CELEBRITY STATUS (The Kate Huntington mystery series #4) (20 page)

            She handed him a sheet of paper, purple crayon scribbles on one side that vaguely resembled a four-legged animal. Typed words were on the other side, a few smudges of fingerprint dust along the edges.

            At the strange look on her daddy’s face, Edie added anxiously, “I din’t have no more paper. It was on the floor in the study.”

            Skip turned away from his daughter so she wouldn’t see his expression. Kate was behind him. She nudged him aside and crouched down in front of the little girl. “It’s okay, sweetie,” she said gently. “It’s a lovely picture. May we keep it?”

            Edie nodded, her face still solemn.

            “Tell you what, we’re going to skip baths tonight. Can you take your brother upstairs and help him get into his PJ’s?”

            “Maria already took him up.”

            “Okay, then you go get into your pajamas and Daddy or I will be up in a few minutes for story time, okay?”

            Edie nodded. Her mother hugged her, then kissed her on the nose.

            Kate heard a choking sound from behind her. “Go on up, sweetie. I’ll be along in a minute.” She turned her daughter around and gently pushed her toward the stairs.

            Kate stood up and closed the door. She turned as Skip staggered over and sat down hard on the edge of the bed. He put his face in his hands.

            She sat down beside him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. “It’s okay, sweetheart,” she said softly.

            He shook his head, without looking at her. “No, it’s not okay,” he managed to get out past the knot in his throat. “The missing note was what started to tip me over the edge. I thought you or Rob had taken it, destroyed it.”

            He turned toward her, grabbing for her hands. “How could I think that, Kate? How could I not trust you?”

            “Because you’re human, and whoever is doing this is
trying
to make you not trust me.” She stared into her husband’s red-rimmed eyes. “Honestly, Skip, if I’d found an e-mail like that, and then had gotten a reply to one I sent out, I probably would have doubted
you
. The other stuff, the letter and the roses, no, they wouldn’t have done it, but the e-mails. That’s pretty damning evidence somebody’s planted.”

            “How did they do that, get that e-mail into our sent mail?”

            “I don’t know, but I’ll bet Liz can figure it out,” Kate said.

            “Dear God, Kate, please don’t tell them I got jealous, that I thought, even for a minute, you and Rob could be having an affair.”

            “Of course not. I tell Rob a lot, almost everything that’s going on with me. But there are some things that are just between you and me, and this is certainly one of them.”

            He stared into her eyes, his jaw tight. Suddenly he was so scared he couldn’t think straight, couldn’t figure out why he was scared. “I’m sorry, Kate,” he said in a choked voice.

            “It’s okay.” She wrapped her arms around him again. “I love you.” Laying her cheek against his chest, she looked down at his hands, clenched in fists on his thighs.

            She felt him kiss the top of her head, then he whispered, “I love you, too.”

            There was an undercurrent of anxiety in his voice. Not sure what it was about, she straightened up to look at him. “Skip, I would never, ever have an affair, and especially not with Rob. Can you imagine sleeping with your sister?”

            “No. Ick.” He shuddered slightly.

            “Exactly. I love Rob dearly. Almost as much as I love you, but in a very different way. Having sex... No, I can’t even say
that
out loud. Sleeping with Rob would be like sleeping with one of my brothers.” She shuddered. “Not gonna happen.”

            He tried to grin at her, but his effort failed. “You’d better go do story time before the kids come looking for us,” he said.

            She kissed him on the cheek, then stood up. “I hope you’re not too tired tonight, Mr. Canfield, because you owe me some
really
good make-up sex.”

            This time his grin materialized, although it was a bit lopsided.

            “Hold that thought,” she said as she headed for the door.

            She told the children Daddy wasn’t feeling well this evening and had asked her to kiss them goodnight for him. After their stories, she hugged each child a little longer than usual, praying that God would help her family get through this mess soon.

