Linda Lael Miller Bundle

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Why don’t you get in touch with your grandmother tomorrow? She’ll be able to tell you a lot more than I can.”

  “She might not want anything to do with me!”

  Mitch shook his head. “She asked me a thousand questions about you, Shay.” He pulled a wry face meant to lighten the mood. “Of course, I didn’t tell her how you taste when you’ve just had a half ton of sugar dumped over your head.”

  Shay was making a sound, but she wasn’t sure whether she was laughing or crying or both. She gave Mitch a shove and then allowed her forehead to nestle into his broad shoulder.

  “Make love to me, Mitch,” she said after a very long time.

  “Here?” he teased in a hoarse voice, but he picked Shay up in his arms and carried her into the room she pointed out to him. The night was a long one, full of tender abandon.

  The pit of Shay’s stomach quivered with nervousness as she dialed the number Mitch had given her. What, exactly, was she going to say to this grandmother she had never known, never heard a word about?

  Mitch puttered around the kitchen, getting breakfast, while the call went through.

  “Mrs. Bretton?” Shay’s voice shook. “My name is Shay Kendall and—”

  “Shay!” The name was a soft cry of joy, full of tears and laughter. “Is it really you?”

  “It’s really me,” Shay answered, and she made a face at Mitch as he shoved a dishtowel into her hands. Then she dried her eyes with it. “T-tell me about my father. Please.”

  “There is so much to tell, darling, and so much to show. Could you possibly come to Springfield for a visit?”

  Shay wanted to hop on the next plane, but she had responsibilities to Marvin and Jeannie and she couldn’t go away without letting Hank know. Suppose he got sick and Garrett brought him home and there was no one there to take care of him? “This is a bad time—my job—my son—”

  “Then I’ll come there!” Alice Bretton interrupted warmly. “Would that be all right, Shay? I could bring the photo albums and we could talk in person.”

  “I’d love to have you, Mrs. Bretton.”

  “In that case, I’ll make arrangements and call you right back.”

  “That would be wonderful.”

  They said goodbye and Shay set the phone receiver back in its cradle as Mitch poured scrambled eggs into a pan of hash browns and chopped onions and bits of crisp bacon.

  “I take it she’s flying out for a visit?” Mitch asked moderately, looking back at Shay over one bare shoulder.

  Shay nodded. “I can’t make sense of what I feel, Mitch. I’m happy that I’m finally going to meet my grandmother and I’m sad because my father died and I’m furious with Rosamond! Here she is, this poor, sick, wretch of a woman, and I could cheerfully wring her neck!”

  “That’s normal, Shay. The important thing is that you wouldn’t really do it.”

  “I want to thank you for this, Mitch. F-for my grandmother.”

  He turned from the stove, grinning, almost unbearably handsome in just his jeans. His hair was rumpled and his feet were bare and, as always, he needed to shave. “Don’t be too hasty with your gratitude, kid,” he warned. “For all you know, she’s a bag lady with bad breath, bunions and bowling shoes.”

  “That was alliterative, in a tacky sort of way,” Shay responded. She slid off the stool near the wall phone and put her arms around Mitch’s lean waist.

  He kissed the tip of her nose and gave her bottom a squeeze that brought back memories of the night before. Shay blushed to recall what a greedy wanton she’d been.

  “I’m not sure whether you bring out the best in me, or the worst,” she commented.

  Mitch’s eyebrows went into brief but rapid motion. “If that was your worst,” he said in a Groucho Marx voice, “I’m all for it.”

  Shay tipped her head back and laughed. It was a throaty, gleeful sound, and it felt oh, so good. If she could be sure that life with Mitch Prescott would always be this way, she would have married him in a second. But in her deepest mind, marriage was linked with betrayal, with pain. She sobered, thinking of Eliott’s desertion and the fickle vanity of her mother.

  Mitch lifted his index fingers to the corners of Shay’s mouth and stretched her lips into a semblance of a smile. “No sad faces allowed,” he said.

