Linda Lael Miller Bundle (5 page)

Mitch sat easily in his chair, giving no indication whatsoever that he meant to do as Shay had asked. “I could have lied to you, you know. Won your confidence and then presented you with a fait accompli.”

“I imagine you’re very practiced at that, Mr. Prescott. Winning people’s confidence, I mean, and then betraying them.” She remembered the coffeepot and went back to measure in the grounds, which sprinkled the counter because she was shaking, put the lid on and plug the thing in. “Surely you don’t write for one of those cheap supermarket scandal sheets—that would never pay you enough money to buy a house like yours.”

“I write books,” he said, unruffled. “Under a pen name.”

Shay leaned back against the counter’s edge, the coffeepot chortling behind her, and folded her arms across her glitzy chest. “So my mother rates a real book, does she? Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Prescott, but there will be no book!”

“I’m afraid there will.”

Shay went back to the table and sat down again. “I won’t permit it! I’ll sue!”

“You don’t have to permit anything—unauthorized biographies are perfectly legal. Moreover, nothing would make my publisher happier than a lawsuit filed by Rosamond Dallas’s daughter. The publicity would be well worth any settlement they, or I, might have to pay.”

Shay felt the color drain from her face. What Mitch said made a dreadful sort of sense.

“I would have turned the project down cold, Shay,” he went on, “except for one thing.”

Shay sat up a little straighter. “What ‘one thing’ was that? Money?”

“I have plenty of money. Have you ever heard of Lucetta White?”

Lucetta White. Shay searched her memory and remembered the woman as the one person Rosamond had truly feared. Ms. White’s books could be lethal to a career, every word as sharply honed as a razor’s edge. “She ruined half a dozen of my mother’s friends.”

Mitch nodded. “Lucetta and I have the same agent. If I don’t write this book, Shay, she will.”

Shay felt sick at the prospect. “What assurance do I have that you’ll be any kinder?”

“This. I’d like you to co-author the book. The byline is yours, if you want it.”

Thinking of other books written by the children of movie stars, Shay shook her head. “I couldn’t.”

“You couldn’t help, or you couldn’t claim the byline?”

“I won’t exploit my own mother,” Shay said firmly. “Besides, I’m no writer.”

“I’ll handle that part of it. All I want is your input: memories, old scrapbooks, family pictures. In return, I’ll pay you half of the advance and half of the royalties.”

Shay swallowed hard. “You’re talking about a considerable amount of money.”

Again he nodded.

A kaleidoscope of possibilities fanned out and then merged in Shay’s mind. She could provide for Hank’s education, start her catering business….

“Would I have full control?”

Mitch was turning a teaspoon from end to end on the tabletop. “‘Full control’ is a very broad term. You can read all the material as we go along. I’ll be as kind as I can, but I won’t sugarcoat anything, and if I find a skeleton, I’ll drag it out of the closet.”

Shay’s color flared, aching on her cheekbones and flowing in a hot rush down her neck. “That sounds like Lucetta White’s method.”

“Read a few of her books,” Mitch answered briskly. “Lucetta invents her own skeletons, bone by grizzly bone.”

The coffee was done, but Shay couldn’t offer any, couldn’t move from her chair. She rested her forehead in her palms. “I’ll have to think about this.”

She heard Mitch’s chair scrape the linoleum floor as he stood up to go. “Fair enough. I’ll call you in a few days.”

Shay did not move until she had heard the front door open and close again. Then she went and locked it and watched through one of the picture windows as Mitch Prescott’s Italian car pulled away.

Mitch waited for three days.

During those seventy-two endless hours, he hired a cook and a housekeeper and a gardener. He sent for the contents of his apartment in San Francisco, he sat at the microfilm machine in the public library, reading everything he could find concerning Rosamond Dallas, until the muscles in the small of his back threatened spasmodic rebellion.

On Tuesday morning, he drove to Reese Motors.

“Damn,” Shay grumbled as she came out of the plush RV on the back lot.

Ivy tried very hard not to smile as she took in the yellow-and-black striped suit Shay was wearing. “I think you make a terrific bee,” she said.