            Billy squirmed after a few seconds, but Edie clung to her mother. “Is Daddy gonna be okay, Mommy?” she asked in a small voice.

            “Yes, Precious. He’s gonna be fine,” Kate reassured her, stroking dark curls off the little girl’s forehead. She kissed that forehead and said, in a deep voice, “Goodnight, Pumkin.” She breathed an internal sigh of relief when Edie’s normal cheerful smile replaced the solemn look that the child had been wearing all too often lately.

            When Kate returned to the master bedroom, Skip was pacing back and forth next to his side of the bed, fists clenched, his face grim. She knew he was desperately trying to figure out how to stop this craziness that had invaded their lives. She felt her own surge of anger at the paparazzi who seemed to think she and her family were fair game.

            Unable to think of anything to say to calm him down, she went into the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth.

            When she came out, Skip had kicked off his shoes and was stretched out on top of the comforter, still fully clothed, his eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

            She walked around the bed to his side and sat down on the edge. He looked up at her and gave her a small smile, but behind the love in his eyes was sadness, and something else.

            It took her a moment to recognize it. Worry. She realized he was afraid he’d stepped over a line, broken trust with her in a way they wouldn’t be able to repair.

            She picked up one of his hands and stroked the back of it. She had discovered that big men’s hands were not all the same. Rob’s were thick meaty paws that enveloped her own when he took one of them to reassure or comfort her. Skip’s were long and surprisingly slender.

            Usually she let those agile hands make sweet love to her. Tonight she reversed roles. She straddled his hips and pinned his hands with her own on either side of his head. Leaning down, she kissed him feather-light on his lips, then slowly deepened the kiss.

            After several moments, she reluctantly came up for air. Letting go of his hands, she began to undress him, trailing tiny kisses down his chest as she unbuttoned and pushed aside his shirt. He closed his eyes and moaned. Once he tried to pull her down and roll her over. She resisted.

            She stood up just long enough to shed her own slacks, then pinned him beneath her again as she shrugged out of the rest of her clothes. Then she continued the slow delicious torture as she relieved him of his jeans.

            He looked up at her, their eyes locking on each other’s, as she slowly guided him into her. They gasped in unison. Then he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her down against his chest. He buried his face in her hair, breathed in the scent of her.

            For a long time there was only the slow movement, the exquisite sensations, the sense of melting together. She moaned and quivered in his arms, tightening around him. He held her closer, moving faster, his back arching of its own volition. She shuddered above him, around him.

            A burst of sensation so sweet it was almost unbearable surged through him as she shuddered again, more vehemently. He heard the sound he loved the most, a cross between a moan and a sigh, escaping from her throat. He wanted to hold on to that moment forever.

            Eventually he rolled over while holding her tight, not wanting to lose the connection. Locking his elbows so he wouldn’t crush her, he looked down into her eyes. They were a smoky indigo from passion.

            “Promise me, Kate, that you’ll never leave me,” he whispered.

            “I already did.” Her voice was gentle. She ran her fingers through his hair. “Til death do us part, remember? I’ll never leave you.” She pulled his head down to kiss his lips.

            And they lost themselves in each other again.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

            The next morning, Kate got up before dawn, so they could call the Franklins. Liz and Rob were early risers. She knew it would be best to call well before seven-thirty, when they would be getting ready for work.

            She put a cup of coffee on Skip’s nightstand and nudged him. He groaned. She picked up the receiver for the bedroom phone and tried to put it in his limp hand. “We’re gonna have a conference call, sweetheart,” she said.

            He opened one eye and looked at her. “What time is it?” he mumbled.

            “Not quite six-thirty.”

            “Is the sun up?”

            “Just barely.”

            The memory of the previous evening came flooding back and his eyes flew open, filled with pain and anger–at the paparazzi, at himself. “Kate, I–”

            “Shh,” she said, putting her fingertips against his lips. “It’s okay, Skip.”

            She was standing next to the bed in her bathrobe. He reached up to pull her down on top of him and fiercely sought her mouth.

