Linda Lael Miller Bundle

by Linda Lael Miller

  She stepped into the tub, standing behind Mitch, working the awesome tension from his shoulders with her fingers. “Talk to me, Mitch.”

  Haltingly, he began to tell her about his interviews with Alan Roget. Shay had read about Roget, knew that he was a vicious killer with a penchant for calling attention to himself. She listened staunchly as Mitch poured out the ugly, inhumane things he’d be expected to write about.

  When Mitch turned to her, there were tears on his beard-stubbled cheeks. Shay held him, her hands moving gently up and down his heaving back, her tears flowing as freely as his.

  “How can I write about this bastard?” he demanded once, in raspy horror. “It makes me sick just to think about him!”

  Shay caught Mitch’s strong face in her hands and held it firmly. “You have to write about him, Mitch, because there are a lot of other psychos out there and if one woman recognizes the type and stays alive because of it—just one woman, Mitch—it will be worth all the pain!”

  “I can’t do it!” Mitch roared, and then a grating sob tore itself from the depths of him. He shuddered in Shay’s arms. “Dammit, I can’t do it anymore!”

  “Yes you can, Mitch. I’ll help you.”

  He drew back from her, studying her face with those tormented, fatigue-shadowed eyes. “You’ll what?”

  “I know you don’t want a relationship with me,” Shay said, wondering where she’d found the strength to admit to something that had been impossible to face only an hour before. “So there won’t be any strings attached.”

  “Strings?”

  “I love you, Mitch, regardless of how you feel about me. Tonight, I’m going to drag you back from everything that’s ugly and base if I have to drive you out of your mind to do it.”

  She held her breath and plunged under the water to pull the plug, and the water began to drain away, but neither she nor Mitch made any move to climb out of the tub. “Your therapy begins right now,” Shay said.

  Because of Shay, and only because of Shay, Mitch was able to fly back to Joliet for one final interview with Roget and then to return home and write about the man. It was hell, and he swore he’d never tackle a project like it again, but by Thanksgiving he’d roughed out the skeleton of a first draft.

  Shay sat on her sofa with her feet tucked underneath her, reading the last chapter. The scent of the turkey Alice had cooked still hung in the air, mingling with the spicy aroma of the pumpkin pie that would be served later. Mitch tried not to watch Shay’s every expression as she read, but his eyes strayed in her direction at regular intervals.

  Hank, worn out by a day of celebrating, was asleep on the couch, his head resting on Shay’s lap. Mitch grinned, remembering the game of Dungeons and Dragons he and the boy had played earlier.

  To keep from looking at Shay again, he watched Alice, who was sitting in a rocking chair, knitting a bright red sweater. These two women and the boy made up a family Mitch wanted very much to be a part of, but he couldn’t risk proposing to Shay again; their relationship was too delicate for that.

  Sitting on the floor, Mitch cupped his hands behind his head and leaned back against the chair he didn’t feel like sitting in, grinning when Alice caught him staring at her and winking mischievously in response.

  Shay finally finished reading and set the manuscript aside. Her eyes were averted and there was a slight flush in her cheeks and Mitch sat bolt upright.

  “You don’t like it,” he said, hating his own vulnerability to this woman’s opinion.

  Shay met his gaze with a level stare of her own. “You detest this guy, Mitch. The other chapters were okay, but this one is a—a vendetta.”

  “Of course I detest Roget! He’s a murderer!”

  “Your emotions have no place in the book, Mitch. You’re a journalist and you’ve got to be objective.”

  Hank stirred and muttered something and Mitch thrust himself to his feet, bending to gather the little boy up in his arms. “I’ll put him to bed,” he said through his teeth.

  Shay smiled. “My, but you take criticism well, Mr. Prescott.”

  Mitch carried Hank into his room, helped him out of his clothes and into bed. “I wish you were around all the time,” the child said with a yawn as Mitch tucked the blankets in around him. “It’s almost like having a dad.”

  Mitch smiled and rumpled Hank’s hair with one hand. “I’m doing my best, fella,” he said quietly. “I’m doing my best.”