“Flattery,” Shay answered bitterly, “will get you nowhere. Don’t you dare laugh!”

Ivy put one hand over her mouth and the diamonds in her showy engagement ring sparkled in the sunshine. “Put the hat on. Here, let me help you.”

Shay submitted to the hat, which was really more of a hood. It was black, with nodding antennae on top.

Richard Barrett approached with long strides. “The wings!” he thundered. “Where are the wings?”

“He thinks he’s Cecil B. DeMille,” Ivy whispered.

Shay, standing there in the hot sun, sweltering in her padded velveteen bee suit, wanted to slap him. “Wings?” she hissed.

“Of course,” Richard replied with the kind of patience usually reserved for deaf dogs. “Bees do have wings, you know.”

The wings were hunted down by Richard’s curvaceous young assistant, who was taking this taste of show biz very seriously. She wore her sunglasses on top of her head and constantly consulted her clipboard.

“I don’t need this job, you know,” Shay muttered to no one in particular as she was shuffled onto an
X
chalked on the asphalt in front of an ’82 Chrysler with air-conditioning.

“Do you remember your lines?” Richard’s cretin assistant sang, blowing so that her fluffy auburn bangs danced in midair.

“Sure,” Shay snapped. “To bee or not to bee, that is the question.”

“Sheesh,” the assistant marveled, not getting the joke.

“All right, Shay,” Richard said, indicating one of two portable video cameras with a nod of his head. “We’ll be filming from two angles, but I want you to look into this camera while you’re delivering your line.”

“Since when is ‘bzzzz’ a line?”

“Just do as I tell you, Shay.” A muscle under Richard’s right eye was jumping. Shay had never noticed that he had a twitch before.

“I’m ready,” she conceded.

The cameras made an almost imperceptible whirring sound and a clapboard was snapped in her face.

“Take One!” Richard cried importantly.

“Bzzzzzz,” said Shay, dancing around the hood of the Chrysler as though to pollinate it. “Come to Reese Motors, in Skyler Beach, 6832 Discount Way! You can’t afford to miss a honey of a deal like this!” She moved on to a ’78 Pinto. So far, so good. “Take this little model right here, only nineteen-ninety—nineteen-ninety—”

Shay’s voice froze in her throat and her concentration fled. Mitch Prescott was standing beside Ivy, looking stunned.

“Cut!” Richard bellowed.

Shay swallowed, felt relieved as she watched Mitch turn and walk resolutely away. Were his shoulders shaking just a little beneath that pristine white shirt of his?

“I’m sorry,” she said to Richard, who looked apoplectic. It seemed to Shay that he took commercials a mite too seriously.

“Take Two,” Richard groaned. “God, why do I work with amateurs? Somebody tell me why!”

He wouldn’t have dared to talk to Marvin that way, Shay thought. And why had she apologized, anyway? Nobody got a commercial right on the first take, did they?

Shay waited for the camera to click into action and then started over, offering the folks in Skyler Beach a bunny of a deal.

“That’s Easter!” Richard screamed, frustrated beyond all good sense.

“Don’t get your stinger in a wringer!” the bee screamed back and every salesman on the lot roared with laughter.

On the third take the spot was flawless. Shay scowled at Richard and stomped into the RV with Ivy right behind her. The younger woman kept biting back giggles as she helped with the cumbersome costume.

When Shay was back in her white slacks and golden, imitation-silk blouse, her hair brushed and her makeup back to normal, she left the RV with her chin held high. The salesmen formed a double line, a sort of good-natured gauntlet, and applauded and cheered as she passed.

Shay executed a couple of regal bows, but her cheeks were throbbing with embarrassment by the time she closed her office door behind her and sank against it. It was bad enough that half of Washington state would see that stupid commercial. Why had Mitch had to see it, too?

T
he very fact of Marvin’s absence seemed to generate problems and Shay was grateful for the distraction. Dealing with the complaints and questions of customers kept her from thinking about the three commercials yet to be filmed and the very enticing dangers of working closely with Mitch Prescott.

