His Cinderella Housekeeper 3-in-1

by Various

The sheriff waved and Phillip waved back to him.

  Cole Yardley shot her a dark glance.

  She lowered her eyes. Oh, dear. This was bad. Cole Yardley was here in Mission Creek with the sheriff, and he remembered her.

  If he could find her, anybody could. Oh, dear. What if he said something about that awful night in Harry’s to Phillip?

  “Can we go home?” she whispered, frantic when Yardley and the sheriff ambled toward their table.

  “Not until I find out what Wainwright and the guy who frowned at you wants.”

  “He did not frown at me.”

  “Well, he damn sure wasn’t looking at me.”

  If only Cole Yardley would quit glowering at her.

  “You know him, don’t you?”

  “N-no,” she said.

  The sheriff joined them. “Sorry to interrupt a social gathering, but Yardley here just rolled into town.”

  Phillip nodded. Everybody introduced himself.

  “Glad to meet you, Celeste, ” Yardley said tersely.

  “Glad to meet you, Mr. Yardley,” she said.

  Silently she begged him not to give her away.

  “Yardley here is a federal investigator,” Justin Wainwright said. Justin handed Cole Yardley’s business card to Phillip. “He’s here about your dead cow and your suspicions about that arms-dealing ring. Like you, he suspects El Jefe may be operating in our area.”

  “In Mission Creek?” Celeste blurted.

  “Just listen to what he has to say,” Wainwright said.

  “I admire your work, Westin. I know you’ve fought for years to bring down El Jefe.” Yardley glanced at Celeste when she began to bite her lip.

  “Who’s El Jefe?” Celeste whispered. “I forget.”

  “Not who. What! El Jefe is the biggest terrorist ring in Mezcaya.”

  “Right. Which is in Central America,” Celeste said.

  “We were just discussing this,” Phillip offered.

  Yardley cocked his brows, but Phillip didn’t embellish.

  Mezcaya again. “We were just leaving,” Celeste said. The talk about Mezcaya was making her nervous. Phillip had nearly died in Mezcaya right before she’d come. She didn’t really want to know about Phillip being involved with terrorists. A second worry was that at any moment Yardley might decide to tell everybody how he and she had met in Vegas.

  Phillip had said he was retired. While the men talked, she found herself staring at the red mark on his cheek. She didn’t care about the dead cow or El Jefe. She had so many vital questions and they were all personal. Was Phillip capable of settling down even if he loved her? Was she capable of giving up her music for him? Did she even want to? Were they as mismatched as ever? Did people like them settle down? Or did they need a rush other people could live without?

  The applause tonight had thrilled her. Still, more than the applause, the gleam of pride in Phillip’s eyes when she’d sung had warmed her heart. But was his love enough?

  “I believe your friend, Mercado, is still involved in the Mafia,” Yardley was saying. “And running guns.”

  First Mezcaya. Now the Mafia. What was Phillip involved in?

  “No way,” Phillip countered.

  “He just may be the ringleader of this nasty, little weapons-smuggling operation I’m investigating.”

  “You’ll never convince me of that,” Phillip said in his flat, Marine-issue voice.

  “He was just down in Mezcaya.”

  “You want to know why? To help Ty Murdoch save my ass. I was slated for execution and he was part of the rescue team.”

  “Execution!” Celeste gasped. The truth at last!

  Phillip had nearly died—again. And he hadn’t told her. “Oh, dear. Oh, dear.”

  “If he wasn’t involved with those bastards, how’d he know you were in trouble?” Yardley asked. “Then as soon as you and…and this young lady get back here, somebody kills your cow and leaves you a note.”

  “You’re grilling me but you’re looking at my girl. You two know each other or something?”

  Yardley and she shook their heads, but neither of them could meet Phillip’s gaze.

  “Where are you from, anyway, Yardley?” Phillip demanded in a voice charged with both annoyance and jealousy.

  Yardley glanced at Celeste.

  Phillip skimmed Yardley’s business card. “Your card says your office is in Vegas.”

