Undercover Mistress

“She did.” Looking even more amused, Doc lifted his wineglass in a sort of salute. “Should be an interesting holiday.”

“Yeah…” Interesting was one way of describing it, Roy thought. He stared at the gold foil bag lying on the chaise lounge beside him, then gave it a nudge. “Hope this is okay. Didn’t know what to get her. I mean, she’s pretty much got everything.” What did you get someone who spent her Christmases in places like Paris, New York or Hawaii?

Doc blew a stream of smoke sideways as he stubbed out the cigarette. “Don’t worry, she’ll love it.” He shot Roy a look, still half-amused, but half…something else. “She will, you know-whatever it is. Celia’s not about things. Thought you’d have figured that out by now. Doesn’t care a fig about things-tends to give them away, in fact. Be prepared-she’ll give you something marvelous for Christmas, but odds are it won’t be something she paid a pot of money for.” He waved a hand toward the house. “I, for example, have a small fortune in Frederick Cross memorabilia in there, things she’s given me over the years. Things that would make any entertainment museum green with envy.”

Roy picked up the gold foil bag and stared at it as he turned it over in his hands, seeing instead all the expressions on Celia’s face that had mystified him during the past few weeks…thinking about all the times he’d caught…something in the depths of her eyes, just before she’d turned them away from him. “What is she about?” he asked gruffly. “You tell me.”

“In a word, my boy.” Doc paused for a swallow of wine and another soft, ironic chuckle. “What Celia’s about is feelings.”

Roy waited, expecting more. When it didn’t come, he scowled and said, “That’s it?”

Doc shrugged. “That’s it. Keep that in mind, and you’ll have a fairly good idea what makes our girl tick.”

Celia returned in the early afternoon with the back seat of the SUV piled full of shopping bags. Tied onto the luggage rack was a large scraggly-looking Christmas tree. When Roy untied it and stood it up and gave it a kind of thump, the way you do with a tree, it dumped roughly a third of its needles on the doorstep.

“It was the only one they had left,” Celia said defensively before he could say a word. “It’s a Charlie Brown tree-you know, from the Peanuts TV special movie? It’s going to look great once we get the decorations on it. I got lots of decorations-everything was on sale,” she added happily. “Half price-can you imagine? Come on-leave it a minute and help me unload all this stuff.”

What could he do? Something about the way she was grinning, and the flush on her cheeks and the wisps of blond hair falling out from underneath the baseball cap made him want to grab her and kiss her breathless, then roll her onto the nearest friendly surface and make love to her, laughing and carefree as a couple of kids, and afterward, feeling warm and happy, hold her in his arms and talk about whatever came to mind…

“Be careful of this one,” Celia said, handing over a large plastic bag. “It’s-” he took the bag from her, not expecting the weight of it, and it sank to the pavement with an ominous clunk, as she finished, “-the turkey.”

It was, too. About twenty pounds worth, by Roy’s estimate, and frozen solid as a chunk of concrete.

He stared down at it, then looked at Celia. “It’s frozen.”

Her mind on the packages she was gathering from inside the SUV, she gave a distracted sigh. “I know, but it was the only one they had left.” She paused, laden, to smile at him. “Don’t worry-I’ll defrost it in the microwave. I’ve gotten really good at defrosting.”

Roy hastily grabbed up the turkey along with several other bags and followed her into the house. “I don’t want to rain on your parade, darlin’,” he said when he caught up with her in the kitchen, “but unless you’re thinkin’ about goin’ after this thing with a hacksaw, it’s never gonna fit in that microwave.” To illustrate his point, he hoisted the bag containing the turkey onto the countertop beside the microwave oven, where it rocked back and forth with a quiet, rhythmic thumping sound.

She looked at the turkey, then at the oven. Her mouth popped open, but no sound came out. After a moment she turned to him, the watermark frown wrinkling the center of her forehead. “So…what do we do? How long does it take to thaw a turkey?”

“One this big? I’m no expert, but I seem to recall…days.”

“But we haven’t got ‘days.’”

