Undercover Mistress
Kathleen Creighton
Exiled soap star Celia Cross had taken a lot of diverse parts in her life, but when she rescued a clinging-to-life man off the Malibu shore, she also found the role of a lifetime. Because said man was in fact a federal agent who had uncovered a deadly plot.And for once, "dippy" Celia was in a position to do some good. If only she could convince the rapidly recovering Roy Starr to cast her as his partner….That was something lone wolf Roy was extremely reluctant to do. His hesitations were twofold: one, the last thing he wanted to do was put his beautiful blond benefactor in danger. And two, when the play-acting was over, would he be tempted to turn this bit of stunt casting into the real thing?
Am I delirious? Am I dying after all?
Breathing slowly and deeply, Roy took stock. Nope. Not delirious. There was a woman in bed with him. He could feel the warmth of her breath on his skin, the dove-soft tickle of her hair. With the utmost care, he turned his head. A deliciously feminine scent drifted to his nostrils. Ignoring the shooting pains rocketing through his skull, he tensed his face and neck muscles and aimed his eyes downward.
A vision of tumbled blond met his gaze—winter grass touched with sunshine.
He thought, My God, it’s my angel. I didn’t dream her.
She’s real.
Undercover Mistress
Kathleen Creighton
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
KATHLEEN CREIGHTON
has roots deep in the California soil but has relocated to South Carolina. As a child, she enjoyed listening to old-timers’ tales, and her fascination with the past only deepened as she grew older. Today, she says she is interested in everything—art, music, gardening, zoology, anthropology and history, but people are at the top of her list. She also has a lifelong passion for writing, and now combines her two loves in romance novels.
In loving memory of HARLAND WEAVER HAND, “PAPA” to his children, and to me, lover of words, drama and poetry, teller of stories;
And with heartfelt thanks to his son, my uncle, TOM HAND, teacher and gentle soul, for encouraging me, so many many years ago, to use the gifts Papa bequeathed to me.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 1
Celia Cross was of the opinion that if you had to suffer from insomnia, there couldn’t be a better place for it than Malibu.
On those clear nights when she found herself wide-awake at three in the morning, there was the moon path beckoning just beyond her beach house windows, stretching off across the sea like a highway to China. And though she lacked the courage to follow the lure of that glittering path, there were still the seemingly unending expanses of beach to explore at a pace of her own choosing. At three in the morning, there was only the whispering surf for company, and little likelihood of any human presence, friendly or otherwise, happening by to intrude on her solitude.
At the same time, there was just enough of a civilized presence in the dark hulks and occasional lights from the beachfront houses of the rich and famous to reassure her she wasn’t entirely alone. And on nights like this one, when the fog lay thick as cotton batting along the water’s edge, enveloping her in its cocoon of cold silence, it was easy to imagine what it might feel like to be the last human soul alive on earth.
With or without fog, Celia never felt nervous about walking or running alone on the beach in the wee hours of the morning. To be truthful, nowadays there wasn’t much of anything—anything that walked, swam, slithered or flew, anyway—she did fear, though she had a sense that fact hadn’t pleased the therapist when she’d told him during the first months after the accident.
“Why do you think that is?” the doctor had asked probingly in the annoying manner of psychotherapists. Celia had replied with something flip and meaningless because, in the annoying way psychotherapists had of sometimes illuminating unwelcome truths, deep down she’d known the real answer: Maybe I’m not afraid of anything because I really don’t give a damn.
Then she thought, mentally smacking herself like a misbehaving puppy, Bad girl. Bad thoughts.
Pushing back the hood of her sweatshirt, she broke into a determined run, veering onto the sheet of firm wet sand left by the retreating tide. A moment later, though, limited visibility forced her back to a walk to keep from tripping over the piles of rubbery kelp that littered the sand. There was more of it than usual tonight, dredged up from the undersea forests just offshore by some tropical storm way off in the Pacific. There’d been big surf earlier in the week.
An especially large clump of debris loomed ahead of her in the fog, and she angled her path to go around it. Only a few yards still separated her from the mass when she halted suddenly, and her heartbeat quickened. Had it been a trick of her eyes, her vivid imagination? Or had something in that tangled pile moved?
She stood motionless, shivers of excitement cascading through her as her eyes strained to penetrate the darkness and fog. Thoughts of sick or injured sea lions crossed her mind—people did find them on these beaches now and then, though she herself had never been so lucky. She’d heard, too, of beachcombers finding pelicans or sea gulls tangled in fishing line, and even dolphins and whales beached on the sand.
What if it is something alive…sick…hurt? What do I do?
Here she was, alone on a beach at three in the morning, and she didn’t have her cell phone with her. How stupid was that?
She didn’t recall her brain telling them to, but her feet were moving again, carrying her toward that dark and shapeless mass. Nervous but curious, wishing she had, at the very least, a flashlight, she leaned cautiously closer, peering into the pile. Okay, there was a whole lot of kelp—the smell of it was sharp and raw in her nostrils. And…oh well, shoot, it was only driftwood after all—a big piece, gnarled and misshapen, like the trees from an enchanted forest. Was that all it had been? Just a piece of driftwood? With a hiss that was half relief, half disappointment, she straightened, laughing silently at herself and her overwrought imagination.
But—about to move on, once again she froze. Okay, no doubt about it. A branch of that “driftwood” had definitely moved.
She bent closer to examine it, holding her breath, poised to leap back out of danger at a split-second’s notice—and that was when she heard it, barely audible above the hiss and sigh of the surf. A sound. A low sound, like a moan.
She sucked back a gasp, and again without conscious decision, found that her hand was moving…reaching toward…whatever it was that was buried in all that debris. Nervously, she pulled it back. Chicken, Celia! Shifting, she edged herself closer, then put out her hand again—slowly, this time, and carefully…until she touched—Oh, ick! Her fingers had touched…something. Something cold and clammy. And smooth. It felt like…skin. Not scales or feathers or fur, but skin. Human skin.
Horror washed over her, as shocking, as breathtaking as if one of the waves curling onto the sand a few feet away had crashed over her head. She opened her mouth to scream, but the sound that emerged was more like a whimper. Oh God, oh God, oh God, it’s a body—a human body. Oh God.
Okay, but not a dead body. She’d seen it move—hadn’t she? She’d heard a groan. She had. Could something that cold, that still, possibly be alive?
Whimpering to herself, Celia tore with her hands at the masses of kelp until she was kneeling close beside the inert shape. Her hands explored, gingerly at first, and then, having so far encountered nothing particularly gruesome, with more confidence. Her search revealed a head covered with short, damp hair, a jaw rough with beard stubble. Okay, obviously a man.
She put her fingers against the side of his neck just below the jaw, the way she’d seen it done countless times on movie and TV screens—the way she’d even done it on camera herself once or twice, come to think of it. She searched for a pulse—and went clammy with a weird combination of relief and panic when she found one.
At least he’s alive!
Oh God. He’s alive.
Which meant it was now up to her to see he stayed that way. What do I do now?
Call 911, obviously.
Except she didn’t have her cell phone with her. Which meant she was going to have to leave the guy lying here on the sand and run back to her house to call for help. But what if he died while she was gone? What if he was badly hurt, bleeding to death even now?
“Badly hurt” was probably a given, considering he was lying face down and unconscious. Other than that… Quelling panic, she proceeded with her inventory. He seemed to be naked from the waist up; below that were sodden trousers—no, shorts—and below that, bony masculine legs that, as far as she could tell—relentlessly squashing horrifying images of shark attack victims—were intact. No shoes or socks, which, she supposed, wasn’t surprising, given the fact he’d almost certainly just come out of the ocean.
She ran her hands over a back dense with muscle—she could feel the indentation of spine between hard, rounded ridges, heavily crusted with sand. Moving her hands outward from there, she felt a rib cage…shoulder blades…all well-padded with that re-silient, though frigid, muscle. Her hands slipped down the sides of the torso—and recoiled. Cold horror sliced through her.
Simultaneously, the man uttered a sound, something between a gasp and a groan.
“Oh God,” Celia said in a breathy squeak, “I’m so sorry.” Shaking, she held up her hand in the darkness, trying to see what it was on her fingers. Something sticky. Sandy and sticky. But of course, even in the dark and the fog, even without seeing it, she knew what it was. What it had to be. She touched the man’s back and whispered it again. “I’m sorry…I’m so sorry.”
So, clearly, the man was injured. And bleeding. There was no way around it—she was going to have to go for help. But to leave him lying here like this—alone…so still…so cold…
Impulsively, she pulled off her sweatshirt and laid it across his naked back. As she tucked the hood around his neck, she leaned close to whisper brokenly in his ear. “Hold on, okay? You’re going to be all right. I’m going to get help. I’ll be right back—I promise. Don’t die, okay? I’ll be right back.”