  “Are you going to marry my mom?”

  Mitch thought for a moment, trying to find the right words. “I hope so,” he finally said.

  Hank snuggled down into the covers and yawned again, his eyes closed now. “I hope so, too,” he answered.

  When Mitch returned to the living room he was shocked to find Shay standing on the couch, holding out a chair, lion-tamer style, and pretending to brandish a whip with one hand. “Back, back!” she cried. To Alice, she said, “There’s nothing more dangerous than a writer who’s just been told that his last chapter stinks!”

  Mitch was having a hard time keeping a straight face. “Oh, so now it stinks, does it?”

  Shay clamped her nose with two fingers and Mitch was lost. He laughed, wrested the chair from her and pulled her down off the couch and into his arms.

  “I think the pie’s done,” Alice chimed, beating a hasty retreat into the kitchen.

  Mitch kissed the bridge of Shay’s nose. “You wanna know what makes me maddest of all, lady? You’re right about that last chapter. Still, you could have spared my feelings.”

  Impishly, she pinched him with the fingers of both hands. “I ask you, did you spare my feelings when my cheeseballs bombed at the mayor’s party? No. You said you wouldn’t feed them to a dog!”

  “Actually, I may have spoken prematurely. I met a Doberman once, in Rio, who richly deserved one.”

  She laughed and the sound made a sweet, lonely ache inside Mitch. He’d never wanted anything as much as he wanted to marry this woman and share his life and his bed with her. As it was, they were together only when their schedules permitted, which wasn’t often. “I love you,” he said.

  There was a puzzled look in her wide eyes for a moment, then she stood on tiptoe to kiss his chin. “Stay with me.”

  “I can’t and you know it,” Mitch snapped, irritated. “What would we tell Hank in the morning? That we’re carrying on a cheap affair?”

  Her lower lip jutted out. “Is that what you think this is, Mitch?”

  He held Shay closer, desperate for the feel and scent and warmth of her. “You know damned well that that isn’t what I think!”

  She pinched him again, her eyes dancing with mischief. “Not even after what we did in my office yesterday?” she whispered.

  Heat flowed up over Mitch’s chest in a flood, surging along his neck and into his face. He swatted Shay’s delectable rear end, hard, with both hands. “You little vamp, are you trying to drive me crazy or what?”

  She wriggled against him. “Ooo-la-la!” she teased.

  “Shay!”

  She was running her hands up and down his hips and his sides. He remembered the episode she had mentioned a moment before, and Halloween night, when she’d saved him from demons that had nothing to do with the thirty-first of October. “Stay with me,” she said again. “We’ll set the alarm and you can leave before Hank gets up.”

  He set her away from him. “No, dammit. No.”

  Shay’s eyes widened with confusion and hurt as he snatched up his jacket and the copy of the new book and started toward the door. “Mitch—?”

  He paused, his hand on the knob. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, and then he opened the door and went out.

  She followed him down the walk, to the front gate and as he tried to outdistance her, she broke into a run. “What’s wrong?” she asked, taking hold of his sleeve and stopping him. “Tell me what’s wrong!”

  “We’re wrong, Shay. You and I.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

 
“Not the way you’re taking it, no.” Mitch sighed and scanned the cold November sky before forcing his eyes back to her face. “We should be able to share a bed without having to orchestrate it, Shay.”

  She receded. “You mean, we should be married.”

  “You said it, I didn’t. Remember that.” He opened the gate, went through it and got into his car.

  Alice was in the kitchen dishing up pumpkin pie. Shay had baked so much of it for her Thanksgiving customers that she couldn’t face the stuff, so she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table.

  “Since nobody’s volunteering anything, I’ll butt my nose in and ask. What’s the matter now?” Alice might have looked like a mild-mannered little old lady, but she was really a storm trooper, Shay had decided, undaunted by any assignment.

  “Mitch wants to get married,” Shay said despondently.

  “Gee, that’s terrible,” came the sardonic response. “The man ought to be horsewhipped.”