Dammit, he couldn’t stand it. The tension in her body…the pinched look of disappointment around her eyes… Well, hell. He could feel his stomach knotting up and his breath coming short and shallow. He didn’t know why it was so all-fired important to her, but at that moment he’d have taken a blowtorch to the damn bird if she needed him to.

He ran a hand over his face, “Uh, look, don’t panic, okay? I sort of seem to remember my momma, one time, puttin’ a bird in the bathtub to thaw-in water, you know? Don’t know how long it takes that way, how much faster it’d be, but we can try it.” The way she looked at him then made him feel as if he were eight feet tall and wearing shiny white armor. His heart did a little happy dance against his breastplate as he gave her an “aw, shucks” shrug. “What’ve we got to lose, right?”

She handed over the turkey without a word, those incredible dark-fringed blue eyes of hers full of trust, never leaving his face. He carried it upstairs to her bathroom-unknown territory for him, and filled with her own unique scent and all her mysterious feminine lotions and potions and secrets.

“Cold water, not hot,” he cautioned her as she knelt beside the Jacuzzi tub and flipped the switch to plug up the drain.

She gave him a look but didn’t question his judgment, just turned on the cold tap full blast. He knelt down beside her and carefully lowered the frozen turkey into the water. Then they waited, side by side on their knees, gazing at the fat, plastic-wrapped bird like two besotted parents bathing a baby, for the bathtub to fill.

At one point Celia looked over at Roy and smiled. He felt an alarming quiver inside his chest, and it flashed through his mind that he was incredibly happy. About the happiest he could ever remember being, in fact. Didn’t make sense, but there it was, no getting around it: it was Christmas Eve, he was down on his knees on a hard tile floor in a soap opera star’s bathroom, baby-sitting a giant naked frozen bird, with a dangerous mission and the fate of millions of innocent people hanging over his head, and he, Roy Starr, was happy.

If that meant what he thought it did, what in the hell was he going to do?

“What did I tell you?” Celia stood back to survey the tree with what was admittedly a not very critical eye. My first completely do-it-yourself Christmas tree. She drew a breath and let it out carefully, so as not to disturb the big untidy lump of emotion that had been gathering in her throat all day. It had grown harder, as the evening advanced toward midnight and the dawning of Christmas Day, to keep it buried there, just beneath her surface veneer of holiday cheer. “Looks great, doesn’t it?”

“Great?” Roy threw her a lopsided grin. “You just better hope nobody comes within twenty feet of it with anything resembling an ignition source. This thing’s so dry it’d go up like a torch.”

“Nobody’s going to. Doc’s not allowed to smoke in here. And we’ll take it down right after Christmas-or anyway, before we leave to board Abby’s boat, so we have nothing to worry about.” She turned from the tree to rummage through the piles of boxes, bags and packaging materials that were scattered over every surface of the living room. “One last thing. Now where did I…okay, here it is.” She pulled a box from the chaos, plucked away an errant strand of tinsel and for a moment just held it and gazed at the cellophane display window.

Mystifyingly, the knot in her throat seemed to grow even bigger, and her vision wavered. A memory floated into her mind: a towering Christmas tree, glittering with a thousand lights…snowflakes falling onto her upturned face as she laughed…

She drew a quick, sharp breath. “This goes on the top. Will you do it? I can’t reach.” She thrust the box at Roy. “It’s not what I wanted,” she said as he took it from her with a curious glance, then began to open it. “I wanted a star, like the one on the tree in Rockefeller Center, but this was all they had left.” Because she felt shivery, she folded her arms on her chest.

“Nothin’ wrong with this,” Roy said as he drew the angel from its box.

She watched him separate it from its wrappings and give its wings a couple of straightening tugs, then step close to the tree, reach up and carefully place the stiff white folds of the angel’s gown over the spindly twig at the tip-top of the tree. She watched him adjust it when it wanted to flop to one side, until he had it standing just… right.

She watched him with stinging eyes and aching throat, with a heaviness in her chest and a shivering in her