She crouched, leg muscles tensed like a runner in starting blocks, but instead of rising, she sucked in air and froze once more. Something had clamped around her wrist, something cold and hard as steel. But it wasn’t steel. It was human flesh. A hand. A whisper, faint as wind-driven sand, stirred across her cheek.
“Please…help…me.”
Something—an emotion completely unknown to her—trembled through her chest. Tears—of nervousness? excitement? relief?—sprang from her eyes. “Yes, yes—I will, I’ll get you some help. I will.” She was babbling, half weeping. “I have to go, now, okay? But I’ll be back, I promise—” Again, she tried to rise.
Where the poor man got the strength, she couldn’t imagine, but his grip on her wrist tightened, holding her where she was. Beneath the sweatshirt she’d placed over them, the powerful shoulders bunched and succeeded in lifting his head barely an inch off the sand. His voice rose in volume to a raspy croak. “Don’t…call…police.”
“No, of course not,” Celia babbled, thinking only to soothe him. “You need an ambulance. Paramedics—”
“No!” The croak became a cry of desperation. “Don’t…tell…anyone. Nobody…can know. They…can’t…know. Promise.”
The grip on Celia’s wrist became painful. “Okay, okay, I promise,” she gasped. “No police—okay?”
“Promise…” The word sighed away into a whisper as his grip relaxed and his head dropped back onto the sand.
O-kay, she thought, shaken. What was that all about? She sat back on her heels, rubbing her wrist and chewing on her lip. No cops? They can’t know? Can’t know what?
Obviously, the man was delirious—out of his head. Obviously, she had to call 911, because if she didn’t, the guy was going to die right here on the beach. She had no choice.
She ran a hand over her face and let out a breath that was almost a groan. Okay, maybe she’d been in television way too long, but dramatic scenarios of every sort were running on fast-forward through her mind. Why would somebody in this kind of shape not want the police involved, unless they had good reason not to? Was this guy some kind of criminal? Was he running from the police? What if the police were the ones who’d shot him?
Celia, get a grip. You don’t even know that’s a gunshot wound.
But…somehow she did. A bullet, or maybe a knife—anyway, she knew that wound in the man’s side, the wound her fingers had touched, was the result of violence—human, not animal—and that it had been deliberate, not accidental. And sure, the man lying helpless in the kelp might be a dangerous criminal, but something told her he wasn’t.
And if he isn’t a criminal?
More scenarios sped across the video screen in her mind. What if he truly was in mortal danger, but for some reason couldn’t risk letting the cops know about it? Soap operas and television dramas and action movies were full of stories about good guys with good reasons not to involve the police. Just because those particular stories were fiction didn’t mean it couldn’t happen in real life. Well, it didn’t.
She cleared her throat and gingerly touched the man’s shoulder. “Hey, listen—can you walk?” She waited, but there was no answer, not even a moan.
“O-kay, I’ll take that as a no.” Swearing under her breath, she pushed herself to her feet. Muscles and bones only recently healed screamed in protest, and she took a moment to placate them with some hurried shakes and stretches before, with a worried look back at the still, dark lump on the sand, she set off back the way she’d come. After the first few plodding steps, she broke into a run.
It wasn’t all that far to her place—perhaps a hundred yards or so, though it seemed like a mile. Her legs were on fire and she had a stitch in her side by the time she left wet, packed sand to angle uphill across the soft, deep powder toward the carriage lanterns she’d left burning on the deck to light her way home in the fog. The lamps gave off a weird coppery glow that was more eerie than welcoming, and Celia couldn’t suppress a shiver as she thought of the man she’d left lying back there on the beach and the words he’d spoken in a raspy whisper, like death: Don’t tell anyone…they can’t know.
At the bottom of the wooden steps she hesitated, put one foot on the first step, then hesitated some more. Don’t…tell…anyone. Well, dammit, she had to tell someone. She sure as hell couldn’t do this alone.
She didn’t consciously make the decision. But one second, she was standing there, about to go up the steps and into her house where there was a telephone and all sorts of trained help only a three-push-button call away, because that was what any sane person would do. And the next, she was doing an about-face, and jogging past her own deck and turning into the narrow canyon between the shadowy forests of wooden pilings that supported her deck and the one next door. She clattered up her neighbor’s steps and onto his deck and then she was pounding on his sliding glass door with her fist; it was too late to change her mind.
She waited, listening to the competing rhythms of the surf and her thumping heartbeat. Come on, Doc…come on…
She cupped her hands around her eyes and peered through the glass, and she could see a light from somewhere throwing furniture shadows across a woven grass carpet. Dammit, Cavendish, I know you’re in there. He had to be—at three in the morning, where else would he go? And most likely asleep—or dead-to-the-world drunk—she thought, as she pounded again, then grasped hold of the handle and jerked it hard, prepared to go in and roust him physically, if necessary.
She was only mildly surprised when the door slid open a foot or so; Malibu Colony people were notoriously careless about locking their ocean-front doors.
She stuck her head through the crack and called hoarsely, “Hey, Doc—you awake? Doc—”
She broke off as a short, stocky bathrobe-clad figure shuffled into view, carrying a wine bottle and a glowing cigarette in one hand and turning on lights with the other as he came toward her.
Jowly cheeks covered with a quarter of an inch of reddish-gray stubble creased in a wry grin when he saw Celia.
“Shoulda known it’d be you—my lovely fellow insomniac,” he drawled in a British accented voice that, thankfully, was only a little slurred. He pulled the door wider and flicked his cigarette in the general direction of the water. “Come in, sweetheart, come in. Join me in a glass.” He held up the bottle and frowned at it. “Oh, hell—this bottle’s pretty well killed. But, there’s more where it came from.”
“Thanks—not now—I can’t.” She spoke rapidly, breathlessly, as she caught hold of his sleeve and began to pull him across the deck. “Come quick—you have to help me. I need you. Hurry!”
Hauling back against the tow like a balky mule, her neighbor managed to slow her down enough to extricate himself from her clutches. As he huffily adjusted his bathrobe over his barrel chest, he peered at her in the lamp-lit murk, taking in her bare arms and torso, which, at the moment was covered only by a stretch-cotton sports bra.
“You’ve actually been out in this crap? Oh, don’t tell me—what’d you do, find a beached seal? You don’t want to mess with those things, sweetheart, they can bite your arm off. Come on in here and call animal control. Better yet,” he added, doing a lurching about-face and heading back toward the doorway, “wait for morning.”
“Not a seal,” Celia gasped, grabbing again at his arm. “It’s a man.”
He halted, staring at her along his shoulder as if he weren’t sure he’d heard her right. Shadows made the bags under his eyes seem even larger than usual. “A what?”
She nodded rapidly. “He’s hurt. Badly, I think. I need—”
“Oh, Lord. Celia.” His face seemed to crumple like a deflating bag. He closed his eyes and lifted the wine bottle to press it against his forehead. “For God’s sake, leave me out of it. Call nine-eleven. You know I can’t—”
“That’s just it. He doesn’t want cops or paramedics. He was insistent about that. Frantic, actually…”
Peter Cavendish, known to his Malibu neighbors as Doc—and to most of the rest of the world as the physician responsible for prescribing the drugs that had led to several well-publicized addictions and one tragic overdose, now permanently stripped of his license to practice medicine—heaved a sigh that was heavily mixed with swearing. He opened his eyes and leveled a glare at her. “I don’t believe this. You know what that means, don’t you? Means the guy’s got to be either crazy or crooked.”
“But what if he’s not?” Celia said stubbornly. “Come on, Doc, I figured if anybody’d understand about not wanting to get the cops involved…”
“Sure. Right.” Doc gave another sigh, this one of resignation. “You know this is blackmail, don’t you? Okay, okay. I’ll have a look at the bloke. But I’m warning you—if he looks like he’s in any danger of dying right away, we’re calling nine-eleven and leaving me out of it. Understand?”
Light-headed with relief, Celia nodded.
Pausing long enough to stuff the wine bottle into a potted bird of paradise plant, Cavendish followed her down the steps.
“How far away is this guy?” he asked when he caught up with her. Hobbling awkwardly as his bare feet made contact with shells or rocks buried in the sand, he hissed a sibilant obscenity and added, with a sideways glance at Celia’s feet, “How can you stand to jog barefooted?”
“I have eyes in my feet. And,” she panted, “it beats getting sand in your shoes. It’s not that far—only seems like it because of the fog. There. See?” She pointed as, at that moment, an obliging air current parted the fog like a curtain, revealing several piles of kelp ahead on the smooth slope of wet sand. Including the one that was larger and bulkier than all the rest.
When she saw it, her heart gave a sickening lurch and fear rose in her throat. Oh, please, let him be alive, she thought as she broke into a run. I can’t be responsible for another death—I can’t.
