Linda Lael Miller Bundle by Linda Lael Miller

think you are?” she snapped. “Sigmund Freud?”
    Mitch sat back in that cushy sofa, damn him, and cupped his hands behind his head, not saying so much as a word. Shay was reminded of the scandalous way he’d loved her in the RV earlier and she sat down in a nearby chair, her knees weak.
    “Everybody has hang-ups about their mother,” she sputtered when the silence grew too long and too damning. She glared at Mitch, remembering all that Ivy had told her over the past few years. “Or their stepmother.”
    Mitch sighed and stared up at the ceiling, still maintaining his attitude of relaxed certainty. “The difference is, my dear, that I can talk about my stepmother. She and I don’t get along because she was my father’s mistress before he and my mother were divorced. In effect, you could say that she took him away from us.”
    “My God,” Shay whispered, feeling sympathy even though there was nothing in Mitch’s voice or manner that asked for it.
    “It was traumatic at the time,” Mitch said evenly. “But Dad was a good father to me and, eventually, my mother remarried. She’s disgustingly happy.”
    “But Ivy’s mother—”
    “Elizabeth does the best she can. She loved my father.”
    Shay was silent.
    “Your turn,” Mitch prompted.
    She stared into the snapping fire for a while, drifting back to another night. “Rosamond was her own greatest fan,” she said. “And yet she could humiliate herself so easily. I remember one of her lovers—a tennis bum—he was good-looking but if you tapped on his forehead, nobody would answer the door.”
    Mitch chuckled. “Go on.”
    “He was part of the reason that Mother got bored with Riley, I guess. After Riley and Garrett were gone, he decided that it was time to get back on the old circuit. He was going to walk out and I’ll never forget—I’ll never forget the way Mother acted. He was trying to get into his car and she was on her knees in the driveway, with her arms wrapped around his legs, begging him to stay.” Shay turned shadowed, hurting eyes to Mitch’s face. “It was awful.”
    “You saw that?” Mitch must have tried, but he failed to keep the annoyance out of his voice.
    “I’ve seen a lot worse,” she answered.
    “Stay with me,” he said, clearing away aging memorabilia to make a space beside him on the sofa.
    Shay couldn’t leave, but she suddenly felt too broken and vulnerable to stay. “I don’t want—”
    “I know,” he said, standing up and extending one hand to her. After a moment or so, she rose and took the offered hand and Mitch led her gently up the stairs and into his bedroom.
    Furnished now with a massive waterbed, chairs and bureaus and a freestanding chess table set up for play, the room didn’t seem so vast.
    Deftly, as though he did such things as a part of his daily routine, Mitch undressed Shay and then buttoned her into one of his pajama tops, a royal blue silk affair with piping and a monogram on the pocket.
    “You do not strike me as a man who wears pajamas,” she said, aware of the inanity of her remark but too shaky to say anything heavier.
    “A Christmas present from Ivy,” he explained, disappearing into the adjoining bathroom. A moment later Shay heard the shower running.
    “Why am I staying here?” she asked the cosmos, holding her arms out from her sides.
    When the cosmos didn’t answer, she followed Mitch into the steamy chamber and helped herself to one of the new toothbrushes she found in the cabinet drawer. As she brushed, she fumed. Six toothbrushes, still in their boxes. The man expected to entertain a harem!
    Behind the beautifully etched door of the double shower, Mitch sang at the top of his lungs. Shay glared at her reflection in the steamy mirror. “If you had any sense at all,” she muttered, “you’d go home! This is a man who keeps extra toothbrushes, for God’s sake!”
    Having said all this, Shay went back to the bedroom and crawled into bed. The sheets were as smooth as