            After a moment, she broke the kiss. He was starting to push aside her robe, his hands trailing fire across bare skin. “Sweetheart, please,” she gasped. “We need to call Rob and Liz before it gets too late.”

            He let her go reluctantly. She stood up. To be on the safe side, she took a step back from the bed before saying, “It really is okay, Skip. We’re okay.”

            He swung his legs out of bed, sitting up. She took his hand, gave it a squeeze, then put the phone receiver in it.

            “I’m gonna get the portable from the kitchen and take it in the study,” she said. “In case Maria or the kids get up before we’re finished.”

            Having done that, Kate punched in the Franklins’ phone number. Liz answered cheerfully, “Hey, Kate, what are you up to this early in the morning?”

            “We had a development here last night,” Kate said.

            “You want to talk to Rob?”

            “Yes, but you stay on the line too, Liz. Skip’s on the bedroom phone.”

            When Rob had picked up an extension, Kate told them both about the flowers and the e-mails.

            “It’s not that hard to get into people’s e-mails,” Liz, the computer whiz, said. “It’s Hacking 101. Once in, it’s a piece of cake to send an e-mail to an already established gmail account. You can set them up in any name you want.”

            “But I can’t understand how whoever is doing this could be monitoring the account so closely,” Kate said. “They wouldn’t know when the sent message would be discovered. How could they reply so quickly when Skip sent the test message?”

            Liz snorted. “You can access e-mail on your cell phone these days. All they have to do is stay logged in and they’ll hear a beep whenever a new message comes in. Day or night they can respond within seconds.”

            Skip spoke for the first time, his voice gravelly. “Crap, I should’ve figured that out.”

            “Good morning, Mr. Canfield.” Liz’s tone was teasing.

            “Humph,” he replied.

            “Obviously Skip is not a morning person,” Rob commented good-naturedly from the phone in his study.

            “This is not morning. This is the middle of the freakin’ night,” Skip declared, sounding grumpy, but actually glad to be joking with the Franklins.

            “So the question is, who is doing this and why?” Liz brought them back to task.

            There was silence on the line as they all thought about that. “The most obvious answer is one of the paparazzi is trying to keep the story alive,” Rob finally said. “But these seem like extreme lengths for them to go to. The first letters maybe, to try to get Kate and me to show up at that hotel, but this is a bit much, even for them.”

            “I don’t know,” Kate said. “A reporter might not send the roses themselves but an editor might suggest it and foot the bill, hoping to get something juicy out of it. These are not mainstream journalists. They play fast and loose with the rules. But the e-mails seem kind of over the top.”

            “Maybe the editor suggested the roses,” Liz said, “and an overzealous reporter thought of the e-mails, figuring the two together would be sure to do the trick.”

           
And they almost did,
Skip thought. He cleared his throat and said, “It kind of feels like two different people. The roses are way too obvious. The e-mail much more subtle. It, by itself, would have actually been more convincing.”

            “Maybe the roses were designed to make you go looking for evidence in our e-mail?” Kate suggested.

            “Could be,” Liz said.

            “Okay, so the paparazzi might be behind this, but it’s a bit of a stretch just to stir up a story,” Rob said. “Anybody else come to mind?”

            Silence again. This time Skip broke it. “Jim Bolton.”

            “Who’s that?” Liz asked.

            “Cherise’s publicist. The man seems to have the ethics of a toad. He’s had no problem so far with hanging me and my family out in the wind, if it means publicity for Cherise.”

            “I thought she fired him,” Kate said.

            “She said she did, but now I’m wondering if she just told me that to appease me,” Skip said.

            “Could it be her?” Kate asked.

            Another silence. “Maybe,” Skip finally said. “But it doesn’t feel like her style. She’s so convinced she’s hot stuff, if she really wanted me, she’d assume she could win me away from you.”

            “She’s come on to you?” Rob asked.