The man was lying where she’d left him—exactly as she’d left him; he didn’t appear to have moved at all. Chilled and shaking, Celia dropped to her knees beside him and pressed her fingers against the side of his neck. Against flesh that seemed to bear no more signs of life than molded plastic. She held her breath and then, deafened by her own heartbeat, groaned in anguish, “Oh, God, I can’t find a pulse.”
“I’d be greatly astonished if you did, in that particular spot,” Doc said acidly, taking her by the arms and moving her to one side. He dropped heavily to one knee beside the body and put his fingers just—she’d have sworn—where hers had been. After a moment, he nodded to himself as if satisfied by what he’d felt, and Celia let out the breath she’d been holding.
Crouched in the reeking kelp, she watched the doctor’s hands move quickly and confidently over the man’s body, following much the same path hers had taken so timidly a short while ago. “The only wound I could find is on his side, there—on the right,” she said when she was sure she could speak without squeaking.
Doc nodded brusquely and lifted one side of the sweatshirt Celia had spread across the man’s back. After a moment he muttered, as if to himself, “Okay…this appears to be a gunshot wound…small entrance, by the feel of it. Can’t seem to find the exit. Give me a hand here—I want you to help me roll him. Take his hips…just like that.”
Thrilled to be doing something helpful, Celia hitched forward, put her hands where the doctor told her to and braced herself.
“Okay, nice and easy now.” Taking the man by the shoulders he gently, carefully turned him. “That’s good. Great. Now, let’s see. Ah, yes. Here it is—see? Huh—damned odd place for an exit wound…”
Though she tried, Celia couldn’t see much of anything in the foggy darkness. She shivered, conscious for the first time of the chill and the damp, and the fact that she was wearing shorts and a sports bra and nothing else. Hugging herself to keep her teeth from chattering, she said, “How bad is it?”
The former doctor grunted and sat back on his heels. “Well, I suppose the good news is, it’s—as they say on television—a through-and-through. And, quite amazingly, the bullet—or whatever—doesn’t seem to have hit anything vital. On the other hand, he’s bound to have lost a good bit of blood, and floating around in the Pacific for God knows how long hasn’t done him any good, either. To put it in terms you’d understand, he’s weak from blood loss, suffering from hypothermia, probably in shock, any one of which ought to have killed him and still could. The man needs to be in a hospital, love. Now. Yesterday.” He lurched to his feet with another grunt and a groan. “You need to call—”
“No!” Celia was on her feet, too, reaching across the unconscious man’s body to clutch at the sleeve of the doctor’s robe. “No. I promised him. I promised. Look, we can—” She looked around wildly. “Okay. Here’s what we do. We carry him back to my place. You don’t have to do anything—just help me get him there, that’s all. I’ll…I’ll take full responsibility. You can show me what to do—you don’t have to touch him. Nobody will have to know—”
“Celia, darling. Sweetheart. I don’t know how to break this to you, but you’re not a doctor. Even if you did used to play one on TV.”
“A nurse,” Celia snapped. “I was a nurse, not a doctor.” Realizing that wasn’t exactly a plus, she added hurriedly, “Anyway, you said the bullet didn’t hit anything vital. Seems to me it ought to be pretty well cleaned out, after soaking in salt water for who knows how long. Salt’s good, right? And you can get me some bandages, can’t you? Some antibiotics?” She gripped his arm and shook it. “Come on, Doc—dammit, help me! Please.”
For a long five-count he continued to resist, swearing softly but vehemently. Then, shaking out of her grasp, muttering about the impossibility of saying no to a half-naked woman, he bent over and thrust his hands under the unconscious man’s shoulders. “All right—I know I’m going to regret this. But it’s for damn sure not doing him any good lying here whilst we argue about it. Don’t just stand there, pick up his feet.”
Celia hurried to comply, but discovered it was easier to say than do. Picking up his feet failed to raise the man’s butt so much as an inch off the sand. Finally, she managed to achieve her desired purpose by planting herself between his legs and hooking her arms just above the knees, then hoisting them up high enough to rest on the top curve of her hips.
“Good…Lord,” Doc gasped as they staggered back up the beach with their burden, “the guy’s heavy—must weigh one-eighty, at least.”
Celia, still trying to keep the middle third of the man’s body from dragging on the sand, had her jaws clenched tightly shut and didn’t reply. Clearly, carrying a grown man’s deadweight, even for two people, was a lot harder than they made it look on TV. She also decided she must have seriously underestimated the distance between her house and that pile of driftwood and kelp. Surely, no NFL team ever labored longer or harder to traverse a hundred yards of ground.
Still, somehow, after stopping several times on the way to grab, breathlessly cursing, at painful gulps of cold, astringent sea air, Celia caught sight of the carriage lanterns’ rusty glow through the fog. Doc, she noted, was wheezing alarmingly as he hitched himself backward up the steps leading to her deck.
“You okay?” she asked, gritting her teeth and sweating rivers in spite of the cold. “You know…it’s gonna kind of…defeat the purpose…if after all this…I have to…call 911…for you.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Doc grunted. “Just…wouldya try not to crack the guy’s backbone on these damn steps? Are you looking for a lawsuit?”
Celia snorted—and was appalled when the snort turned into laughter. Where that had come from, she had no idea—stress reaction, she supposed. Here she was carrying half of a man’s deadweight—oh, bad word choice, Celia!—in her arms, for God’s sake. A seriously wounded man, moreover, and God only knew how he’d gotten that way. What she really wanted to do right then was collapse on those steps and give in to a colossal fit of the shakes.
But, of course, she couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Not now. Not yet. She clamped her teeth together and set her jaw and from some unknown storehouse found strength to take one…more…step.
Then, miraculously, they were in Celia’s living room. In a half crouch, managing to maintain her hold on the man’s legs, she reached behind her to pull the sliding door shut, and all at once it was warm and dry and still. The surf thunder became a distant whisper beyond the glass and the fog.
“Where do you want him?” Doc’s question was a gasp.
Celia didn’t answer. The lights she’d left on in the room were low and soft, but they were enough to give her a good look, her first clear look, at what she’d been carrying so blithely, so casually. Something clenched inside her, and her body went cold from the inside out.
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.
Chapter 2
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.”
“Oh, hell yeah, I remember—painted all the naked statues so they were anatomically correct, didn’t he? Something like that?”
Max nodded, his lips twitching in a smile without amusement. “Outraged his royal relatives back home, too—not exactly the accepted role model for an Arab crown prince, I guess. They disowned him—not that it slowed him down any. Abby—as he’s called—is a billionaire in his own right.”
Roy made a derisive sound. “The guy’s hardly a terrorist. He’s a playboy. And a nut.”
“A playboy…” said Max, and paused meaningfully before adding, “…with a boat.”
“Ah.”
“A helluva big boat. One of those megayachts—the Bibi Lilith, which I’m told translates as ‘Lady of the Night’—I swear to God. Do you suppose he knows what that means in English? Anyway, the damn thing looks like the Queen Mary. Over three hundred feet long and luxury all the way. Twenty guest cabins in addition to the main stateroom, and a crew of thirty.”
“Uh-huh,” said Roy, in a neutral tone.
Max gave him a sideways look. “Don’t you skipper a fishing boat? Something like that?”
“Yeah, I do,” Roy said, thinking, with a sudden sharp twist of longing, of his beach house on Florida’s Gulf Coast, and his boat, the Gulf Starr, which was currently in the capable hands of his best friend and business partner, Scott Cavanaugh. Scott had recently and unexpectedly become his brother-in-law, too, thanks to his recent marriage to Roy’s sister, Joy—something he was still having some trouble getting his mind around.
“What’d you do, get me on this boat’s crew?” He was thinking this assignment might have a definite upside, in spite of the grim nature of its purpose.
“Wish we could, believe me. Problem with that is, you’d have to infiltrate the guy’s inner circle, and they’re a close-knit, suspicious bunch—mostly related, and even that doesn’t mean they trust each other. Even if we could manage to pull it off, it would take time—a whole lot more than we’ve got.” Max was gazing at the distant harbor lights again. There was another pause, and then: “Your dad used to own a big rig, right?”
Wary, now, wondering what Max was getting around to asking of him, Roy nodded. “That’s right.”
Max let out a breath. “I hope to God he taught you your way around a diesel engine.”
“I’ve turned a wrench or two in my time,” Roy said. He didn’t mention the fact that his father had died too soon to have taught him much of anything, and that what he knew about diesels he’d mostly learned from his brother, Jimmy Joe. That, and trial and error.
Except, there wasn’t going to be any room for error here. In his current line of work, an error most likely meant people—a lot of people—were going to die.
“So, you’re thinking about…what, sabotaging an engine?”
Max’s teeth flashed bluish white in the artificial light. “Can you think of a better way to get you on board? They call for a mechanic—”
Roy shook his head. “Tough to jimmy up a diesel—at least, bad enough to need a technician to fix it.”