At five minutes to five, Ivy waltzed into Shay’s office with a mischievous light in her eyes and a florist’s bouquet in her hands. “For you,” she said simply, setting the arrangement of pink daisies interspersed with baby’s breath and white carnations square on top of Shay’s paperwork.

At the sight and scent of the flowers, Shay felt a peculiar shakiness in the pit of her stomach. Reason said the lovely blossoms had been sent by the salesmen downstairs or perhaps the Reeses. Instinct said something very different.

Her hands trembling just slightly—she couldn’t remember the last time anyone had sent her flowers—Shay reached out for the envelope containing the card. Instinct prevailed. “If you’re free tonight, let’s discuss the book over dinner at my place. Strictly business, I promise. R.S.V.P. Mitch.”

Strictly business, he said. Shay remembered Mitch’s kiss and the sweet, hard pressure of his body against her own on the Reeses’ darkened deck the night of the party and wondered who the hell he thought he was kidding. She felt a certain annoyance, a tender dreading, but mingled with these emotions was a sensation of heady relief. With a sigh, Shay admitted to herself that she would have been very disappointed if the flowers had come from anyone else on the face of the earth.

“Mitch?” Ivy asked, the impish light still dancing in her eyes.

Shay grinned. “How very redundant of you to ask. You knew.”

“I did not!” Ivy swore with conviction and just a hint of righteous indignation. “I just guessed, that’s all.”

Shay’s weariness dropped away and she moved the vase of flowers to clear the paperwork from her desk. She sensed all the eager questions Ivy wanted to ask and enjoyed withholding the answers. “Well,” she said with an exaggerated sigh, picking up her purse and the flowers and starting toward the door, “I’ll see you tomorrow. Have a good evening.”

Ivy was right on her heels. “Oh, no you don’t, Shay Kendall! Did my brother ask you out or what? Why did he send you flowers? What did the card
say
, exactly?”

Smiling to herself, Shay walked rapidly toward the stairs. To spare her friend a night of agonizing curiosity, she tossed back an off-handed “He wants to start work on the book about Rosamond. Good night, Ivy.”

“What book?” Ivy cried desperately, hurrying to keep up with Shay as she went down the stairs and across the polished floor of the main display room. “You don’t mean—you’re not actually—you said you’d never—”

Fortunately, Todd was waiting for Ivy outside, or she might have followed Shay all the way to her car, battering her with questions and fractured sentences.

Ivy looked so pained as her fiancé ushered her into the passenger seat of his car that Shay called out a merciful, “I promise I’ll explain tomorrow,” as she got behind the wheel of her own car.

Shay did not drive toward home; Hank wouldn’t be there and she needed some time to prepare herself for the strange quiet that would greet her when she unlocked her front door. She decided to pay her mother a visit.

More than once during the short drive to Seaview Convalescent Home, Shay glanced toward the flowers so carefully placed on the passenger seat and wondered if it wouldn’t be safer, from an emotional standpoint anyway, to forget Mitch Prescott and this collaboration business altogether and take her chances with Lucetta White. Granted, the woman was a literary viper, but Ms. White couldn’t hurt Rosamond, could she? No one could hurt Rosamond.

Shay bit her lower lip as she turned into the spacious asphalt parking lot behind the convalescent home. Rosamond was safe, but what about Hank? What about Riley and Garrett? What about herself?

Stopping the car and turning off the ignition, Shay rested her forehead on the steering wheel and drew a deep breath. Each life, she reflected, feeling bruised and cornered, touches other lives. If Miss White chose to, she could drag up all sorts of hurtful things, such as Eliott’s theft all those years before, and his desertion. Shay had long since come to terms with Eliott’s actions, but how could Hank, a six-year-old, be expected to understand and cope?

Shay drew another deep breath and sat up very straight. Except for his personal word, she had no assurances that Mitch Prescott would be any fairer or any kinder in his handling of the Rosamond Dallas story, but he did seem the lesser of two evils, even considering the unnerving effect he had on Shay’s emotions. The book would be written, one way or the other, and there was no going back.

