Undercover Mistress

body-had probably saved his life. This body, that had once been a source of pride-even arrogance?-to her, and which she could hardly bear to look at, even now.

And his body…lithe and lean in the photographs…young and tan and unmarred…

With her eyes closed and the water pouring over her face she saw it again the way she’d first seen it last night-bruised and crusted with sand, and the ragged hole high on his chest where a bullet had burst through. Like her, he’d carry a scar there, for the rest of his life.

In a thoughtful mood, a calmer mood, Celia turned off the water and reached for a towel. She dried and dressed in jeans, T-shirt and sandals, tied her wet hair up in a haphazard ponytail and put on a baseball cap over it. This was her grocery-shopping outfit. Celia knew how to dress if she wanted to be noticed, and once upon a time she’d enjoyed playing the celebrity…loved the attention, the adulation. Now, the thought of being recognized in public made her sick to her stomach. Dressed like this, she was almost guaranteed not to be recognized by anyone among the hoards of surf bums and sun worshippers that swarmed over Malibu in all seasons of the year.

Pausing only to add the finishing touch-a pair of sunglasses, no makeup-she went downstairs to look in on the sleeping stranger one more time. Then she went outside, locking the house behind her, and got into the modest American-made SUV she’d bought last summer when she’d finally gotten the doctors’ okay to drive again. She was still getting used to it-it seemed tall and ungainly after her beloved Mercedes roadster, which she’d turned into a twisted mass of metal on the Pacific Coast Highway just over a year ago. The fact was, she was still getting used to driving at all and wondering if the day was ever going to come when she could get behind the wheel of a car without feeling that cold clenching of fear in her stomach.

This morning, mentally focusing on the task ahead of her the way she’d once prepared for a particularly challenging scene, she fought down the fear, backed the SUV carefully out of her driveway and headed slowly up the narrow winding street toward the Pacific Coast Highway.

Roy dreamed he was being chased. He dreamed of running, running, running, with his lungs on fire and his breath coming in tearing gasps. Then suddenly he wasn’t running, he was swimming, but his lungs were still on fire.

Sharks. Sharks were chasing him, so he couldn’t stop swimming, but his chest hurt so badly he was pretty sure he was going to die from that, anyhow. Hell of a choice-get eaten by sharks or have his chest explode. Since it was an impossible choice to make, he woke up.

He discovered that he was lying in a bed under a mountain of comforters, in a tangle of damp sheets, drenched in sweat and shivering with cold. And his chest was still on fire.

But no sharks.

Yeah, he remembered now. He’d been shot. He’d escaped from the yacht Bibi Lilith by diving overboard into the Pacific Ocean, but he’d been shot in the process and somehow, by some miracle, he’d wound up here. A gorgeous blonde and a chubby little guy named Doc had brought him here and put him in this bed, and for some strange reason hadn’t called the cops or the paramedics to come and deal with him.

And the blonde had asked him about Max.

Max! I have to get hold of Max. Have to let him know… Let him know I blew the mission. Screwed up. Failed…

The house seemed profoundly quiet. He thought about calling out for someone to come and help him, but his head was pounding and his mouth felt like the Sahara Desert. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth and managed to hitch himself up onto the pile of pillows behind him. The pain in his chest seemed to ease some, so he lay still for a minute or two, resting up for the next big step. He didn’t know how he was going to manage it, but somehow or other he was going to have to get himself to a bathroom.

While he was trying to psych himself up for the ordeal, he let his gaze travel around the room, getting a good look at the place he’d come to, trying to get a fix on the kind of people into whose clutches he seemed to have fallen. An actress and a doctor? An odd couple, for sure-but no, the doc had said they weren’t a couple. Roy was pretty sure he remembered that much.

The first thing that struck him about the room he was in was that it didn’t look like a bedroom-at least, not the kind of bedroom he’d have associated with a gorgeous single woman. The walls were mostly covered with bookcases, the built-in kind, custom-made and expensive, from real wood finished in warm honey tones, some with leaded glass doors. Where the bookcases weren’t, the walls were paneled with the same golden wood, and hung with framed photographs and movie posters, though not of the blonde, as he might have expected. These looked like old-style Hollywood. Many were black-and-white, and the people in them, a man and a woman, looked familiar to him, though he couldn’t immediately think of their names.

The shelves and glass cabinets held books, a lot of them, but other things, too. An intriguing assortment of things, from what looked to Roy like just about every corner of the world: a kachina doll, a lacquered box painted with brightly colored birds, an elephant carved from something that looked like real jade. There was a stuffed bear that looked old, and one of those Russian dolls made of wood that have dolls inside of dolls, each one smaller than the one before, and a model sailboat, and a zebra, exquisitely carved from dark wood.

On one shelf high up near the top, there was a row of golden statuettes he’d seen before, though only in pictures. The three in the middle were of an off-balance female figure holding up an open sphere. Flanking these like bookends were two pairs of statuettes most likely everybody on the planet would recognize-a sleek but rather stiffly posed bald guy named Oscar.

Roy breathed a soft, soundless whistle and thought, Wow, she said she was an actress, but she didn’t say she was famous! And he wondered why, if she’d won all those awards, he didn’t know who she was.

Celia, love…

The name popped into his memory along with images of a sleek and voluptuous curve of back and bottom and long, graceful legs walking away from him, and hunger-juices miraculously pooling at the back of his throat…

Doc called her Celia. Celia what? Didn’t ring any bells.

Summoning his strength and will, Roy pushed back the mountain of comforters and struggled to a sitting position on the edge of the bed, legs over the side, feet tingling on the carpeted floor. His head swam and nausea threatened, the pain in his head and chest, and all his joints and muscles-hell, even in his teeth-was so bad he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to keep from passing out. And he was so damn thirsty.

As he rocked himself slowly, waiting for the dizziness to pass, he noticed a ceramic mug sitting on the nightstand. It was nearly full of a brownish liquid of some kind, and it didn’t take much in the way of common sense to tell him it had been left there for him to drink. He picked it up and was shocked to discover how much strength it took to do that. Though his hands shook, he managed to get it to his lips. He sniffed, then tasted it. Ugh. Tea, tepid and unsweetened. But wet.

He drank it down clumsily, slurping and wheezing like a two-year-old, thanking God there wasn’t anybody to see him.

By the time he’d emptied the mug and returned it to the nightstand, he felt as beat as if he’d run a marathon. His body weighed a ton, and all he wanted to do was give in to the forces of gravity…keel over into that nice soft bed and sleep for about a week. But there was all that tea he’d drunk, making it that much more imperative he haul his battered carcass to the nearest bathroom, no matter what it took.

Roy had always considered himself a pretty tough kind of a guy, with guts and willpower enough to get him through just about anything, something he considered he’d just finished proving, in case there was anybody who might have doubted it before. But damned if he wasn’t ready to admit that midnight swim in the Pacific-after getting beaten half to death and shot besides-was nothing-a walk in the park-compared to what he was fixing to do now, which was drag himself a few yards across a room and one small hallway into a bathroom.

He did it, though. He got himself to where he needed to be, but by the time he’d finished his business, he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to make it back. Still, he tried and kept on trying, even while the cold, clammy walls were closing in and the darkness poured like ink into his field of vision. The last thing he remembered was centering himself on the rectangle of the bathroom doorway and lurching for it, as if it were the gate to paradise and about to slam shut in his face.

Celia was humming a song from Chicago-and wasn’t that a