  He went to dish up the scrambled egg concoction he’d made for their breakfast, and Shay sat down in a chair at the table. It was strange, having a man not only cook for her, but serve her as well. “I could get used to this,” she said as he set a steaming, fragrant plate in front of her.

  “Good. We’ll get married and make it a ritual. I’ll fix your breakfast every morning and then take you back to bed and make wild love to you.”

  Shay blushed again, but some vixen hiding deep inside her made her say, “Keep making threats like that, fella, and I’ll accept your proposal.”

  Mitch’s eyes were suddenly serious. “Eat,” he ordered in a gruff tone, looking away.

  Before Shay could say anything at all, the telephone rang. Alice Bretton had made her flight arrangements and she would be arriving in Seattle the following afternoon at two. Shay wrote down the name of the airline and the flight number and when she turned away from the phone, Mitch was disconsolately scraping their plates.

  Standing behind him, Shay wrapped her arms around his middle and rubbed his stomach with tantalizing motions of both hands. “I seem to remember something about a threat,” she said softly, her lips moving against the taut flesh of his back as she spoke.

  Shay was late for work that morning.

  Just talking to Alan Roget over the telephone gave Mitch a creepy feeling, as though a massive spiderweb had settled over him or something. He frowned as he listened to the first accounts of the murderer’s childhood, entering notes on the screen of his computer throughout the conversation.

  The night with Shay had been magical, and so had the morning. Life was so damned ironic: one minute, a man could be eating scrambled eggs or making love to a woman, the next, talking to someone who personified evil. Like most psychotics, Roget exhibited no remorse at all, from what Mitch could tell. He seemed to feel that civil and moral laws applied only to other people and not to him.

  By the time Mitch hung up the telephone, he was a little sick. He immediately dialed Reba’s number in California, and when she answered, he asked to talk to Kelly.

  “You’re in luck, big fella,” Reba responded warmly. “The munchkin happens to be home from school today.”

  Mitch sat up a little straighter in his desk chair. “Is she sick?”

  “Nothing serious,” his ex-wife assured him promptly. “Just the sniffles. So, how have you been, Mitch?”

  Mitch couldn’t help smiling. Reba definitely wasn’t your standard ex-wife. She was happy with her new husband and that happiness warmed her entire personality. “I’m in love,” he confided, without really expecting to.

  “Oh, Mitch, that’s great!” Worry displaced a little of the buoyancy in her voice. “It is great, isn’t it? Maybe great enough to keep you out of jungles and hotbeds of political unrest?”

  “No more jungles, Reba,” he said solemnly. He’d made changes in his life recently that he had refused to consider while he and Reba were married, and he wondered if she would resent that.

  Not Reba. He should have known. “We’ll all breathe a sigh of relief,” she chimed. “On the count of three, now. One, two—”

  Mitch laughed. He remembered the good times with Reba and, for a fleeting moment, mourned them.

  When Kelly’s piping voice came on the line, he forget about Roget and all the other ugliness in the world. But the house seemed even bigger than it was after he’d talked to his daughter, and even emptier.

  He threw himself into his work, concentrating on Rosamond Dallas and what had made her tick.

  The need to throttle Rosamond was gone by the time Shay visited her that afternoon; in its place was a certain sad acceptance of the fact that mothers are wom
en, human and fallible.

  She approached her mother’s chair, kissed her forehead. “How can I hate you?” she whispered.

  Rosamond rocked and clutched the ever-present doll. It seemed to Shay that she was retreating deeper and deeper into herself and growing smaller with every passing day.

  Tired because of a most delicious lack of sleep the night before, a day of work and telephone conversations with half a dozen contractors, Shay sighed and sank into the chair facing her mother’s. “I’m going to meet my grandmother tomorrow,” she said, hardly able to believe such a thing could be possible and expecting no reaction at all from Rosamond.

  But the woman sat stiffly in her chair, her famous eyes widening.

  Shay was incredulous. “Mother?”

  The fleeting moment of lucidity was over. Rosamond stared blankly again, crooning a wordless song to her doll.