  “We don’t know each other,” Celeste whispered, but she blushed hotly.

  Phillip stared at Yardley.

  “I never saw her before in my life. And believe me, I would remember a face like hers.”

  “She’s a hard woman to forget,” Phillip said stiffly. “Well, it’s late. I’m tired.” He stood.

  “If you hear anything, anything at all that’s the least bit suspicious, give me a call,” Yardley said. “If you lose any more livestock…”

  “Sure.” Phillip’s voice and manner were curt.

  When Celeste and Phillip were in his truck, Phillip said, “You never did tell me why you abandoned your career in Las Vegas and came here in such a hurry. Did something happen?

  Was Yardley your lover?”

  “I can’t believe…” she whispered. “How could you ask me such a thing?”

  “Fasten your seat belt,” he muttered. Then he stomped down hard on the accelerator.

  She gave a little cry when the truck shot forward into the darkness. Soon the silence inside the cab was so thick between them Celeste hardly dared to breathe.

  She stared out the window. He watched the yellow lines in the center of the road fly past.

  When they got home, she got out of the truck and ran to the front stairs, only to stumble over something warm and sticky. When she fell forward, black eye sockets stared up at her.

  She screamed, and Phillip flew to her when she convulsed in tears and pulled her off the bloated object.

  “I—it’s a dead…cow,” she sobbed. “A-another one. On…on the first step…”

  “It’s okay.”

  “There’s another note—”

  Phillip ripped off the note somebody had nailed to the porch railing.

  “‘You hurt my family, so now I will hurt yours,’” Phillip read.

  “Another cow,” she whispered. “Two cows. Why would anybody be killing your cows? I thought Sheriff Wainwright—”

  “He’s investigating. So am I,” Phillip said.

  “Is this happening because you killed that bad guy in Mezcaya and didn’t tell me about it?”

  “I don’t know, damn it. With your kind of logic, I could blame you. Cows didn’t start dying till you came here.”

  “Oh?” She felt a rush of guilt and fought to cover it. “Sure! Blame me!” She turned away, so he couldn’t read her face.

  “I was making a point.”

  “This is about you, not me! What are you doing behind my back?”

  “What are you doing behind mine, Celeste? You’re not telling me where you’re coming from, either.”

  “Are you about to go off on a mission again and get yourself killed the next time?”

  “You’re hiding something, too, Celeste. What the hell is going on? Are you going to run off with Yardley or something?”

  “What?”

  “Did he come here because of you? Is he your next Johnny Silvers?”

  “D-don’t be ridiculous. He’s investigating your gun smugglers!”

  “My gun smugglers? Hell!” He stared at her.

  “I’m tired,” she said. “And I’m going to bed. To my old room down the hall. Thank you for a lovely evening.”

  “My pleasure.” His tone was hard—pure Marine issue. “I’ll call the sheriff and then get rid of the cow.”

  She picked up her skirt and walked carefully around him and the mutilated cow. He raced up the stairs and unlocked the door for her. It was hours before the sheriff came and finished his business, hours before Phillip and Juan finished dealing with the dead cow and Phillip finally stom
ped up the stairs and came inside.

  She was still awake, lying in her bed at the end of the hall, staring up at the spidery threads of moonlight on the ceiling. When she heard his heavy tread in the hall, she ached to run into his arms. Instead, she buried her face in her pillow.

  His door opened and closed, and he went to bed alone, just as she had.

  She hugged herself as she had so many times when she’d lain awake in the dark after her mother had died. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw black eye sockets. She wanted Phillip’s arms around her so badly, it was all she could do not to get up and run down the hall to his bed.

  Would she always always be that grief-stricken little girl who cried too easily because she was starved for true love?

  Chapter 6

  The honeymoon was over. After a sleepless night worrying about Yardley, and being scared about the second dead cow, and sick that she and Phillip had quarreled, Celeste got up in the dark several hours before 0600. It upset her that Phillip, Mr. Big Macho Marine, could sleep like a baby even when she ran the vacuum down the hall.