  “It could be terrible,” Shay insisted sadly. “I might be just like my mother and she was—you know how she was.”

  “Your great-uncle Edgar was a chicken thief, but I’ve yet to catch you in somebody else’s coop.”

  Shay had to chuckle. Maybe she’d have a piece of pie after all. “Your point is well taken, but the fact remains that marriage scares me to death.”

  Alice refused to smile; she was clearly annoyed. “Mitch Prescott is a very fine man and you’re going to fool around and lose him,” she fretted.

  “Have some pie,” Shay said.

  “I’ve lost my appetite,” Alice snapped. “Good night and I’ll see myself out.”

  Shay stood up. “Please, don’t go.”

  “You should have said that to your man, Shay,” Alice replied, and she walked stiffly out into the living room.

  Shay followed, clenching and unclenching her hands, feeling like a miserable child. “I did. He wouldn’t stay with me. He didn’t want Hank to wake up and find him here.”

  “At least one of you has some sense.” Alice murmured, her exasperation fading into tenderness. “If Mitch were your husband, there wouldn’t be so many logistical problems, Shay.”

  “I can’t marry him just so we won’t have to explain going to bed!”

  “You can’t marry him because you’re afraid, yet you love him, I know you do. And he loves you.” Alice sighed, poised to leave. “Take a chance, Shay. Take a chance.”

  “I did that once before! And the man I loved ran off with a librarian!”

  “It’s a damned good thing that he did, kiddo, or you might never have found yourself. Look at you. You’re in business for yourself. You’re strong and you’re smart and you’re beautiful. What in Sam Hill do you want, a written guarantee from God?”

  Shay just stared at her grandmother, stuck for an answer.

  “That’s what I thought. Well, you’d better not hold your breath, Shay, because we don’t get any guarantees in this life.” With that, Alice Bretton opened the door and walked out.

  Shay went to the window and watched until her grandmother was safely in her car, then returned to the kitchen and sat staring at her half-eaten piece of pumpkin pie with its dollop of whipped cream. She stuck a finger into the topping and dolefully licked at it.

  Some Thanksgiving this was. Hank was asleep and Alice had gone home in a huff and Mitch…She didn’t even want to think about Mitch.

  The next day she woke up with a chest cold and had to stay home, trusting Barbara and Louise, the two women she’d hired through the Displaced Homemaker program at the college, to run the business.

  Half-buried in tissue boxes and decongestants of all sorts, Shay lay on her sofa, grimly watching game shows and soap operas and trying to be civil in the face of Hank’s determined attempts to nurse her back to health.

  By the time he finally gave up and went out to play with his friends, Shay was in a dreadful mood. The telephone began to ring and she made her way across the room, grumbling all the way.

  “Hello,” she said through her nose.

  The response was a rich masculine chuckle. “Good Lord,” Mitch marveled. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m thick,” Shay answered with dignity.

  He laughed. “I would describe you as thin.”

  “Thick ath in not well,” Shay labored to say.

  “I’ll be over in ten minutes.”

  Before Shay could protest that plan, Mitch had hung up. Her head pounding, she stumbled back to the couch and huddled under the afghan she’d crocheted during her earth-mother phase. She coughed and pulled the cover up over her head.

  It would save the paramedics the trouble.

  13

  The two small shops on the first floor of Shay’s building were all decorated for Christmas. She marveled at the industry of their proprietors; Jenna and Betty must have worked all of Thanksgiving weekend to assemble such grandeur, she thought.

  Though her own office and kitchen were, of course, on the first floor, too, Shay climbed the stairs to see if Alice and the woman who owned the candle shop had followed suit. They had.

  Shay crammed her hands into the pockets of her coat and went downstairs by the back way, feeling a little guilty because she hadn’t put out so much as a sprig of holly.

  Both Barbara and Louise were busy in the huge kitchen, with its big tables and commercial refrigerators. Shay watched them for a few moments, unnoticed, trying to imagine what their lives had been like.