She got out of the car, crossed the parking lot and entered the convalescent home resolutely. Shay was not looking forward to another one-sided visit with her mother and the guilt inspired by that fact made her spirits sag. What was she supposed to say to the woman? “Hello, Mother, today I dressed up as a bee?” Or maybe she could announce, “Guess what? I’ve met a man and he wants to tell all your most intimate secrets to the world and I’m going to help him and for all that, Mother, I do believe he could seduce me without half trying!”

As Shay hurried through the rear entrance to the building and down the immaculate hallway toward her mother’s room, the inner dialogue gained momentum.
I’m afraid, Mother. I’m afraid. I’m starting to care about Mitch Prescott and that’s going to make everything that much more difficult, don’t you see? We’ll make love and that will change me for always but it will just be another affair to him. I don’t think I could bear that, Mother.

Overcome, Shay stopped and rested one shoulder against the wall beside Rosamond’s door, her head lowered. The fantasy was futile: Rosamond couldn’t advise her, probably wouldn’t bother even if she were well. That was reality.

A cold, quiet anger sustained Shay, made her square her shoulders and lift her chin. She walked into her mother’s room, crossed to her chair, bent to bestow the customary forehead kiss. Then, because her own reality was that she loved her mother, whether that love had ever been returned or not, Shay sat down facing Rosamond and told her about being a bee in a car-lot commercial, about a bouquet of pink daisies, about a man with brash brown eyes and a smile that made grooves in his cheeks.

After half an hour, when Rosamond’s dinner was brought in, Shay slipped out. She hesitated only a moment before the pay phone in the hallway, then rummaged through her purse for a quarter. Mitch answered on the second ring.

“Thank you for the flowers,” Shay said lamely. She’d planned a crisper approach, but at the sound of his voice, the words had evaporated from her mind in a shimmering fog.

His responding chuckle was a low, tender sound, rich with the innate masculinity he exuded so effortlessly. “You’re welcome. Now, what about dinner and the book?”

Shay, whose job and personal responsibilities had always forced her to be strong, suddenly ached with shyness. “Strictly business?” she croaked out.

Mitch’s silence was somehow endearing, as though he had reached out to caress her cheek or smooth her hair back from her face, but it was also brief. “Until we both decide otherwise, princess,” he said softly. “You’re not walking into any heavy scenes, so relax. You’re safe with me.”

Tears filled Shay’s eyes, coming-home tears, in-out-of-the-rain tears. She would be safe with Mitch, and that was a new experience for Shay, one she had never had with Rosamond or Eliott. “Thanks,” she managed to say.

“No problem,” came the velvety yet gruff reply. “Remember, though, I’m not promising that I won’t tease you about this morning.”

Shay found herself laughing, a moist sound making its way through receding tears. “If you think the bee debacle was bad, wait until you hear about my next epic.”

“The suspense is killing me,” Mitch replied with good-natured briskness, but then his voice was soft again, at once vulnerable and profoundly reassuring. “It looks as though it might rain. Drive carefully, Shay.”

“What time do you want me?”

Mitch laughed. “You name a time, baby, and I want you.”

“Let me rephrase that,” retorted Shay, smiling. “What time is dinner?”

“Now. Whenever.” He paused, sighed in exasperation. “Shay, just get over here, before I go crazy.”

“Can you stay sane for half an hour? I want to change clothes.”

She could almost see his eyebrows arch. “Wear the bee suit,” he answered. “It really turns me on.”

Shaking her head, Shay said goodbye and hung up. Her step was light as she hurried down into the hallway and outside to her car. The sky had clouded over, just as Mitch had said, and there was a muggy, pre-storm heaviness in the summer air. Shay blamed her sense of sweet foreboding on the weather.

At home, she quickly showered, put on trim gray slacks and a lightweight sweater to match, reapplied her makeup and gave her damp hair a vigorous brushing. It was a glistening mane of softness, tumbling sensuously to her shoulders and she decided that the look was entirely too come-hither. With a few brisk motions, she wound it into a chignon and then stood back from the bathroom mirror a little way to assess herself. Yes, indeed, she looked like the no-nonsense type all right. “Strictly business,” she reminded her image aloud, before turning away.

Since his new housekeeper, Mrs. Carraway, had left for the day, Mitch answered the door himself. He knew the visitor would be Shay, and yet he felt surprised at the sight of her, not only surprised, but jarred.