Max gave him a long look. “I know you’ll think of something,” he said as he turned back to the vista.
There was a long silence. Then Roy asked, in a voice so careful it could have been mistaken for indifference, “Any plans to raise the alert level?”
Max’s reply was a puff of air too muted to be called a snort. “Again? Unless we have something specific to tell ’em, who’s gonna pay attention?” He turned abruptly and tapped Roy’s chest with an index finger. “We need surveillance on that boat. We need something specific. If Abby…” His voice trailed off. He shook his head, once more scanning the sea of lights.
“Even if we knew for certain, what good would it do to tell them? Look at ’em down there. Ten million people. What do you think they’d do if they knew a cloud of death was heading their way? Can you imagine it? Jeez…”
For a long moment there was silence, and the balmy Southern California autumn night seemed to grow colder. Then Max said softly, “Whatever it takes, we have to keep a lid on this thing. Let’s find out where this is coming from, but for God’s sake, don’t let it get out we’re even close to looking at this guy. Abby’s a media magnet even under normal circumstances—surrounds himself with the biggest names in showbiz and politics. If even a hint of this were to hit the media…” He caught his breath, then growled, “They can’t know. Understand? Nobody…can know.”
When the shivering started, Celia did the only thing she knew how to do: She wrapped her arms around the injured man’s body and held him, rocking him like a baby and whispering, “It’s okay…it’s okay…I’ve got you…shh…I’ve got you.”
“Ah, those maternal instincts,” Doc said in his dry, ironic way as he came into the room. He was carrying a scuffed leather bag which he placed on the armchair next to the bed. “Can’t keep ’em buried forever, can you, love?”
“He was shivering,” Celia snapped, glaring up at him. She felt a bit foolish, now that her backup had returned, although perhaps rather in need of some soothing and mothering herself, after what she’d just heard. Except her chills, her shivering, were all hidden inside.
Don’t tell anyone. Nobody…can know.
Who in the world is this guy? Babbling about bombs and death and luxury yachts…
Oh, God, what have I gotten myself into? Why didn’t I do the sensible thing and call the cops when I had the chance?
She still could, she supposed, only how was she going to explain what the guy was doing here, in her house? In her bed?
She was once more acutely aware of the weight of the cold, hard body pressing against her, the grittiness of sand, the sharp, sea smell of his hair. He was muttering unintelligibly through pale lavender-colored lips that barely seemed to move, and shivering less violently, now, in fitful bursts. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?
“Has he said anything that might tell us who he is?” Doc casually asked, glancing at the man’s face as he bent over him, his fingers monitoring pulse beats.
Celia shook her head. “Nothing I can make out,” she lied, repressing a shudder. And then, reconsidering a little, “He keeps talking about somebody named Max.”
“Hmm…” Doc folded down the top edge of the blankets and frowned at the ragged wound high on the man’s chest. Even from her position, wedged behind the injured man’s broad shoulder, Celia could see that the crater was glistening with new, red blood. “Friend, family…lover?”
“I don’t think so,” she whispered. The cold hollow place inside her had just gotten bigger.
Okay, Max, this was my bright idea…I hope to God it works.
Silently cursing the circumstances that had him clinging to the hull of a superluxury yacht in the cold, dark Pacific, Roy rode the gentle swell outside the marina’s breakwater and listened to the mutter of voices far above his head. The security guards were making their rounds…right on schedule. He’d clocked them three full rotations and they hadn’t varied their routine. This time he was going in.
The voices faded, blending into the shush and sigh of the waves. Roy glanced at the greenish numbers on the face of the chronometer on his wrist and patted the waterproof packet taped to his chest inside his wet suit. The packet contained a chip roughly the size and shape of a postage stamp, and it would be his job to install it in the motherboard of the computer panel that controlled and monitored the yacht’s three big—and, according to their schematics, virtually indestructible—diesel engines. According to the yacht manufacturer’s blueprints he’d committed to memory, the computer was located in the central control room, essentially a locked vault deep in the bowels of the yacht, near the engine room.
Amazing, he thought, that such a tiny thing could bring those engines to a standstill. Even better, the cause of the problem would be almost impossible for anyone but a technician to detect. Any call for such a technician would, of course, be intercepted by Max, who would immediately dispatch—who else?—Momma Betty Starr’s little boy, Roy, who would then have convenient access to virtually every nook and cranny of the Bibi Lilith. If any WMDs of any kind were being transported in this yacht, he’d find them.
Unhooking a device that resembled a medium-size firearm from his belt, he aimed it upward and pulled the trigger. A thin smile of satisfaction curved his lips when he heard a soft thunk from somewhere on the deck above his head.
Moments later, he was ascending rapidly and silently, hand over hand, toward the starless, milky sky.
Piece o’cake.
“That’s about all I can do for him,” Doc said, closing his medical bag with a snap. “The rest is up to him—and you, I suppose. Keep those warm towels coming, and do try again to get some hot liquids into him.”
“What about all that stuff he was saying? Do you think…” Celia frowned at the fitfully quaking mound of blankets on her bed. “Maybe we should…”
The doctor made a dismissive sound. “He’s delirious—that’d be the hypothermia talking.” His lips curved in a sour smile. “Sounded rather like the plot of an Arnold Schwartzenegger movie, didn’t it? I wouldn’t worry about it, dear heart. Worry about getting him warmed up.” He stifled a yawn as he turned.
Celia gave a yelp of dismay. “You’re not leaving me!”
He sank into the armchair with a grunt and a sigh. “Thanks, love, much as I’d prefer my own bed, I’d rather not have another death on my conscience if I can possibly avoid it. Forgive me, though, if I close my eyes for a bit…and wake me if he does anything interesting, will you? Besides mumble and shake, I mean…” Doc’s voice trailed off.
Celia’s gaze returned to the gaunt, gray face on her violet-sprigged pillow. It was an arresting face, she thought, the bones strong and rugged without being coarse, the stubble of beard, slightly arched eyebrows and comma of hair on his forehead almost black against his dusky skin. His nose appeared swollen, and had a definite bump on the bridge. She wondered again what color his eyes were.
He looks like a pirate, she thought. Okay, a very sick pirate.
Another shiver rippled through her. The cold radiating from the blanket-wrapped body seemed to be seeping into hers. No…I don’t want another death on my conscience, either.
Reclaiming her seat on the edge of the mattress, she shifted and maneuvered herself until the man’s upper body was once again propped almost upright against her. “Okay…” she murmured as she picked up the mug of chicken broth, “let’s try this again.”
Once more, the man’s head rolled on her chest and she felt the faint stirring of words against her cheek.
“Shh,” she whispered, with a catch in her voice. “It’s all right. Don’t try to talk.”
But his lips moved again, and her heart quickened as she leaned closer in order to hear.
“Piece o’cake,” the man said.
It should have been.
He’d been monitoring the Bibi Lilith for over thirty-six hours, and he knew the security guards’ routine backward and forward, to the second. He’d made it all the way to the control room, even got the damn door unlocked without a hitch. Then, either his luck ran out or his intel let him down. Maybe both.
Who could have foreseen on this particular night one of the guards would just happen to get hold of some bad shrimp, or an intestinal bug—who knew what it was that sent him, at that precise moment, in search of a vacant crew’s head?
The guy came out of nowhere—Roy rounded the corner and there he was. And in that narrow passageway, there was no place for him to hide. Trapped like a deer in a hunter’s headlights.
Lord knows, things couldn’t have looked more hopeless for Momma Starr’s baby boy than they did at that moment. But life was precious to him—he hadn’t realized how precious until he’d realized he wasn’t giving his up without one helluva fight.
In that moment, instinct took over. Instinct…and then some pretty intense combat training, thanks to which, in the first chaotic moments, he very nearly succeeded in making his escape. He’d taken out the first guy and was heading for the deck, but seconds later the narrow passageway had filled to bursting with security guards, all of them big. And heavily armed. And, it seemed, all of them bent on pounding him into a lifeless bloody pulp. He could feel his body being buffeted by blows from all sides, though oddly enough, with all the adrenaline pumping through him, he felt almost no pain.
Then, suddenly, he felt nothing at all.
“Doc,” Celia sobbed, “help me—I don’t know what to do! Oh God—what’s happening? Is he dying?”
Doc’s face, as he bent over the injured man, was close to hers. She saw one bloodshot eye flick her way, then narrow in a frown as he straightened. “Just unconscious, at the moment.”
“He was shivering and mumbling, then all of a sudden he just went…like that.” She was ashamed, now, of her panic. “So…still. I thought…” She’d thought he’d died on her, that’s what she’d thought. Literally. And how awful would that be!
“Take your clothes off,” Doc said.
Celia stared at him. “What?”
