the bathroom she was startled to find Mitch Prescott sitting at the RV’s tiny table, his hair moussed into an elongated crew cut rising a good four inches above his head. “May I say,” he told her blandly, “that I was shocked by your behavior this morning?”

  The utter ridiculousness of the moment dissolved Shay’s foul mood, and she began to laugh. “You’re crazy!”

  Mitch caught her hand and pulled her onto his lap. “About you,” he said, on cue.

  Shay knew that she shouldn’t be sitting on this man’s lap in an oversized bathrobe with all of Reese Motors’s employees gathered outside, but she was powerless to move away. She looked at Mitch’s hair and into his laughing brown eyes and she thought, I love you. God help me, I love you.

  Mischievously he opened the front of her robe, revealing her breasts, and she could not lift a hand to stop him. “It’s a good thing you washed that stuff out of your hair,” he mumbled distractedly, and she could feel his breath on her right breast, feel the nipple tensing for the touch of his tongue. It came soon enough, and Shay gasped, the sensation was so wickedly delicious.

  “Why?” she groaned.

  “Because we might have mated and produced a punk rocker,” he answered sleepily, still busy with her breast.

  Using laughter and the last bit of her willpower, Shay thrust herself off Mitch’s lap and out of his reach. Watching her, he helped himself to a hairbrush left behind by Chrissie and returned his hair to some semblance of normalcy. Shay wanted to use that time to dress and escape, but she couldn’t seem to work up the momentum.

  When the maestro held out his hands, she moved into them, moaning softly as she stood before Mitch, shivering as she felt the robe open. The intermezzo was a sweet one, brief and soaring, underscored by Shay’s own soft cries of pleasure as she was taught a new tune, note by glorious note.

  Minutes later, fully dressed, she left the RV with her head held high and her body humming. The vibrations carried her through the rest of the day.

  If the night before had been given over to dalliance, that one was all business. The rest of Mitch’s furniture had arrived and he and Shay sat on a sinfully soft burgundy sofa in his library, facing each other instead of the crackling fire, half-buried in scrapbooks and old photographs.

  As she explained what she knew of her mother’s life, Shay found herself thrust from one emotional extreme to another, from laughter to tears, from love to anger. Mitch only listened, making no move to touch her.

  “Sometimes,” Shay confided pensively as the long evening drew toward a close, “I think she was the most selfish person on earth. Riley loved her so much, and yet…”

  The small cassette recorder between them hummed and whirred. “Yes?” prompted Mitch.

  “I think that was the very reason that Rosamond began to lose interest in him. Finally she seemed to feel nothing but contempt. But Riley was such a good man, so decent and solid—it just doesn’t make sense!”

  “Since when are legendary movie stars expected to make sense?”

  Shay shrugged and then yawned. “Rosamond certainly didn’t.”

  “She must have made you angry,” Mitch remarked, snapping off the recorder with a motion of his hand.

  The words jarred Shay out of her sleepy stupor. Suddenly she didn’t want to talk about Rosamond anymore, and she didn’t want to talk about herself. “I’d better be going,” she said, moving to rise off the sofa.

  Mitch stopped her by taking her arm in a gentle grasp. “She did make you angry, didn’t she?” he persisted quietly.

  “No.”

  “You’re lying.”

  Shay bounded off the couch and this time there was no stopping her. “Who do you think you are?” she snapped. “Sigmund Freud?”

  Mitch sat back in that cushy sofa, damn him, and cupped his hands behind his head, not saying so much as a word. Shay was reminded of the scandalous way he’d loved her in the RV earlier and she sat down in a nearby chair, her knees weak.

  “Everybody has hang-ups about their mother,” she sputtered when the silence grew too long and too damning. She glared at Mitch, remembering all that Ivy had told her over the past few years. “Or their stepmother.”

  Mitch sighed and stared up at the ceiling, still maintaining his attitude of relaxed certainty. “The difference is, my dear, that I can talk about my stepmother. She and I don’t get along because she was my father’s mistress before he and my mother were divorced. In effect, you could say that she took him away from us.”

  “My God,” Shay whispered, feeling sympathy even though there was nothing in Mitch’s voice or manner that asked for it.

  “It was traumatic at the time,” Mitch said evenly. “But Dad was a good father to me and, eventually, my mother remarried. She’s disgustingly happy.”

  “But Ivy’s mother—”

  “Elizabeth does the best she can. She loved my father.”

  Shay was silent.

  “Your turn,” Mitch prompted.