  She didn’t hear a peep from his bedroom until well after ten. When she finally heard him in the shower, she was on the way to the utility room, her arms aching under the weight of a third, huge load of laundry.

  There was a lot of dirt on a ranch, at least in dry south Texas. When Phillip came in from a hard day’s work in some distant pasture, his carved face would be streaked with mud because he’d perspired so much that the blowing dust had stuck to him. His clothes and hair would be caked with grit. The dirt seeped under doors and through cracks and crannies of the window frames. Dusting had to be done every single day.

  That gloomy morning after the dance, Celeste made herself two pots of coffee. Wired from so much caffeine and exhausted from no sleep and the hours of housework, the blissful six days of their marathon lovemaking in Phillip’s bed seemed like a long-ago dream. So did her ambition to be a star.

  Maybe it was for the best that Mercado, Yardley, rumors about dangerous gunrunners, and the dead cow had turned up to burst her little romantic bubble. Phillip and she were as different as two people could be. Maybe she lusted after him and ached for his sweet smiles and praise. Maybe they really did love each other in their way, but how long could passion alone sustain them? Her failures in the music world had taught her that making it in the real world was an everyday matter. So was love and marriage.

  She didn’t want to be married to a soldier who left her and went off to war while she stayed home to panic at every phone call because she was so afraid somebody would phone to say he was dead and she’d lose everything again. And did he want a girl who couldn’t give up her impractical dreams of being a country-western star?

  Mercado had him figured. In between adventures like chasing gunrunners, Phillip needed some nice society, church girl, one of those rich, proper beauties from the country club who dressed like a lady. Someone who was content to be a stay-at-home wife while he was gone.

  Celeste was different. She had a voice and a need to be more than she was. Only when she sang did she lose the awful feeling that she was an invisible little nothing. If she dressed flashy and sang her heart out, it was because she craved attention and love. A girl didn’t just have talent. Talent had the girl.

  When she’d been a kid, all the other kids had had real mothers and daddies to go home to. All she’d had was her music. Singing and writing songs gave her a release from pain and a way to express herself that nothing else did. If she gave all that up for Phillip now, and he kept fooling around with gunrunners and went off again on some dangerous mission and got himself killed, where would she be—too old to make her big dream come true.

  If Phillip died, she’d be a nothing. For all the fireworks and tenderness, Phillip might leave her. Her music was the only real anchor she’d ever had.

  She was thirty-two. Her shot at the big time was running out. Every spare moment she got, she’d better work on her music. She had greatness in her. She knew she did. This time she’d go to Nashville.

  For the rest of that week Celeste kept to her bedroom in the evenings when Phillip came in from work, and Phillip kept to his. She would cook early and leave the food on the stove.

  They would eat dinner at different times and avoid speaking to each other whenever possible.

  Even though she was curious about the dead cow, she hadn’t asked him what he’d done with it or what he’d said to the sheriff or maybe to Cole Yardley. She knew Phillip was investigating the incident, but she didn’t probe for details because the whole thing upset her too much.

  At night Phillip went for long walks and watched television. She read and wrote and taped songs in her room. Every chance she got to go into town, she mailed a tape and a letter to Greg Furman, the producer in Nashville, who still hadn’t written her back. Phillip seemed too preoccupied to notice that she’d asked for the truck more often.

  At night when she was too tired to sing another note, she would crawl into her bed and curl up, lying rigidly in a fetal position, listening to the boards creak and the wind moan in the eaves. After lying in Phillip’s arms and enjoying all that soul-stirring sex, it was all the harder to sleep alone without his muscular arms holding her close.

  Since Phillip was an ex-Marine, he probably found it easier to stick to his sulk and content himself with investigating his mystery than she did. For him it was second nature to draw lines in the sand and then stay on his side waiting for her to surrender. Well, she wouldn’t surrender. She wouldn’t.

  According to Wainwright and Yardley, Mendoza’s men were definitely in the area. Not that Celeste invited Phillip to share his concern on that subject with her. Hell, she was barely civil.

