when he was under deep cover-less chance of slipping up that way.
Both Celia and Max were shaking their heads decisively. “What’s your middle name?” Max asked him.
“Jackson,” Roy said, eyeing him warily. “As in, General Stonewall.”
“Initials,” Celia said, with a smile like a burst of sunshine. “R.J.-how’s that? R. J. Cassidy, Canadian millionaire.” She stood back to look at him, like an artist surveying her creation-which, in a way, she was.
She clapped her hands over her mouth, stifling giggles.
“What?” Roy glared at her, unreasonably affronted. Then he looked down at himself.
Well, hell-he supposed it did look a little ridiculous for a billionaire-Canadian or otherwise-to be wearing a pair of baby blue UCLA sweats several sizes too small for him.
“Max,” he said plaintively, “tell me you brought me my clothes.”
Chapter 10
“She took me shopping,” Roy said morosely. “On Rodeo Drive.” He paused to take a swallow of beer from the longneck bottle he’d been cradling against his chest before continuing. “Do you know the last time a woman took me clothes shopping? It was my momma-I think I was ’bout eight.”
“She’s got good taste, you gotta admit,” said Max, nodding at the slacks, pullover and leather jacket Roy was wearing.
They were sitting on Celia’s deck and although the sun still had a ways to go before taking its nightly dive into the Pacific, there was a stiff wind blowing and a December chill in the air. The weather reports had said there was a storm moving down from the Gulf of Alaska that probably wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow, but in the meantime it had blown away the fog.
Roy looked down at himself and snorted. “I get a shock every time I walk past a mirror. Shoot-I look like my own daddy.” He didn’t, though. From what he recalled of his daddy, Joe Starr had been a man with considerably less hair and all the outward signs of a lifetime of good down-home Southern cooking.
Max studied him for a moment from behind his sunglasses. “What’s with all the complaints? You’ve been undercover before. You’ve put up with disguises a lot worse than this.”
“Yeah? I’ve never had to be somebody’s ‘boy toy’ before.”
Having been completely unsuccessful at stifling a snort of laughter, Max turned his head away, still snickering.
“Okay, laugh, but I’m tellin’ you, it’s not funny from where I’m sitting. Hell, I was supposed to be the millionaire-”
“Billionaire.”
“Whatever. She’s supposed to be my mistress-so how come I feel like I’m the one being
“Poor baby,” Max said with absolutely no sympathy. “By the way, is that your new set of wheels I saw out in the driveway?”
Perking up a bit, Roy said, “You mean, the Land Rover?” Then, since it was obviously a rhetorical question, he shrugged. “Celia’s idea-she seems to think it goes with my ‘rugged, outdoorsy image.’ Canadian…north woods…all that…stuff.” He snorted and took a swallow of beer, wondering what Celia would think of his damned image if she knew his idea of “rugged and outdoorsy” was hooking a marlin on a warm, sunshiny day on the Gulf of Mexico.
“I sure never expected I’d be driving a Land Rover,” he said, shaking his head in a wondering way. Then he looked over at Max and had to grin. “Never expected I’d be living with a soap opera queen, either. But what the hell-it’s just make-believe, right?” He lifted his beer bottle in a sardonic toast to the sparkling view.
“You sure about that?”
Roy snapped Max a look. Max nodded toward the small figure jogging toward them from far down the beach. “That’s one gorgeous and sexy woman you’re sharing a house with. Sleeping in her room-hell, in her
“Come on.” Roy waggled his shoulders impatiently. “She sleeps upstairs, I sleep downstairs. Anyway, are you nuts?” He watched the jogging figure for a moment, and he could feel a heaviness building inside his chest. When he spoke again, his voice had grown gravelly. “Even if we weren’t in the middle of an operation-forget it. She’s from a different world. Hell, practically a different species. I’m a small-town Southern boy. She’s-
“Can I ask you something?” Since that was such an unusual thing for Max to say, Roy nodded out of pure curiosity. “You’re…thirty-five, right? How many girls-women-would you say you dated in the past twenty or so years, while you were growing up…living in that small Southern town?”
His curiosity growing, Roy said warily, “I don’t know, quite a few, I guess-why?”
“And yet…you’re not married. Why is that?”
Feeling vaguely annoyed, Roy shrugged and wriggled around in his deck chair. He didn’t like the way the conversation was going. He’d been called to account on the subject of marriage by various members of his beloved family enough times that it was a sore subject with him. He gave Max the same answer he generally gave, which was the shortest and simplest, not necessarily the most truthful. “I don’t know-why does anybody not get married? Never met the right woman, I guess.”
“Ever think maybe that’s because those small-town Southern girls weren’t what you wanted? Maybe what you want is someone different. From a whole different world, even.”
Roy stared at him for a moment, then grunted and shook his head. He looked down at his beer bottle, but it had lost its appeal. For a moment, he toyed with the idea of telling Max how he felt about the choices he’d made in his life so far. How for him, choosing a career as an undercover agent pretty much meant there was never going to be a Mrs. Roy Starr and a bunch of little Roy Starr Juniors waiting for him back home, all cozy in a little house with a picket fence. From what he could see, undercover agents made lousy husbands and even worse daddies. He said, “That’s pure fantasy, man.”
“Maybe.” To Roy’s great relief, Max seemed to have finished with the subject. But a moment later, just when Roy was starting to relax, he said, with the air of somebody starting a whole new subject, “Ever think about the fact that actors, even Hollywood royalty, even soap opera queens, are just people, too?”
Roy couldn’t help it-he burst out laughing. “That is truly lame, you know it? You’re as bad as she is.”
Max gave him a long look he couldn’t read at all, thanks to the damn sunglasses. One thing he was sure of, though-it wasn’t even close to being a smile. “I’m serious. She’s just a woman, Roy. Okay-prettier and richer than most, but a woman all the same. Smart, too. And funny. Not to mention, nice…”
“Jeez,” Roy said, with a grimace of severe pain, “you sound just like my momma.” He made his voice high and singsong. “Roy, you know, Lena Grace Osmond’s youngest, you remember her-Jolene? She is just the
“Okay, okay.” Laughing, finally, Max held up his hands in surrender. “Just as well you’re not interested. Should make it easier to keep your mind on the job. Speaking of which,” he said, casually shifting gears, “any progress on that front?”
He didn’t add the obvious-that the holidays were fast approaching, which meant they were running out of time.
The intelligence “chatter” had been growing more ominous by the day.
The terror alert hadn’t been elevated, but it would be soon-most likely the week before Christmas. The thinking was if the alert was raised too soon or too often, it would lose its effectiveness-like the boy who cried wolf.
Roy shifted and straightened up as Celia approached the bottom of the stairs, flashed them a smile and a wave, then paused to do some cooling-down stretches. Without taking his eyes off of her, he said to Max in a low voice, “She’s got some party we’re supposed to go to tomorrow night. It’s at some producer’s house up in Bel Air. Seems to think there’s a good chance al-Fayad’ll be there…”
The truth was only part of his mind was engaged with renegade Arab princes, luxury megayachts and international terrorists right then. The rest was thinking about the long, slender body doing toe touches and waist
