Undercover Mistress

skin…and it came to her as she watched him that what she wanted…desperately…was to be held.

“That should do it…” He’d turned from the tree to look at her. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She managed to produce a brilliant smile, gazing up at the angel, not at him. She didn’t dare to look at him. “It looks pretty good, doesn’t it?”

“Looks great.” They stood together, studying the angel. She could feel him, feel the heat from his body, though they weren’t touching.

Hold me, she thought. Please hold me. It’s Christmas.

“Actually,” he said, glancing over at her, “she looks kinda familiar.”

She risked a glance back and found his smile had gone crooked. Bravely holding on to her own, she said, “Familiar?”

“Yeah-I thought I saw an angel, you know-when I was…out of it. Thought I musta died, but…turned out the angel was you.”

“Oh.” To her dismay it came out not as a word, but like a cry, high and breathless…a complete betrayal. Unable to withdraw it, she could only stare at him, standing utterly still, knowing her need for him was naked in her eyes… in her face.

He stood still, too, looking back at her, Christmas tree lights gleaming in his silver-touched hair and his smile fading slowly, like a mirage.

Hold me…please.

And then-she hadn’t spoken it aloud, she was sure she hadn’t-all at once he was. She hadn’t moved, she was sure she hadn’t, but somehow his arms were around her, and the fabric of his shirt was soft against her cheek, her face nested in the warm curve of his neck, the scent of his aftershave in her nostrils and her heartbeat knocking against his in crazy, out-of-sync rhythms. Her arms went around his waist, and his arms held her close… closer…and she felt warm and protected and completely safe.

They stood like that for…she didn’t know how long. She felt his cheek resting on her head…just resting there, demanding nothing, giving only comfort, and she thought in mild surprise, He’s kind. Nothing like a pirate, really. A kind man. I wonder if he even knows how kind he is.

And then she thought, I love him. Oh God, I wonder if he knows. He must know. No wonder he’s being kind…

Shaking, now, with chagrined laughter, she turned her face upward and murmured his name, meaning to release him gently from that obligation. But his answer was her name, spoken gruffly, raggedly as he lowered his mouth to meet hers.

Though even the kiss was gentle, at first… His lips touched hers sweetly, tentatively, with a first-kiss kind of innocence, as if neither of them had done such a thing before. But, like a spark dropped in dry tinder, it flared in the next instant into something neither tentative nor innocent.

She felt the blaze of heat inside him and drew a gasping breath, as if the shock wave of that heat had just hit her full in the face. Her mouth opened and he drove the kiss deep-straight to her heart, it seemed-while his hand cradled her head and he rocked her with the slow, sensuous motion of his tongue.

Celia, you’re an idiot, she thought, before she gave up all thought. This definitely isn’t kindness!

He pulled back, panting as if caught up in a terrible struggle, and she clutched his shirt in desperate handfuls.

“Please,” she whispered, as shameless tears began to sting her eyes. “I know we said we wouldn’t do this. But…just this once…just for tonight? It’s Christmas.”

She felt a brief sharp quiver go through his taut body, like the twanging of a bowstring. “Just for tonight,” he growled. And in a whisper, just before his mouth found hers again: “Merry Christmas…”

His hands were gentle, pulling the bottom edges of her T-shirt from the waistband of her jogging pants, whispering over her skin to brush the sides of her breasts, holding her lightly as she leaned eagerly into his kiss. Her own hands were less gentle, too full of need to be gentle, as they dove beneath the waistband of his jeans, raked hungrily over his firm, warm flesh, fumbled with the buttons on his shirt. He drew her to him and as her nipples brushed…her soft breasts pillowed, then pressed against the hardness of him…the shock of it was so sweet, so exquisite, she whimpered and tears pooled in the corners of her closed eyelids.

She hardly felt it when he laid her down, sweeping and nudging aside boxes and wrappings to make a place for them on the couch. She barely noticed when he glided his hand over her taut, quivering belly, the pins-and-needles prickle of her scar when he touched it only one more small sensation in the dizzy, overwhelming circus of her senses. She didn’t open her eyes when he laid his warm and supple length along her body, when his strong hands skimmed down her back and under her to lift her to him…when she felt the weight and press and sweet-hot sting of his body’s entry into hers. She didn’t open them even when he took her face between his big, warm hands and gently kissed her tear-damp lashes and whispered her name again…and again against her fevered skin.

She kept them closed because she didn’t want to see his face…flawed and human and real. Roy’s face. She kept them closed and filled her mind instead with the fantasy of him…the pirate, the billionaire, the secret agent…because that, after all, was all this was. Fantasy.

Like Christmas. Like TV movies and daytime dramas. Like all the other times she’d fallen in love with an image, a vision, a make-believe hero, her leading man. Fantasy.

This would end, she knew that, from all the times it had ended for her before. But while it lasted, it would be sweet and beautiful and, in its own way, real.

For her, because she was Celia Cross, it would have to be enough.

Chapter 15

Looking back on it, Roy couldn’t recall a Christmas Day so full of emotional ups and downs. A real roller-coaster ride.

First, there was waking up and finding himself where he had no business being, with Celia in his bed, all tangled up in warm and sinful ways, with an unforgivable smile of well-being on his face and a faint queasiness of guilt lying ignored in his belly.

After that, his first thought-okay, maybe his second or third thought, probably because, after the murmured and kiss-interrupted good mornings and Merry Christmases, it was the first coherent word out of Celia’s mouth-was the turkey!

They found it sitting in an inch or so of chilly water, maybe half-thawed.

“Don’t panic,” he ordered, after she gave him a stricken look, as if he’d let her down, somehow, and it was all his fault. “We’ve still got time.”

He filled up the tub with fresh water and left her to shower and dress while he went downstairs to make coffee and start clearing away the debris in the living room. After he’d got most of the wrappings mashed into a plastic trash bag and the empty boxes stowed in the garage, and about half a bushel of pine needles swept up off the rug, he went and got the gold foil bag with the wind chime in it and put it under the tree.

He was standing there looking at it, thinking how lonely it seemed there all by itself after the mountains of presents he was used to seeing, when Celia came down the stairs. She was wearing red, some sort of bathrobe- that was all he knew to call it, though he imagined it probably had some other, fancier name-and her hair was tied up on top of her head with a red ribbon, with a sprig of some kind of greenery-holly?-stuck in it. She was carrying a box in her hands, wrapped in Christmas paper and ribbon, and she sort of checked when she saw him, as if she’d been hoping to sneak it under the tree when he wasn’t looking.

Caught, she came to him instead, pink and excited as a child. She handed over the present, then stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek and whisper, “Merry Christmas,” in his ear.

Touched and gravel-voiced, he said, “Hold on, I’ve got one for you, too,” and swooped down and snatched up the gold bag.

Holding it in her hands, she stared at him, as stunned and openmouthed as if Santa Claus himself had presented her with the gift. With a smile of pure delight and a breathy, “For me?” she