  Shay looked at the doll and, for the first time ever, wondered if that raggedy lump of cloth and yarn could, in Rosamond’s mind, represent herself as a baby. It was a jarring thought, but oddly comforting, too. Maybe, Shay thought, she loved me as well as she was able to love anyone. Maybe she did the best she could.

  On her way home from the convalescent home, Shay stopped at the Skyler Beach mall and went into a bookstore, looking for the four titles Ivy had written down for her. Mitch’s work was published under the odd code name of Zebulon, with no surname of any kind given and, of course, with no photograph on the back or inside flap of the book jackets.

  Shay felt a little shiver of fear as she looked at the covers and thought of all the dangerous people who must hate Mitch Prescott enough to kill him. She was trembling a little as she laid the books on the counter and paid for them.

  At home, she did housework, ate a light supper and took a bath, then curled up on the couch with one of Mitch’s books. The one she’d selected to read first was an account of the capture of a famous Nazi war criminal, set mostly in Brazil. It was harrowing, reading that book, and yet Shay was riveted to it, turning page after page. In the morning, she awakened to find herself still on the couch, the open book under her cheek. Groaning, she raised herself to a sitting position and ran her fingers through her hair.

  This was the day that she would meet Alice Bretton, her grandmother, for the first time. She was determined to think of that and not the horrors Mitch had to have faced in order to write that book.

  After showering and dressing, she wolfed down a cup of coffee and half an English muffin and drove to work to find the usual chaos awaiting her. At least Richard Barrett wasn’t around, wanting to film the last commercial. That was a comfort.

  Shay delved into her work and the hours passed quickly. Soon it was time to drive to the airport and meet Mrs. Bretton’s plane.

  She wondered how she would recognize her grandmother and what she would say to her first. There were so many things to tell and so many questions to ask.

  As it happened, it was Alice Bretton who recognized Shay. A tiny, Helen Hayes-type, with snow-white hair done up in a bun and quick, sparkling eyes, Mrs. Bretton came right up to her granddaughter and said, “Why, dear, you look just like Robert!”

  Shay was inordinately glad that she resembled someone; Lord knew, she looked nothing like Rosamond and never had. It was that gladness that broke the ice and allowed her to hug the small woman standing before her. “I’m so happy to see you,” she said, and then she had to laugh because, looking down through a mist of tears, she could see that Alice was wearing bowling shoes with her trim, tasteful suit.

  “They’re so comfortable, don’t you know!” Alice cried in good-natured self-defense.

  Shay looked forward to telling Mitch that Mrs. Bretton did indeed wear bowling shoes, though she obviously wasn’t a bag lady and it was doubtful that she had bunions.

  Talking with her grandmother proved remarkably easy, considering all the years and all the heartaches that might have separated them. The two women chattered nonstop all the way back to Skyler Beach, Shay asking questions, Alice answering them.

  Shay’s eyes were hazel because hazel eyes ran in the Bretton family, she was told, and yes, Robert had wanted to marry Rosamond, but she’d refused. He had tried to see Shay many times, but she had always been away in some school, out of his reach. Rosamond had never allowed any of his letters or phone calls to Shay to get through.

  Alice patted her sensible, high-quality purse. “But I have most of those letters right here. When they came back, Robert saved them.”

  Shay worked at keeping her mind on her driving, and it was hard. She wanted to pull over to the side of the freeway and read all of her father’s letters, one after another. “Why didn’t Rosamond want him to see me or even talk to me?”

  Alice sighed, and if she bore Rosamond Dallas any ill-will, it wasn’t visible in the sweet lines of her face. “Lord only knows. She wasn’t very happy as a child, you know, and I guess she didn’t want anything to do with anyone from Springfield. Not even her own baby’s father.”

  Rosamond had said very little about her life in Springfield, only that her mother drank too much and her father, a railroad worker, had died in an accident when she was four years old. “Did you know Rosamond as a girl?”

  Alice shook her head. “I only met her after she’d started to date Robert. She was beautiful, but I—well, I had my misgivings about her. She was rather wild, you know.”