“I said, take off your clothes. Now. We’ve got to get him warm. If we don’t, I’m not giving any odds on him making it. Without thermal wraps and IV fluids, and given his size and the difficulty involved in getting him into a shower or bathtub, the best way I know of to do that is the old-fashioned way—skin to skin. And I’m sure as hell not going to be the one to cuddle up to him. This was your idea. Come on, love—up you get.”
“I’m not taking off everything,” Celia said, glaring at the doctor as she eased herself out from under the injured man’s limp body. “I’m keeping my underpants on, and that’s final.”
Doc grunted impatiently. “If you feel you must. Just hurry up, will you?”
“Turn around.”
“Dear girl, might I remind you that I am a doctor?”
“Not anymore,” Celia said darkly, standing her ground.
Doc rolled his eyes, but obediently turned his back. With fingers that felt stiff and uncoordinated, she unbuttoned and unzipped her shorts, shook them down to her ankles and stepped out of them. She stood for a moment chewing on her lips. Then, throwing a nervous glance over her shoulder at Doc’s rigid back, she peeled off the damp and sandy sports bra and dropped it on top of the shorts.
Her breasts shivered and her nipples puckered as she lifted the edge of the quilt and perched gingerly on the edge of the mattress. Taking a deep breath and sucking in her stomach in a futile effort to avoid making contact with his body, she arranged herself alongside the injured man.
“Okay, now what?” Although she wasn’t cold herself—not really—her teeth insisted on chattering. She tensed her jaws to make them stop doing that.
“Snuggle up to him, darling. Wrap your arms and legs around him. Do I really have to explain it to you?” Doc sounded amused.
Oh…God. Every nerve ending in her skin rebelled at the touch of that clammy body. That hard, unfamiliar masculine body.
She gasped. “He’s naked.”
“What did you expect? Would you rather I’d left those sandy wet drawers on him? Don’t be such a prude. Anyhow, I doubt he even knows you’re there.” Doc was leaning across her, lifting and pushing at the man’s loglike form. “Here—scoot in and wrap yourself around his backside. That’s the ticket…as close as you can get. Skin to skin, dear. I shouldn’t have to tell you how, should I? Touch him everywhere you can.” And he pulled the comforters tightly around her, tucking them in behind her so that she was trapped…cocooned inside the bundle with the unconscious stranger.
Celia closed her eyes and counted the rapid thumping of her heartbeats. Her face was pressed between cold, gritty shoulder blades. She didn’t know what to do with her hands. Her palms, stiffly flattened over his rib cage, measured the faint, slow tick of his pulse. Her tightened nipples hurt where they mashed against hard muscle. Shivers cascaded through her body in waves. Between them she muttered brokenly, “Okay…what…now?”
“Now?” Doc exhaled in a gust as he sank once more into the armchair. “I don’t know, dear heart. Hope and pray you’re the hot-blooded type, I suppose.”
Roy became aware of the pain first, a dull throbbing ache in his head, his belly, his back—in fact, in just about every part of him. That soon led to the realization that he was cold and uncomfortable on top of the pain, and only a little additional mental exercise told him the reason: he was lying on his side on a hard slick surface—the deck of a ship? Yes, and—he was wearing only a pair of shorts—what had happened to his wet suit? Additionally, there was a piece of duct tape over his mouth, and his wrists were bound together behind his back—also with duct tape. The deck beneath his cheek was vibrating, a deep, throbbing thrum, and a cold, damp wind was stirring across his naked skin.
He remembered now. He was on board the megayacht Bibi Lilith. And, apparently, the yacht was no longer riding at anchor just outside the marina. She was now under way, heading at full speed out to sea.
Careful to move nothing else, he opened his eyes. Still dark. Apparently not much time had elapsed since he’d been caught trying to plant a Trojan horse chip in the engine control computer.
The chip. Where’s the damned chip?
They’d stripped him down to his shorts, and the packet had been tucked inside his wet suit. They’d found it—had to have found it. And were probably at that very moment trying to figure out what it was and what he’d intended to do with it. It was, he reasoned, probably the only reason they hadn’t killed him yet. They’d want to know what damage he’d done, who had sent him, how much he knew. His heart thumped and his skin crawled at the thought of the means they might be planning to employ to extract that information from him before they killed him and threw his body overboard.
Overboard. Well, hell. That was the reason the yacht was heading out to sea. They’d want to be in deep water when they dumped him.
It took only a few seconds for his senses to gather all this information, and for his brain to process it. After that, his brain wasted a good bit more time skittering around trying to figure a way out of the situation he was in. The only thing that activity produced was the conclusion that his prospects weren’t good. He was alone on this mission, without backup, vastly outnumbered, and what weapons or means of calling for help he’d had were on his belt, which had been removed from him along with his wet suit.
Looking on the bright side, he was alive, at least for the moment. And, they hadn’t gone too far offshore yet. The lights of L.A. were still visible out there, rising and falling on the horizon. If he could make it to the water, he might have a chance. A small one, for sure, but it beat the hell out of anything that could happen to him if he stayed on this boat.
I have to make it to the water….
He moved experimentally and heard a mutter of voices respond immediately from somewhere nearby but beyond his line of vision. The voices were speaking something other than English. Arabic? Persian?
He heard the scuff of footsteps, and a dark shape bent over him. He moaned, again as an experiment, and was rewarded with a vicious kick in the ribs for his trouble. Another voice spoke, and Roy felt himself jerked roughly to his feet. The tape was ripped cruelly from his mouth.
He stood swaying, licking his stinging lips as the dark shapes closed in around him. Now? Shall I make a move now? His mind calculated the distance to the railing. Too far! Besides which, his legs still felt wobbly and his head was swimming. He’d never make it alive.
While he was making that assessment, the line of dark shapes directly in front of Roy broke apart, and another shape moved into the gap. This man, obviously the one in charge, lifted a hand and drew long and deeply on a cigarette, briefly and faintly illuminating hawklike, angular features—good-looking in a dark-browed and bearded sort of way. I’ll know him, Roy thought. If I live to see him again, I’ll know him.
“Who do you work for?” The words coming at him from out of the darkness were spits of sound—short and sharp, but deadly, like the sounds a gun makes when it has been equipped with a silencer. “Why are you here?”
“I don’t…work for anybody…except myself,” Roy said, with what he hoped were convincingly weak-sounding coughs. “Figured…a yacht like this…there’s gotta be something worth stealing—”
A fist thudded without warning into his stomach. He doubled over, retching feebly. Lights ricocheted inside his skull.
“Wrong answer,” the staccato voice said calmly. “If you wanted to steal you would have been upstairs, in the salon, or the staterooms. What were you doing outside the control room? Answer me correctly this time, or the next thing to hit your stomach will be a bullet.”
Roy considered his options and kept his mouth shut.
His interrogator shrugged as he drew once more on his cigarette, then tossed it over the railing. Roy watched the reddish spark arc downward and out of sight, like a short-lived shooting star.
“It doesn’t matter,” the interrogator said in his curiously passionless voice. “I know who you are. You are an agent of the United States government. You are trespassing on this yacht. The computer chip you were carrying with you will be analyzed and your intentions will be discovered. But in any case, whatever you were sent to do, you have failed. Whatever else you may have left behind, it will be found.” He gestured to the other shapes. “Take care of him.”
Roy’s heart lurched as he heard the unmistakable jangle of heavy chain from somewhere close behind him. Whatever I do, I can’t let them put that chain on me.
Still clinging to the guise of casual and inept thief, Roy whined, “Wait! What—what are you doing? Hold on a minute! Jeez! What’s with you guys? What ever happened to calling the cops?”
The interrogator paused to look back, and a light from somewhere on the yacht’s upper decks caught and illuminated his smile. “Police ask too many questions.” The voice now sounded almost gentle. “This is much simpler. Cleaner. Nothing of you will ever be found…no evidence. Fewer questions.” He turned to continue on his way.
Roy shook away the nearest of his captors and lurched toward the interrogator, calling out, “Wait—dammit!” as if he were bent on pleading his case, arguing for his life.
It was a desperate gamble, but the deception gave him the split second he needed. For that split second his captors froze expectantly, and he surged past them on a wave of pure adrenaline, veering instead toward the ship’s railing.
The railing loomed ahead of him, an impossible distance away. He focused on it and ran…no, dove for it—his legs didn’t seem to touch the deck. An awkward half crouch was all he could manage with his hands secured behind his back. As he lurched forward, he heard angry exclamations from behind him. Then shouts. He plowed on, every nerve in his body humming, every muscle spasming in expectation of the brutal slam of bullets into his flesh.
The railing was there, right in front of him. He struck it hard, then arched and twisted his torso up and over, and he was falling, falling free through the darkness. From far, far away, he heard the crackle of gunfire, the zing of bullets slicing past him, the hiss and spit as they hit the water.