She was wearing gray slacks and a V-necked sweater to match. Her makeup was carefully understated and her hair was done up, instead of falling gracefully around her shoulders as it usually did, and Mitch suppressed a smile. Obviously she had made every effort to look prim, but the effect was exactly the opposite: she had achieved a sexy vulnerability that made him want her all the more.

For several moments, Mitch just stood there, staring at her like a fool. The cymballike clap of thunder roused him, however, and he remembered his manners and moved back from the doorway. “Come in.”

Shay stepped into the house with a timid sort of bravado that touched Mitch deeply. Were her memories of the place sad ones, or were they happy? He wanted to know that and so much more, but getting close to this woman was a process that required a delicate touch; she was like some wild, beautiful, rarely seen creature of the forests, ready to flee at the slightest threat.

“Your things haven’t arrived,” she said, her eyes sweeping the massive empty foyer swiftly, as though in an effort not to see too much.

Gently, Mitch took her elbow in his hand, still fearing that she would bolt like a unicorn sensing a trap. “Actually,” he answered in a tone he hoped sounded casual, “some of them have. All the most impractical things, anyway: pots and pans but no plates, sheets and pillows but no bed…”

He instantly regretted mentioning the bed.

Shay only smiled. She was relaxing, if only slightly.

They ate in the library, picnic-style, before a snapping, summer-storm fire, their paper plates balanced on their laps, their wine contained in supermarket glasses. For all that, there was an ambiance of elegance to the scenario, and Mitch knew that it emanated from the woman who sat facing him. What a mystery she was, what a tangle of vulnerability and strength, softness and fire, humor and tragedy.

Mitch felt his own veneer of sophistication, something he had long considered immutable, dissolving away. His reactions to that were ambivalent, of course; he was a man who controlled situations—at times his life had depended on that control—but now, in the presence of this woman, he was strangely powerless. The surprising thing was that he was comfortable with that.

When the meal was over he disposed of the plates and the plastic wineglasses and returned to the library to find Shay standing in the center of the room, studying every bookcase, every stone in the fireplace.

“Were you happy here?” he asked, without intending to speak at all.

She started and then turned slowly to face him. “Yes,” she said.

The ache in Shay’s wide hazel eyes came to settle somewhere in the middle of Mitch’s chest. “Feel free to explore,” he said after a rather long silence.

A quiet joy displaced the pain in Shay’s face and Mitch was relieved. “But we were going to work,” she offered halfheartedly. “I brought the photo albums you wanted. They’re in the car and—”

Mitch spoke with the abruptness typical of nervous people. “I’ll get them while you look around. Maybe you can give me a few decorating ideas. Right now, this place has all the cozy warmth of an abandoned coal mine.”

She looked grateful and just a little suspicious. “Well…”

Mitch pretended that the matter had been settled and left the house. Her car was parked in the driveway, only a few strides from the front door, and the box containing Rosamond Dallas’s memorabilia was sitting in plain sight on the seat. He took his time carrying the stuff inside, setting it on the library floor, sorting through it. Instinctively he knew that Shay needed time to wander from room to room, settling memories.

The room that had been Shay’s was empty, of course. The built-in bookshelves were bare and dusty, the French provincial furniture and frilly bedclothes had been removed, along with the host of stuffed animals and the antique carousel horse, a gift from Riley Thompson, that had once stood just to the left of the cushioned windowseat. The nostalgia Shay had braced herself for did not come, however; this had been the room of a child and she felt no desire to go backward in time.

She wandered across the wide hallway and into the suite that had been Rosamond’s, in a strange, quiet mood. The terrace doors were open to the rising rain-and-sea misted wind and Shay crossed the barren room to close them. She smiled as she stepped over the tangled sleeping bag that had been spread out on the floor, and a certain scrumptious tension gripped her as she imagined Mitch lying there.

He was downstairs, waiting for her, but Shay could not bring herself to hurry. She reached down and took a pillow from the floor and held it to her face. Its scent was Mitch’s scent, a mingling of sun-dried clothing and something else that was indefinably his own.