  She stared into
the snapping fire for a while, drifting back to another night. “Rosamond was her own greatest fan,” she said. “And yet she could humiliate herself so easily. I remember one of her lovers—a tennis bum—he was good-looking but if you tapped on his forehead, nobody would answer the door.”

  Mitch chuckled. “Go on.”

  “He was part of the reason that Mother got bored with Riley, I guess. After Riley and Garrett were gone, he decided that it was time to get back on the old circuit. He was going to walk out and I’ll never forget—I’ll never forget the way Mother acted. He was trying to get into his car and she was on her knees in the driveway, with her arms wrapped around his legs, begging him to stay.” Shay turned shadowed, hurting eyes to Mitch’s face. “It was awful.”

  “You saw that?” Mitch must have tried, but he failed to keep the annoyance out of his voice.

  “I’ve seen a lot worse,” she answered.

  “Stay with me,” he said, clearing away aging memorabilia to make a space beside him on the sofa.

  Shay couldn’t leave, but she suddenly felt too broken and vulnerable to stay. “I don’t want—”

  “I know,” he said, standing up and extending one hand to her. After a moment or so, she rose and took the offered hand and Mitch led her gently up the stairs and into his bedroom.

  Furnished now with a massive waterbed, chairs and bureaus and a freestanding chess table set up for play, the room didn’t seem so vast.

  Deftly, as though he did such things as a part of his daily routine, Mitch undressed Shay and then buttoned her into one of his pajama tops, a royal blue silk affair with piping and a monogram on the pocket.

  “You do not strike me as a man who wears pajamas,” she said, aware of the inanity of her remark but too shaky to say anything heavier.

  “A Christmas present from Ivy,” he explained, disappearing into the adjoining bathroom. A moment later Shay heard the shower running.

  “Why am I staying here?” she asked the cosmos, holding her arms out from her sides.

  When the cosmos didn’t answer, she followed Mitch into the steamy chamber and helped herself to one of the new toothbrushes she found in the cabinet drawer. As she brushed, she fumed. Six toothbrushes, still in their boxes. The man expected to entertain a harem!

  Behind the beautifully etched door of the double shower, Mitch sang at the top of his lungs. Shay glared at her reflection in the steamy mirror. “If you had any sense at all,” she muttered, “you’d go home! This is a man who keeps extra toothbrushes, for God’s sake!”

  Having said all this, Shay went back to the bedroom and crawled into bed. The sheets were as smooth as satin and the lulling motion of the water-filled mattress, coupled with the song of the tide coming in through the terrace doors, reduced her to a sleepy, languid state.

  She felt the bed sway as Mitch got into it, heard the click of the lamp switch, stirred under the sweet weight of the darkness. “Are you going to make love to me?” she asked.

  He chuckled and drew her close, holding her. “No,” he said.

  Shay yawned. “Don’t let go, okay?”

  “Okay,” came the hoarse reply.

  They both slept soundly, huddled close in that gigantic bed, neither asking anything of the other except their nearness.

  Mitch awakened to an exquisite caress and opened his eyes to see a tumble-haired vamp kneeling on the bed beside him, her whole face lit by a wicked grin. “Ummm,” he said, stretching, luxuriating in the pleasure she was creating. “The truce is over, I take it?”

  “Every man for himself,” she agreed.

  “In that case…” He stretched again, with deceptive leisure, and then flipped over suddenly, carrying Shay with him, imprisoning her soft body beneath his own.

  Her eyes widened in mock surprise and he laughed, using his nose to spar with hers.

  She caught her hands together at the back of his neck and drew him into her kiss; it was a soft, nurturing thing, and yet it sent aching waves of desperate need crashing through him. He sensed that she was exerting some tender vengeance for the way he’d pleasured her in the RV the day before and he was all for it.

  When the opportunity afforded itself some moments later, Mitch pulled back far enough to rid Shay of the pajama top and then fell to her again, settling against her but reluctant to take her.

  Suddenly she parted her legs and the warmth of her was too compelling to be resisted. He entered her almost involuntarily, thrust into the agonizing comfort she offered by the strength of her hands and the upward thrust of her hips.

  She guided him, she taunted him, she rendered him mindless with need. For all Shay’s beautiful treachery, however, her moment came first and Mitch marveled at the splendor in her face as she cried out, tossing her head back and forth on the pillow and grasping at his shoulders with her hands.

  “I love you,” he said.