  When Phillip stalked into the house late one scorching afternoon intending to bar himself in his bedroom until it was time for dinner, the sound of Celeste’s lilting voice in the bathtub brought him to an abrupt halt outside her door. Damn it. She sang those sweet, sad songs every night in her room, probably just to get to him.

  The last week had been pure hell. Besides worrying about her safety, it was impossible to live with her, to hear her pour her heart out in those songs, to watch her glide from room to room, without wanting her. Everything she did was sexy, everything she wore—those tight short shorts that revealed her long legs, those skimpy T-shirts that clung to her breasts, the way her yellow hair flowed messily around her shoulders, her dreamy expression when she stared out the window. Did she yearn for bright lights, the stage, fame, and a man who could give her or at least promise her those things?

  Every night he’d lain in bed thinking about her, remembering her every smile, smiles that died the minute he entered a room. She’d been driving into town a lot. Why? To flirt with other men? Cole Yardley? To plan her next escape? What did she want, really?

  Why couldn’t he forget how hot she’d been in his bed before their quarrel, how she’d opened her mouth and given him endless tongue, how she’d stripped and danced for him on the kitchen table? He’d shoved the dishes on the floor, and they’d done it on that table, then in the shower, on the burgundy couch, against the front door, and even in the cab of his pickup before he’d driven into town one morning.

  Boots clomping, he stalked noisily down the hall, pausing at her bedroom door, only to gasp when it groaned. Had he touched it by mistake?

  Instinctively he grabbed the knob, and the damned door, which had been slightly ajar, opened as if by itself. She was in the tub, splashing water and singing too loudly to notice him. He could see her plain as day.

  Beyond her rumpled bed, the path to the bathroom was littered with her clothes and jewelry—those incredible short shorts, her lacy black bra and panties, that little silver chain that disappeared into her T-shirt and hung between her breasts.

  Her breasts. His gaze feasted on the lush mounds. She held up a wet rag and squeezed water onto them as she sang some husky melody that he heard all the way to his bones.

  It took
him a while to catch his breath. She was lying back in her tub sponging her breasts with that damned pink washrag until her nipples peaked like ripe raspberries. His heart knocked violently and he went statue-still. A second glance and he felt as if he’d been slammed in the groin. Instantly he was as hard as a rock.

  “I’m just a lonesome girl/lost in the middle of nowhere,” she sang. “A lonesome girl in love with a lonesome man…”

  But when she squeezed the water out of her rag and folded it neatly on the side of the tub, he knew he should go. She stood up, water dripping off her sleek, dewy body. Oh, God. More than anything he wanted to shove the door open and rush inside to her. But what would she do? She’d barely spoken since she’d stumbled over the dead cow.

  His heart thrummed madly in his throat. Soap bubbles clung to her voluptuous, pink body as she reached for a towel. Even from the hall, he could almost smell the rose soap she used, almost taste the warm steamy water that beaded on her skin.

  His gaze slid up and down her body, lingering on her breasts and then on that golden triangle of hair lower down. She’d cost him his peace of mind, his very sanity. He didn’t know how to win her, but losing her wasn’t an option. His objectives weren’t clear. He couldn’t focus on anything but her.

  Oh, man. His physical reaction bothered him. He was a Marine. Where was his iron will, his disciplined Marine Corps brain? Why was it so hard to be tough with her?

  Damn it. Xavier Gonzalez and the dead cows didn’t bother Phillip nearly as much as his fears of losing Celeste. It took all his control not to rush inside, fall on his knees and beg her forgiveness for being so cold the past week. Fire raced through his veins. Desire had him shaking. Oh, God, she made him weak.

  Why had she left Vegas? He’d called Yardley at his motel and asked him the same question.

  All Yardley had said in that grim voice of his was, “Why don’t you ask her?”

  The man knew something; that was obvious. Had they gone to bed? Was she in some kind of serious trouble? Damn it, Phillip thought, if Celeste loved him, if she trusted him at all, she would tell him. But she didn’t, and he’d been damned before he cut her any slack just because she made him feel so needy.