Kathleen Creighton
Undercover Mistress
A book in the Starrs of the West series, 2005
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.
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:
Then she thought, mentally smacking herself like a misbehaving puppy,
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
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.
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
But-about to move on, once again she froze. Okay, no doubt about it. A branch of that “driftwood” had definitely
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.
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.
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.
Okay, but not a
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.
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.
Which meant it was now up to her to see he stayed that way.
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?