  It was clear enough that Ivy’s feelings were hurt. Entering the office, after a hasty shower and change of clothes at home, Shay remembered her promise to have lunch with her friend the day before and was chagrined, even though there had been no time to go out to eat.

  “Hi,” she said, standing before Ivy’s desk.

  Ivy kept her eyes on her computer screen. “Hi,” she said remotely.

  “Free for lunch?”

  Ivy looked up quickly, and the clouds separated, revealing the sunlight that was integral to her nature. “We might have to stay in. I got kind of behind yesterday.”

  Shay was relieved that no permanent damage had been done to this most cherished friendship. Ivy might be nosy, but it was only because she cared so much. “We could always call Screaming Hernando’s and have them send over a guacamole pizza.”

  Ivy made a face and then giggled.

  The morning went smoothly, and when noon came, Ivy and Shay were able to slip away, Ivy having set the office answering machine to pick up any incoming calls. They had chicken sandwiches at the coffee shop across the street.

  “I thought you were mad at me,” Ivy confided between delicate bites from her sandwich. “I guess I shouldn’t have called Mitch and told him you were filming another commercial.”

  Shay leaned forward, forgetting her sandwich. “So that was how he knew. I should have guessed. Ivy Prescott, what possessed you?”

  “Actually,” Ivy replied, “it wasn’t anything quite as dramatic as possession. It was plain old bribery. Mitch promised to try to get along with my mother if I would call him whenever you were doing a spot.”

  “Traitor!”

  “What can I tell you? I love my mother and I love Mitch and I want to see them bury the hatchet, especially with the wedding coming up.”

  Shay remembered what Mitch had told her the night before, when they were talking about hang-ups. “Is it working?”

  “They’ve been civil to each other,” Ivy said, shrugging. “I guess that’s a start. So, are you and Mitch an item, or what?”

  “An ‘item’? Have you been reading old movie magazines or something?”

  Ivy executed a mock glare. “Stop hedging, Shay. You don’t need to tell me, you know. You can just sit by and see me consumed by my own curiosity.”

  Shay sighed. “If you’re talking about the love-and-marriage kind of item, we’re not.”

  Ivy’s eyes were wide with delight. “That’s what they all say,” she replied. “So the gossip is true! You and Mitch are doing more than working together!”

  “Now that is definitely none of your business, Ivy Prescott,” Shay said firmly. “And exactly what gossip is this?”

  “Well, you two were inside the RV together for quite a while yesterday….”

  Shay willed herself not to blush at the memory and failed. She hoped Ivy would ascribe the high color in her face to righteous indignation. “What were you doing, standing out there with a stopwatch?”

  “Of course not!” Ivy’s feathers were ruffled. She squirmed in her chair and looked incensed and then said defensively, “I don’t even own a stopwa
tch!”

  7

  This is some pile of bricks,” Ivan announced, gazing appreciatively up at the walls of the house while Mitch was still recovering from the surprise of finding his agent standing on his doorstep. “Pretty big for one person, isn’t it?”

  Mitch stepped back to admit the small, well-dressed man with the balding pate. Ignoring Ivan’s question, he offered one of his own. “What’s so important that it couldn’t have been handled by telephone, Ivan?”

  Ivan patted his breast pocket and grinned. “An advance check of this size warrants personal delivery,” he answered.

  Mitch turned and walked back toward the library where he’d been working over his notes for the Rosamond Dallas book, leaving Ivan to follow. Mrs. Carraway, who had been upstairs cleaning most of the morning, magically appeared with coffee and warm croissants.

  Once the pleasant-faced woman had gone, Ivan helped himself to a cup of coffee and a croissant. “Nice to see you living the good life at last, Prescott. I was beginning to think you were going to spend the rest of your days crawling through jungles on your belly and hobnobbing with the Klan.”

  Despite his sometimes abrasive manner, Mitch liked and respected Ivan Wright. The man was always direct, and he played hardball in all his dealings. “I guess I’m ready to settle down,” he said, and his mind immediately touched on Shay.

  “That could be good, and it could be bad,” Ivan replied. “What are your plans for after?”

  “After what?”

  “After you finish the Rosamond Dallas book.” Ivan added jam and cream to his croissant.

  “I haven’t made any plans for another project, if that’s what you’re getting at. I may retire. After all, I’m a rich man.”

  “You’re also a young man,” Ivan pointed out. “What are you, thirty-seven, thirty-eight?” Without waiting for an answer, the agent went on. “Your publishers want another book, Mitch, and they’re willing to pay top dollar to get your name on the dotted line.”