Undercover Mistress

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!