  Shay could imagine her mother as a young girl, looking for approbation and love even in those pre-fame days. It was strange that the search had never stopped, that Rosamond had gone from man to man all her life. “I wish I’d known about you and about my father.”

  Alice reached across the car seat to pat Shay’s knee. “You’ll know me, and I’ve brought along things to help you know your father, too.” Suddenly the elderly woman looked alarmed. “I do hope I’m not keeping you from your work, dear!”

  Shay thought of the commercials and the irate customers and the stacks of contracts and factory invoices she had left behind at Reese Motors. “My work will definitely keep until tomorrow. You can stay for a while, can’t you?”

  “Oh, yes. Nobody waiting at home but my parakeet, my cat and my bridge club. Now tell me all about this boy of yours. Hank, isn’t it? You know, it’s a funny thing, but your great-grandfather’s name was Henry and they called him Hank, don’t you know….”

  10

  Shay bit her lower lip as the ringing began on the other end of the line. It was just plain unconscionable to awaken someone at that hour of the night, but after reading her father’s gentle, innocuous letters, she felt a deep need to touch base.

  On the third ring, Mitch answered with an unintelligible grumble.

  “She wears bowling shoes,” Shay said.

  “You woke me up to tell me that?” He didn’t sound angry, just baffled.

  “I thought you’d want to know.” She paused, drew a deep breath. “Oh, Mitch, Alice is a wonderful woman.”

  “She’s your grandmother. What else could she be besides wonderful?”

  “Flatterer.”

  “You love it.”

  I love you, Shay thought. “Good night, Mitch,” she said.

  He laughed, a wonderful rumbling, sleepy sound. “Good night, princess.”

  Shay was glad that no one could see her, there in the darkness of her kitchen. She kissed the telephone receiver before she put it back in place.

  Alice was still sleeping the next morning when Shay left for work. Rather than disturb her grandmother, she scribbled a note that included her office telephone number and crept out. Alice had made it very clear, the night before, that she didn’t want to disrupt Shay’s life in any way.

  On the way to Reese Motors, Shay marveled that life could follow the same dull and rocky road for so many years, and then suddenly take a series of crazy turns. She’d met Mitch, she’d found her grandmother, she was about to start the business she had only dreamed of—and all this had taken place in a period of a few weeks.

>   When Shay arrived at work, she found Richard waiting in her office with the fourth and final storyboard. She was relieved; after this, she would never have to make a fool of herself on camera again.

  “It’s a giant, hairy hand,” Richard said with amazing enthusiasm.

  “I can see that, Richard,” Shay replied dryly, frowning at the storyboard. “When are we filming this one?”

  “Tomorrow, I hope. We had to special order that hand, you know.”

  Shay sighed inwardly. “It won’t collapse or anything, will it?”

  “Absolutely not. Would I risk your life that way?”

  Shay shrugged philosophically. “I don’t know, Richard. You almost smothered me in sugar the other day, so I thought I’d ask.”

  “Marvin’s going to be pleased with these commercials, Shay,” Richard said on an unexpectedly charitable note. “You’ve done a great job. The first spot aired late last night. You looked great, even in a bee suit.”

  Shay grinned, unable to resist saying, “I’ll bet people are buzzing about it.”

  Richard laughed and left the office, taking the storyboard with him.

  At noon, Alice arrived at Reese Motors by taxi, all dressed up for the lunch date she and Shay had made the night before. Shay proudly introduced her to Ivy, all the salesmen and even the mechanics in the repair section.

  “I saw you on television today, dear,” the elderly woman announced moderately over a chef’s salad. “You were dressed as a bee, of all things.” Alice looked puzzled, as though she thought Shay might say she was mistaken.

  Briefly, Shay explained about Marvin’s penchant for creative advertising.

  “We have a car dealer like that in Springfield,” Alice said seriously, and there was an endearing look of bafflement in her eyes. “He let a mouthful of water run down his chin and said he was liquidating last year’s models.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Shay groaned. “Do me a favor and don’t mention that around Reese Motors. Marvin would probably get wind of it and come up with some version of his own.”