  Barbara, a plump woman with beautifully coiffed hair, was rolling out dough for an order of quiche. She had signed up for the Displaced Homemaker program at the college after her husband of twenty-eight years had divorced her for another woman. Louise, a small and perpetually smiling blonde, had lost her husband in a car accident a year before. She, like Barbara, had never held a paying job in her life, and yet she’d been faced with the prospect of earning a living.

  Inwardly, Shay sighed. These two women had given their best to their marriages, and where had it gotten them? They had been betrayed, abandoned.

  At that moment Barbara spotted her and smiled. “Good morning, Ms. Kendall. Feeling better?”

  The inside of Shay’s chest still felt raw and hollow, while her sinuses were stuffed, but the worst was past. Mitch had coddled her shamefully. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I feel better.”

  “You look like you dragged yourself down here,” Louise observed in her forthright way. “Why don’t you go home and rest? We can manage things on this end.”

  Shay looked upon the two women with admiration. Okay, so they were “displaced homemakers,” but they were also survivors. They had tallied what skills they had—neither was a stranger to cooking for a crowd—and they’d gone out and found a market for what they knew. “I’ve got some book work to do in the office,” she said in reply to Louise’s well-meant suggestion. “But it probably would be better if you two handled the cooking today.”

  “I could make the deliveries, too,” Barbara ventured.

  I must look like I’m on my last legs, Shay thought. She nodded and went into her small office, closing the door behind her.

  Her desk was piled with telephone messages, bills from food suppliers, catalogs offering fancy ice molds and serving dishes. She sighed as she sat down in her chair. She had her own business now, and she was keeping her head above water financially, which was something in the first year, so where was all the delight, all the fulfillment, all the pride of accomplishment?

  Barbara and Louise were laughing in the kitchen, their voices ringing. They didn’t sound very displaced to Shay. They sounded happy.

  Shay opened a ledger and tried to concentrate on debits and credits, but her mind kept straying back to those two women in the kitchen. She had expected to pity them; instead she found herself envying them. Why was that?

  She tapped the eraser end of her pencil against her chin. She guessed she’d qualified as a “displaced homemaker” herself, after Eliott had left her, a
nd she’d landed on her feet, like Barbara and Louise, but she didn’t remember laughing the way they were laughing now. She remembered fear and uncertainty and a constant struggle, and she remembered leaving Hank with a baby-sitter on cold winter mornings when she would have given anything to stay home and take care of him herself.

  Shay sighed again, laying down her pencil. That was it, that was what she envied. For all the heartache they’d suffered in recent months, Louise and Barbara had had their time with their children. They’d been there for the first giggle, the first step, the first word.

  Resolutely, Shay took up her pencil again and forced her eyes to the neat columns written in the ledger. There was no point in bemoaning such things now; she was a career woman, whether she liked it or not. And on that cold, windy November day, she didn’t like it very much.

  At noon Alice breezed in with chicken sandwiches from the deli down the street, her cheeks pink from the cold weather. The two women chatted about inconsequential things as they ate, and then Alice went back to her yarn shop upstairs.

  Shay marveled at the woman’s energy, at the same time wondering what had happened to her own. She finished balancing the books and then went into the kitchen to help Louise and Barbara box fragrant crab quiche for delivery. Once the boxes had been loaded into the back of her new station wagon, Shay confessed that she didn’t think she could make it through the rest of the day and her helpers promised to take up the slack.

  She delivered the quiche to the home of a prominent surgeon and his wife and then drove around aimlessly, not wanting to work, not wanting to go back to her empty house. Finally, in desperation, she went to Reese Motors to say hello to Ivy.

  The office was in an uproar. Marvin was about to make another commercial and Ivy was simultaneously going over an invoice with a salesman and sparring with Richard Barrett. It gave Shay a pang to see that she’d been so easily replaced.

  She would have sneaked out without speaking to Ivy at all if her friend hadn’t spotted her and called out, “Shay, wait. I need to talk to you about the wedding.”

  Ivy got rid of the salesman and Richard in record time and all but dragged Shay into her office. It was disturbingly neat, that office.