He felt a searing, burning sensation slam into his side and knife through his chest and had time for only one thought: Oh, hell, I’m hit!
The black Pacific swell rose up to swallow him.
The cold…
Roy had never been so cold. Being a Southern boy, born and bred, Lord, how he hated to be cold.
But, at least he was alive, and at the moment, being cold was the least of his worries. For starters, he was alone in a vast, dark ocean, although maybe the alone part wasn’t altogether a bad thing, considering the company he’d just left. At first, he’d feared his erstwhile captors might turn the yacht around and come to search for him to finish him off—maybe even launch one of the outboards. The moment of euphoria he’d felt when he’d realized they weren’t going to do that was short. Clearly, his would-be killers were confident the sea could be counted on to complete what they’d started. They didn’t even consider it worth their trouble to make certain.
Taking stock of his current circumstances, he could see their point. He was shot and bleeding profusely, miles from shore, in an ocean full of sharks. With his hands taped together. Behind him. It was, he thought, one of those Perils of Pauline cliff-hanger moments, where it looked as if things couldn’t possibly get any worse.
Except that, in those old movie serials, rescue always came at the beginning of the next episode. He was pretty sure nothing like that was going to happen here. In his case, things definitely could get worse.
Fighting back panic, Roy floated on his back and rested. While he rested, he took stock of his situation. And, in those first few minutes, the best he could do was draw courage from small victories.
Number one, I’m alive.
That was a biggie. And, he was no longer being hunted, at least by anything human. And, while the water was god-awful cold, that was a good thing, too, it seemed to him, in that it appeared to help numb the pain of the bullet wound in his side.
Or chest? Side? Both? And if that’s the case, why am I still alive?
Oddly, though, he didn’t feel as if anything vital had been damaged. The blood… He didn’t like to think about that blood.
Normally a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants kind of guy, now Roy forced himself to think methodically. To prioritize. First things first. One thing at a time. Think about sharks, for instance, only if and when they show up.
In the meantime, if he was going to swim to shore—and that did seem to be his only hope for survival—he was going to need the use of his arms. So, the taped wrists were obviously his first priority.
It turned out to be easier than he’d expected. His captors, clearly never intending the bonds to have to hold him for very long, had made the mistake of taping his wrists overlapping each other in opposite directions, leaving him enough slack in his joints and muscles so that, in his semiweightless state, it was possible for him to contort his body and maneuver his feet through the closed circle of his arms. Once he had his hands in front of him, his teeth made relatively short work of the tape. Now his arms were free—another victory.
But it was one he’d paid a high price for.
Intent on his task, he’d closed his mind to the pain in his chest and side, and to the fact that way too much of his blood was leaking out of his body. Now, rising and falling with the swell, he fought waves of nausea and dizziness, of the invading chill and weakness. Once again he floated, looking up at the milky sky…resting, and struggling, now, to keep his tenuous grip on consciousness.
He lost track of time. Stay awake…keep moving…stay alive. That was his existence now. That, and the rise and fall of the ocean beneath him, like the respirations of a giant living being. From the top of each swell, he could find a measure of encouragement in the line of lights along the shore, never seeming to move closer, but still there…always there…a beacon and a hope. Then…down he’d plunge into the trough…and he was alone again with the darkness and the cold.
Chapter 3
The man was stirring again. And muttering. Not the wild litany of horror Celia had listened to with chilled fascination for most of the night, but a single word, repeated with choked and pitiful desperation:
“Cold…c-cold…”
“I know…” she whispered against his back, tightening her arms around him, her hands unthinkingly stroking. “Shh…it’s okay…it’s okay…”
“C-cold.” He turned suddenly, reaching for her.
She gave a gasp as his arms came around her, folding her against his naked body in a shockingly intimate embrace. Her face was trapped now in the hollowed curve of neck and jaw, held there by the weight of a bony masculine chin, her lips pressed against a tickling thread of pulse. “Doc!” she squeaked in panic. “Doc—help!”
The loud snores coming from the direction of the armchair continued unabated.
Oh, God. What now? She squeezed her eyes shut and held herself still, holding even her breath. Okay…okay. Don’t panic. He’s unconscious. Delirious. This is okay. You’re fine.
Willing herself to the discipline of slow, deep breaths, she felt calm gradually overtake her. And with the quieting of her own mind and body, became aware that the man was shaking again. Not the terrible, racking shudders of hypothermia, but something gentler, and oddly rhythmic. She held herself utterly still, listening…and came to a stunning but inescapable realization: the man was crying.
Incredible, but yes, it was true. Though still less than fully conscious, the man in her arms was silently weeping.
The feeling that came over Celia then was unlike anything she’d ever known, an emotion she could neither name nor describe. It awoke from somewhere deep inside her, rippled through her chest and shivered over every inch of her skin. She felt almost frighteningly fierce and primitive and powerful…and at the same time incredibly soft and gentle and nurturing.
“So…cold,” the man whispered.
“I know…” Celia answered, her throat husky with the new emotions, “I know…but it’s okay…you’re safe…I’ve got you.”
In that moment, in some strange way, she felt he belonged to her.
When the first slithery something brushed his skin, he felt it like the sting of a whip. Fresh adrenaline slammed into his exhausted body. His mind shrieked, Shark! Every muscle, nerve and sinew braced for the jolt of teeth tearing into his flesh.
Instead, there it was again—that light, slithery touch, almost like a caress. Like cold, clammy fingers drawn flirtatiously along his torso…his arms…his legs. Sick with horror, it was several long seconds before the truth penetrated his tired brain: Not sharks. Nor any kind of fish, in fact.
It was seaweed.
It came to him that he must have drifted into one of the vast beds of giant kelp that lie off the coast of Southern California. But what did that mean for his chances of survival? He knew next to nothing about kelp, his entire experience limited to the rubbery tangles he’d seen washed up on the beaches, smelling of brine and dead sea creatures. Good thing or bad thing?
In the end, he supposed, it probably didn’t matter much, one way or the other. He was so cold…so weak…and still so far from the lights. So far…
Keep moving…stay awake…stay alive…
Something bumped him. Definitely something big, this time. Something heavy. Definitely not seaweed.
He struck at it weakly, still fighting for life, out of raw instinct, to his last living breath. Take that, shark!
But whatever it was didn’t seem at all impressed by his futile gesture of defiance. It didn’t bother to move away from him. It didn’t move in for the kill, either. It merely dipped sluggishly into the flattened slick between waving fronds of kelp, then surfaced and nudged him again. And again. As if, he thought, it was trying to get his attention.
Vaguely annoyed—Either finish me or get the hell out of my way, damn you!—Roy pushed at the object again. Again it dipped and bobbed, in what seemed to him almost like a friendly invitation. And on the very edges of consciousness, his reason flashed the word: driftwood.
Instinctively, without even knowing why, with the last remnants of his strength and will, he grasped the floating log and hitched himself onto its gnarled length. Clinging to it, he gave in once more to the darkness and the cold.
It wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it would be, dying. Rather a relief, in fact, after the cold and the pain and the constant, unrelenting struggle to keep swimming…keep moving…stay alive.
He couldn’t very well be expected to keep moving, keep swimming, could he, when he couldn’t feel his arms and legs. Couldn’t feel much of anything, in fact. He seemed to recall knowing this was because his body was concentrating its remaining resources, bringing everything into its core to keep the vital organs alive. Soon, even those would quit functioning. Heart or brain…which would be the last to go? His heart, probably. He could already feel his brain shutting down—at least, he assumed that was what was happening, since he was having such weird fantasies—pictures and sounds and sensations that made no sense to him. Voices—strangers’ voices. One in particular, a woman’s, crooning to him as if he were a child. A little baby. He found it unexpectedly comforting.
He dreamed a face to go with the voice—an angel’s, naturally. This angel, though, had a body like a Playboy centerfold, which was definitely something they hadn’t told him about in Sunday School. The angel snuggled her voluptuous body next to his, warming him. Soothing him with her voice…warming him with her body.
Yeah, he thought, this dying business isn’t so bad…
Resurrection, though, was hell.
Protesting, he came rocketing up out of black oblivion and into a blinding, thundering artillery barrage of pain. Pain was everywhere. It pounded behind his eyeballs and stabbed the muscles of his arms and legs like a thousand tiny, vicious knives. It seared through his chest and yawned cold and empty in the pit of his belly. His skin burned. His molars ached. He hurt so badly he retched, which was not only humiliating, it made everything hurt more than ever. The urge to throw up was incredibly strong, and it was only because he couldn’t stand any more of that pain that he managed to fight it back down.
At first, he thought he wanted to go back to the nice darkness and stay there, even if the darkness was death. Then he thought maybe he had died, that those Sunday School teachers years ago had been right about where he was destined to end up.
