Undercover Mistress

see if there was a smile of triumph on her lips or lurking in her eyes. He focused instead on the spoon, watching as she lifted it first to her own mouth to test its temperature before offering it to him. She did that so casually, so naturally it didn’t occur to him until later what an intimate act it was.

The broth was the best thing he’d ever tasted. It both warmed him and made him feel stronger, and when, after several spoonfuls, the worst of the shivering seemed to have stopped, he said in a humble tone, “You’re pretty good at this. You sure you’re not a nurse?”

Concentrating on her task, she replied absently, “No, I only play one on TV.”

“No kidding?” His eyes flicked to her face, making him jerk just enough to dislodge a few drips of broth from the brimful spoon. Before when that had happened he’d felt embarrassed and ashamed; now he barely noticed. “What,” he asked as he lifted a hand to swipe at his chin, “are you on some kind of series?”

“Sort of,” She was leaning over to reach for something-a napkin-on the nightstand, and he couldn’t see her face. He gazed instead at her ear, the back side of it, the curve of the hair-line, the random wisps of blond hair that had escaped from her ponytail. It struck him how very young and innocent, even sweet, that part of her seemed.

Distracted, he asked, more bluntly than he’d intended, “So…who are you?” Then, because he thought that might sound a little rude, tried to amend it. “I mean…what’s your name? Should I-”

“Celia Cross.”

“Celia…” Celia, love… He tested the name on his tongue, and thought, I remember that. Not that it meant any more to him now than it had when he’d first heard Doc say it. “Are you somebody I should…recognize?” Because he didn’t.

She threw him an amused look, not quite a smile. “Probably not. The show I’m on is a soap.”

“Pardon me?”

“A soap opera-or, as we in the business prefer to say, daytime drama. It’s called Doctors and Lovers.” The amused look twitched into irony. “I play one of the latter. Who also happens to be a nurse-Suzanne Sullivan, in case you’re interested. Head surgical nurse at Rosewood Medical Center, Rosewood, Ohio.” Something-a shadow-took the light from her eyes as she lifted the mug of broth once more.

Intrigued by that unfathomable look, he shook his head, ignoring the proffered spoon. His hunger for answers, for knowledge was more compelling. “Aren’t those daytime soaps pretty much a year-round, everyday thing? So what are you, on vacation or something?”

“Something like that.”

She drew a catching breath, the way people do when they want to start on a fresh tack. Her lips smiled, though her eyes still avoided his. “Hey-I’ve been grocery shopping. Let me know when you feel ready for something besides broth, because I got so much good stuff.” The center of her forehead furrowed charmingly. “At least, it looks like it would be good. I’ve never tried the pot roast-I’m sort of a semivegetarian…”

“Sort of…a semivegetarian. That like being semipregnant?”

“Yeah, well…” She hitched up one shoulder and her smile deepened, producing an unexpected dimple as her gaze doggedly followed the spoon’s path. “Meaning, I almost never eat red meat but I’m not a fanatic about it.”

He accepted the spoonful of broth, then lifted his hand and caught hers before she could lower it again. She made a soft breath sound and the smile vanished. Her startled gaze lifted and slammed into his.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked in a harsh and garbled voice. It was something he’d asked her before, though the urgent need to know the answer seemed to have come upon him only now, in a devastating rush, like a rogue wave.

“You were on the beach,” she said with a shrug, edgy and evasive, veiling her eyes once more. “I found you. What was I supposed to do, leave you there?”

“No-no, don’t give me that. Anybody else would have called somebody. Cops…paramedics…”

She was ready for him now; her face had composed itself into the cool perfection of porcelain. “Then it’s a good thing anybody else didn’t find you, isn’t it?”

His hand tightened over hers, and it felt small within his grasp-small, but unexpectedly substantial. Not soft, not helpless, but strong, the way small female creatures are strong in defense of their offspring. “Why didn’t you?”

Her gaze lifted…locked with his. “You begged me not to.”

“You said that before. Doesn’t explain it. Not even a little bit.” He couldn’t explain the tension, or how he knew the battle being waged between them had little to do with the questions asked or answers given. But as the struggle went on in unblinking silence, he had a strange feeling the way she answered him now was going to be important to him down the road in ways he couldn’t begin to understand.

After what felt like a very long time, she seemed to deflate, not in a defeated way, just a softening. She eased her hand from his grasp and he let it go, but with an odd sense of having relinquished some long-sought-after treasure.

She sat back and returned the mug and spoon to the tray in her lap, reestablishing subtle barriers between them. “I’m not sure I can explain it. Not…in a way you’d understand.”

“Try me.”

Her glance flicked at him-a brief flare-up of defiance. Then, letting go of a breath, she shifted the tray onto the mattress beside her and reached up to pull the fastening from her hair, giving her head a little shake as the sun- shot masses slithered and tumbled onto her shoulders. His throat tightened as a cloud of scent enveloped him…a delicately sweet fragrance that made him think, incomprehensibly, of weddings.

“I suppose I have to, or you’ll just think I’m a nutcase,” she said as she combed her hair back from her face with her fingers. She gave an airy laugh, though it seemed to him it was mostly pretense, lacking in ease and confidence. “I guess…well, part of it is-and I guess this won’t come as a great shock to you, given my profession- but I have a pretty vivid imagination.”

He gave a snort of surprise. “Imagination!” He didn’t know why it surprised him. Maybe because it sounded like the truth when he’d expected all the build up to be the prelude to a lie.

“So, when I came upon this…body-you-lying on the beach, in the middle of the night, in the fog, and you’d obviously been hurt and then washed up there, like…like so much driftwood…that’s what I thought, at first. I almost ran on by, but then…you moved. At least, I thought…but as I said, I have an imagination. What if I hadn’t stopped? Can you imagine-”

“Just get on with it,” Roy muttered, impatient with her tangents, which began again to seem to him like pretense. A distraction, nothing more.

“You obviously have no sense of drama,” she scolded, in a tone more teasing than grumpy. But he noticed her eyes weren’t laughing when she continued, “Well, anyway…there you were, unconscious, and so cold…and when I put my shirt over you-”

“Your shirt?”

The watermark frown appeared in the center of her forehead. “Well…yeah, it was all I had. I was out jogging. A jacket would have been too warm. So, I took off my shirt-”

“Thank you,” he said huskily, remembering the terribleness of the cold. The pain of it. “For that.”

“You’re welcome.” Was it his imagination, or had the color on her cheeks deepened? She hesitated, then glared at him in an annoyed sort of way. “Anyway, you said, ‘Don’t call police. Don’t tell anyone. Nobody can know.’”

“Oh, come on.” The way she’d imitated his voice-pitch, inflection, accent and all-unnerved him. It hit him then- really hit him-that she was, after all, an actress. And judging from those statuettes on the bookshelves, a damn good one.

“Those were your exact words. Believe me, if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s memorizing dialogue.” She sniffed and looked away. “You made me promise. What was I supposed to do?”

Roy didn’t know how to answer that and didn’t try.

After a moment, she gave a little shrug and her eyes, when they came back to him, seemed to have grown darker. The rippled watermark frown gave them a confused look as she murmured, “I know, I know. Most people