The notion scared him enough so he dared to open his eyes, and that was when he figured out he was most likely alive after all. At least, he was unless the hereafter looked a lot like somebody’s den, and God or the devil was a chubby guy wearing a purple silk bathrobe, sound asleep in a big ugly armchair and snoring like a buzz saw with his mouth wide open.
Reassured, Roy gave in to the lead weights attached to his eyelids and let them sink down…down.
A moment later they fluttered up again. His heart beat a wild tattoo against his ribs. What the hell? Am I delirious? Dying after all?
Breathing slowly and deeply, he took stock. Nope. Not delirious. There was a woman in bed with him. He could feel the humid warmth of her breath on his skin, the dove-soft tickle of her hair. Her arm lay draped like a strap across his torso, and one of her legs had overlapped and slipped intimately between his. With the utmost care, he turned his head. A deliciously feminine scent drifted to his nostrils. Ignoring the shooting pains rocketing through his skull, he tensed his face and neck muscles and aimed his eyes downward. A vision of tumbled blond met his gaze—winter grass touched with sunshine.
He thought, My God, it’s my angel. I didn’t dream her. She’s real.
The body snuggled against him tensed, suddenly. The cloud of blond hair parted, and he found himself gazing into a single wide-awake eye—an eye of the clearest, most vivid blue he’d ever seen. The eye, surrounded by thick, sooty lashes, stared back at him—for about two seconds. Then, with a flurry of movement that reminded him of an uncoiling spring, the arm, the leg, the eye, and all the various body parts that went with them, separated themselves from him and retracted into a blanket-wrapped bundle. The bundle was topped by a face befitting an angel, an oval flushed with the loveliest shade of pink, like the insides of some seashells, and dominated by two of those smudgy blue eyes.
“You’re awake.” The words, breathless and husky, issued from lips so lush and full that, gazing at them, he felt twinges at the back of his throat, as if he’d just caught the scent of something delicious, like bacon frying or bread baking. And that, more than anything, finally convinced him he truly was, against all odds, alive.
“Lord, I hope so,” he murmured. But the sound he’d intended, the voice he’d expected, wasn’t there. Instead, he heard only a stickery whisper.
To his bemusement, the eyes gazing down into his grew luminous and shimmery. “Oh—God. Oh, God, you’re awake.” A hand emerged from the blanket mound, wavered toward him, then stopped. “Wait-wait—it’s okay. It’s okay.” Her voice was trembling, though there seemed to be a note of laughter in it, too. “Don’t move, okay? Doc!” She threw that over her shoulder, in the general direction of the sleeping man in the armchair. “Hey! Doc! Wake up! He’s awake. He’s alive. He’s okay.”
Alive? Okay? Doc? Where in the hell am I?
He couldn’t bring himself to ask, because Where am I? sounded too much like a bad movie script. And as for whether he was okay, he had some serious doubts on that score. He’d never felt less okay in his life.
He hissed in a breath when he felt something cold touch his skin. Another barrage of shooting pains assailed him as he forced his eyes to focus on the shape bending over him. A hand was doing something under the heap of blankets that covered him to his chin. A masculine hand. Recognizing both the chubby man from the armchair and the stethoscope dangling from his ears, he thought, How ’bout that—he really is a doctor.
But this isn’t a hospital I’m in.
At least, he’d sure as hell never heard of any hospital putting a naked woman in a patient’s bed.
Wait a minute! Why am I not in a hospital? Who the hell are these people?
The mystery of that, and the mental energy required to solve it, became too much for him. Overwhelmed by pain, weakness and other physical discomforts, only one thing seemed of vital importance to him now.
“Thirsty…”
The man called Doc nodded curtly and retracted the stethoscope from under the covers. As he straightened he lifted his eye-brows at the blanket-wrapped bundle perched next to Roy. “I think we’re ready for that broth now, Celia, dear.”
Roy watched in mute fascination as the head atop the bundle made a slight but definitely negative motion, and every strand of that blond hair seemed to dance and coil as though it had a separate life of its own.
The doc looked startled, but before he could say anything, the woman’s lips tightened and her blue eyes narrowed to flinty chips. “Close your eyes,” she said in a voice to match the look.
The doctor, with a much-put-upon sigh, did as he was told. The woman shifted her glare to Roy. “You, too.”
In that moment, gazing into those incredible eyes, all he could think about was how close he’d been to never looking upon a woman’s body—naked or otherwise—ever again, and his mind said, No way.
The doc said, “Celia, love…”
For a long, unmeasurable moment she stared back at Roy. Then, with a muttered, “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she got up off the bed with a flounce, throwing down the blanket.
There followed a profound and respectful silence as the two men—she couldn’t seriously have expected the doc to keep his eyes closed, could she?—watched her leave the room…blond hair bouncing on a smooth, gently curving back…tapering to a rounded bottom not so much covered as nicely framed by wisps of pale blue fabric…anchoring a pair of long, well-muscled legs.
When she was gone, the silence extended for another second or two before the doctor cleared his throat. Roy said, “Your wife?” in a careful voice that sifted from his throat like sand.
The reply was a sharp bark of laughter, and then, in a British accent, “Dear boy, not even in my wildest dreams.”
“Ah,” Roy said, and fell silent, pondering the fact that he felt less weak and pitiful than he had only minutes before. Sex, he thought—the male imperative—was evidently a more powerful life force than he’d ever imagined.
“I dreamed she was an angel,” he said after a moment, in his new, scratchy whisper of a voice.
“An angel?” The doc seemed to find that amusing. “Hardly. Though, I am quite certain you owe her your life.” He peeled back the blankets in an offering sort of way.
Avidly interested in seeing what had been uncovered, Roy tried to raise his head to look at himself. Then he thought better of it and lifted an exploring hand instead, wincing when his fingers encountered a heavy layer of gauze and tape. Well, he’d suspected as much. “I’m shot, right?”
The doctor nodded. Roy closed his eyes and exhaled carefully. “How bad?” And why am I here and not in a hospital?
“Through and through, my boy.” The doc’s voice had perked up several notches, as if plugged into a new source of energy. “You were lucky. Looks to me like the bullet entered here—” Roy felt a light touch, low on his side “—and my guess is, it grazed the first couple of ribs and fractured them, but was deflected enough that it then plowed up through chest muscle, and…came out here.” The hand brushed the bandages high on Roy’s pectoral, then described a line in the air that barely missed his jaw and earlobe. “Continuing on the same trajectory… Damned odd trajectory, that is…I can’t…quite figure out—unless you were above, and the shooter was…”
Roy opened one eye and saw the doctor making wild gestures and contorting his purple-robed body while he tried to reconstruct the shooting scenario. He stopped when he saw Roy watching him and lifted one bristly eyebrow. “I don’t suppose you’d care to tell us, uh…”
“Sorry,” Roy mumbled, closing his eyes, “can’t help you there. Don’t remember much.”
“Ah. No. I suppose not.” The doc drew a disappointed-sounding breath. “Well, then. Can you at least tell us who you are? Your name? Is there someone we can notify?”
Roy didn’t reply. In spite of his racing heart and a desperate and overwhelming sense of urgency, he knew he couldn’t fight anymore, knew he couldn’t have lifted a finger right then to save his own life. But weak as he was, his survival instincts were still strong, and at the moment there was no way in hell he was telling anybody anything. Not until I know who you people are, and what in the hell I’m doing here!
It wasn’t much of a stretch for him to pretend exhaustion and slip back into slumber.
Celia stopped off in the bathroom across the hall long enough to put on a bathrobe, and while she was at it, splash some water on her face and drag a brush through her hair. While she was doing that, she stared at her reflection in the mirror above the sink, at the watercolor wash of pink on her skin, at the mark on one cheek left by a crease in the pillowcase, and felt her body grow warm inside the lightweight robe. No matter what, she thought, I can always manage to look good.
Though, why should she care whether she did or not, when it was only Doc and some half-dead stranger?
Stranger. As the word flashed through her mind she felt a lifting beneath her ribs, a sudden surge of excitement, anticipation and an indefinable yearning. What does this mean? she wondered as she swept down the hall, the ends of her robe separating and flapping in the breeze she made. All that stuff he talked about. Is it true? What does all of it mean…for me?
Entering the kitchen, Celia checked in surprise when she saw, across the serving island and the creamy-carpeted living room, beyond the expanse of glass framed by the curtains she’d forgotten to draw the night before, the Pacific Ocean glittering in the morning sunshine like a vast field of molten gold. A glance at the clock above the stove told her it was early for the fog to have burned off, a sure sign a Santa Ana or another storm was on its way. She felt a shivering in her scalp and down the back of her neck, as if the wind had stirred the fine hairs there.
Once again, she went through the motions of getting a mug out of the cupboard, filling it with water and two cubes of bouillon and setting it in the microwave. While it was heating, she arranged a spoon and a napkin on a tray, and put a kettle on the stove to heat more water for tea. All the while she was doing that, her mind was replaying every word the stranger had spoken during the long dark night. She was used to memorizing pages and pages of script at a time, and she remembered every horrifying, improbable detail.
Could it possibly be true? In the middle of the night, in the fog, it had been easy to get caught up in fantastic scenarios. It had seemed, as Doc had suggested, rather like watching a movie thriller on DVD. Today, with the sun shining, and the injured man awake and lucid in her bed…
What if it’s true?
The tray in front of her blurred. She saw instead a pair of eyes…the wounded stranger’s eyes. She’d wondered what color they’d be. Hadn’t expected them to be so dark. Dark…like unsweetened chocolate. Like coffee. Something strong and heady and not at all sweet. They seem to her impenetrable, like the night. Full of danger. Full of secrets…
The ding of the microwave’s timer scattered her musings like so many sparrows. She snatched the steaming mug out of the oven and was placing it on the tray when the tea kettle went off like a factory whistle, startling her. She swore under her breath as she licked scalding bouillon from one hand and grabbed at the shrieking kettle with the other—efficiency in the kitchen had never been her strong suit. Boiling water was, in fact, about the limit of her expertise and for the next several minutes she was forced to concentrate on the task at hand, clamping down on the strange excitement simmering inside her as she got out tea bags and another mug, poured hot water and added a sugar bowl to the assortment on the tray.
But as she carried the tray down the hallway to her bedroom, she felt a warmth in her cheeks and a quickening in her pulse, a fire in her belly that could only be one thing: desire.
Not the usual kind of desire—Celia couldn’t remember the last time anyone had kindled those particular fires in her. No, this was the kind of yearning, burning desire of her actor’s soul that consumed her whenever she got her hands on a really great script, one that had a really great part in it for her. The kind of part she’d give her very soul to play. There’s a part in this for me, I know there is.
She could feel the tension the moment she walked into her bedroom. The way it feels, she thought, when you walk in on a conversation right after somebody’s dropped a big bombshell. There was Doc, standing with his hands in his bathrobe pockets, frowning down at the man in Celia’s bed. The man himself had his eyes closed, and his face was like a death mask.
She halted inside the door, both shoulders and tray sagging with disappointment. “Don’t tell me. He’s out cold again?”
“So it would seem,” Doc said, with a particular lilt in his normally dry British voice that Celia happened to know meant he wasn’t pleased.
“So…you haven’t found out anything? What about a name?”
Looking frankly frustrated, Doc shook his head.
Celia settled herself on the edge of the bed with the tray on her lap. Head tilted, she studied the rugged, unresponsive features. Fascinated in spite of herself, she noted scrapes and hollows, shadows of bruises that had escaped her notice before.
They worked you over good, didn’t they?
She remembered the strange and overwhelming protectiveness and sense of ownership that had come over her in the night, and felt an unsettling desire to touch those shadowed places…
“Well, then,” Doc said grumpily, “since he seems in no danger of kicking off right away, I think I’ll leave him in your nurturing hands. I’ll leave you some painkillers—the OTC kind, of course,” he added dryly. “As for antibiotics, even if I had any, I’d be a bit leery of giving him those, in case he might be allergic. Infection’s going to be the main thing to watch out for, and if that wound starts showing signs of it, I’m afraid you’re going to have to get him to a hospital whether he wants it or not. Aside from that, he just needs time to recover from the hypothermia and blood loss—time, and plenty of rest and nutrients, fluids and so on. Which I’m quite sure you are capable of providing.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face as he turned and made for the door. For the first time since they’d carried the stranger into her house, Celia felt a pang of guilt. Doc had been a good friend to her in her darkest hours and, come to think of it, had been through quite a lot of darkness himself.
“Doc—thanks,” she said softly. “For…everything. I appreciate it—I really do.”
“No problem.” He dredged up one of his bitter smiles. “I’m afraid I don’t do all-nighters as well as I once did. So—I’m off to bed. I don’t think you will, but if you need me for anything, anything at all—give me a ring.” He gave a wave and left her.
Celia brought her gaze back to the man in the bed—and felt a small jolt, like a zap of electricity, when she saw the eyes that had been closed before were now open. Watching her. Eyes…like the night…full of danger…full of secrets.
“So,” she said in a light and breathy voice, while her heart thumped in contrabass, “you’re awake after all.”
“More or less.” His voice reminded her of blowing sand, while his eyes clung, hard and cold as limpets, to her face.
Tearing hers away, Celia aimed them instead at the tray in her lap. “Do you think you could eat something? Doc says you need to. You have lost a lot of blood.”
“Maybe…water…”
“Broth,” she countered, giving her head a determined shake as she picked up the mug and spoon. “It’s mostly water. Plus, it’s warm. Here—open up.” She leaned toward him, humming inside with a curious high, a mixture of excitement and anticipation, confidence and…not exactly fear—more like stage fright. Like opening night on Broadway—if I should ever be so lucky.
The man’s brow furrowed in a frown of reluctant acquiescence. She clamped her teeth on her lower lip, holding back the tumult of her feelings as she watched the parched lips open…followed the spoon’s unsteady path toward them…saw the spoon hover…the lips purse…sip…and the amber liquid disappear.
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.
Chapter 4
“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.
An instant later she jerked upright. The computer screen had already flashed back a blue bar with the words, Searched the Web for Roy Starr Fishing Charters Florida. Results 1-10 of about 115,786. Search took 0.18 seconds.
She gave a huff of astonishment and whispered, “Wow.” Then, clamping her teeth on her lower lip, she leaned forward and began to read through the entries on the screen.
A few minutes later she was triumphantly connected to a Web site for STARR CHARTERS, and gazing at a picture of a rather ungainly-looking white boat afloat on impossibly blue water. Plainly visible on the boat’s bow were the words, Gulf Starr. Below the picture, the company’s name and logo were featured artistically, along with mailing and e-mail addresses and an 800 telephone number. Below that were the words, Roy Starr and Scott Cavanaugh, captains—experienced, trustworthy, professional.
There were links to other pages and other pictures—a good many of them. It took some time, but Celia visited and studied them all. Most of the photographs featured happy sunburned fishermen displaying their catch, but several afforded glimpses of the crew, as well. The one most often shown was a big, burly man with honey-brown hair cut short in a distinctly military style. The brother-in-law, obviously. He looked to be in his mid-forties, and had a nice smile—a very nice smile, Celia decided, the kind that made the man wearing it look as if he might actually be trustworthy and professional.
The same could hardly be said of the other man in the photographs. This one had a lean and untamed look, with a whisker shadow and longish dark hair that flirted with the wind. And, far from inviting trust and confidence, his smile held a hint—just a delicious shivery touch—of wickedness.
So he was telling the truth—about this, at least, Celia thought, shaking off the shivers—though her heart went tripping on in double-time, oblivious to her will. But it doesn’t explain how he came to be shot and washed up half-dead on my beach.
It didn’t explain the nightmare babbling about boats and bombs and millions of people dying. It didn’t explain about a luxury yacht called Lady Of The Night. And who was Max?
Since the answers to her questions didn’t seem likely to magically appear on the computer screen she was staring at, she turned it off, huffed a frustrated breath and went downstairs.
In her bedroom, the stranger—Roy Starr, alleged charter boat captain from Florida—slept on, his breathing raspy and rhythmic, not quite a snore. Celia tiptoed past him to her dresser, then to the closet, gathering clothes and clean underwear. From the bathroom she collected makeup and toiletries, and then, arms full, trudged back up the stairs, pleased once again to note that her legs barely protested.
The master bathroom felt chilly and unfamiliar to her when she first entered it—hard to believe it had been almost a year since she’d used it last. In some ways, she thought, a very long year…and in others, the night of the accident seemed like only last week. Like yesterday.
Nausea twisted coldly in her belly. She slammed the door on those memories and turned on the water in the shower.
She unbelted her robe and let it fall, as was her habit, in a heap on the floor, and as she did that the thought flashed into her mind: Ohmigod, I’ll have to call Mercy!
Normally, the robe would stay where it had fallen until Mercy the cleaning lady or one of her helpers picked it up and either put it in the laundry hamper, or, if it was the day for it, in the washing machine. But, of course, the cleaning service was going to have to be cancelled, at least temporarily, since it would be hard to explain to Mercy and her girls the presence of a wounded stranger in her bed.
It occurred to Celia for the first time, as she stepped into the shower, that the man downstairs was likely going to change her life more than a little. Last night, what she’d done—getting Doc to help her, picking him up, bringing him here—she’d done in the dark and fog and loneliness of a sleepless night. The wee hours of the morning. People did crazy things in the wee hours of the morning—ask anybody! It hadn’t occurred to her then what it was going to mean, practically speaking. Such as the fact that, apparently, she was now going to have to do her own cleaning.
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