The Elliotts: Bedroom Secrets: Under Deepest Cover

“Really? Which one?” Please, dear God, don’t let it be anyone she knew, anyone with In Tight.

“Zeke Woodlow.”

Lucy was infinitely relieved—until she put it all together. She’d read about Zeke’s engagement in The Buzz. “Your sister is Summer Elliott. You’re the Elliott family, the ones who own all those magazines.” One of the richest families on the Eastern Seaboard.

Scarlet looked startled. “You didn’t know that?”

Maybe she’d just better shut up. “I didn’t know Bryan was one of the Elliotts. I’m a little slow—just putting it together now. We haven’t been dating for long,” she added, hoping that would explain away her cluelessness. “As for my clothes, I, uh, burned them. I need a fresh start.”

“Burned them? Where?”

Belatedly Lucy remembered you couldn’t burn anything in New York—it was against the law.

“Back home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Kansas. On a farm.” That much, at least, was true. She’d grown up in a small, conservative Kansas farming town, and her parents were still there.

“What was Bryan doing in Kansas? I thought he was in Europe.”

“Oh, he was. We met in Paris.”

“Then you went home to the farm, burned your clothes and came back here? Naked?”

Lucy smiled as if this wasn’t the most ridiculous story anyone had ever tried to pass off as the truth. “Right.”

“Girlfriend, I like your style.”

Bryan was still trying to recover his equilibrium as he headed down to the restaurant. He’d realized he was going to have to make it look good if his family was ever going to believe Lucy was his girlfriend. He’d never had a serious relationship before. Well, he’d tried once, but he’d quickly found out that women didn’t like it when he disappeared for weeks at a time. He’d decided that as long as he was in the spy business, it wasn’t fair to any woman to try to have a relationship. Not only would they have to put up with frequent absences, but there was always the chance he wouldn’t come home.

If that ever happened, the poor woman would probably never find out his fate.

So he dated casually. He occasionally slept with a woman if she was hot, willing and understood the ground rules. He’d seldom brought a woman into his loft, and he’d certainly never installed one as a live-in mistress. For his family to buy “Lindsay’s” sudden presence in his life, he was going to have to claim he was utterly smitten. And that meant acting the adoring boyfriend, with public displays of affection, longing glances, the whole nine yards.

He probably should have prepared Lucy better for the role she was playing. They hadn’t even gone over a cover story—where Lucy was from, where they’d met.

Oh, well, Lucy was smart enough to wing it. As long as she reported back to him any details she’d given Scarlet, so they could keep the story consistent, it would be okay.

As for that kiss, Lucy had looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights when he’d swooped in for the light smooch. But he was the one who’d been surprised. Her lips had been soft and warm, and her vulnerability had somehow transmitted itself straight from her soul to his, all in the half second of contact between their mouths.

It had been the merest brushing of lips, so innocent, yet it had shaken him to his shoes. No kiss had ever done that.

He’d mostly composed himself by the time he entered the restaurant kitchen, but the memory of the kiss remained in the back of his mind.

“Hey, boss, you’re back!” one of the sous-chefs greeted him.

“Monsieur Bryan!” called out another. “Hey, those Florentine eggrolls are going like hotcakes.”

The head chef, Kim Chin, who ran the kitchen like a marine bootcamp, looked up from his sauté pan and grunted a greeting. “’Bout time.”

All right, so he’d been neglecting his business lately. No one said it was easy working two jobs, and the Alliance Trust case had been occupying every waking hour these days. While Lucy had worked it from her end, Bryan had been tracking down the people receiving the embezzled funds, working with two French agents to prevent any of the illicit funds from reaching terrorists in Iraq while not tipping off the bad guys on the American side. Not until he had them all rounded up could he assemble the evidence needed to put them away for a good long time.

“Where’s Stash?” he asked Kim.

“Out schmoozing the beautiful people, of course, the worthless Frenchie.” Which was pretty funny, since Stash practically lived at the restaurant, keeping everything running, paying the bills, meeting payroll, handling all the hundreds of details that kept Une Nuit at the top of everyone’s list.

“Bryan, you’re back!” Stash greeted him with a hearty hug and a double air-kiss. Stash Martin was an energetic Frenchman in his thirties. With equal parts stubbornness and optimism, he was the perfect manager for an often absent owner. “What keeps you away for so long, eh?” he asked with a French accent. “The place could have been turned into a hot-dog stand while you were gone.”

Bryan had prepared a long, shaggy-dog story about his exploits in Europe. Instead he said, “I met someone.” He had to set up Lucy’s cover story, he reasoned. Lying came easily to him, given the number of years he’d worked undercover. But the scary thing was, he didn’t have to manufacture the edge in his voice when he talked about Lucy. What had started as a fairly routine job had turned into something exciting and challenging—and for all the wrong reasons.

Lucy stared at herself in the mirror, then stared some more. Scarlet hadn’t allowed her to watch the transformation, so her own image was a complete surprise. No, a shock. Her mother wouldn’t recognize her—which was the point, of course.

Her brown hair lay in piles on the floor. Scarlet had cut it to chin length, dyed it to a pale blond, then blow-dried it straight so that it fell in a shimmering fringe that bounced with her every move. Her eyebrows had been plucked and reshaped, and the artfully applied cosmetics had sculpted her face and redefined the shape of her mouth. She now had cheekbones.

Then there were the clothes. After sorting through the piles and piles of glamorous outfits, Scarlet had decided that Lucy needed a look, and had chosen an array of clingy knits in a palette of soft colors—mossy green, plum, cantaloupe, tawny gold. The outfit she wore now was a pair of green low-rider pants and a cropped tank top that clung to all her curves. A second shirt in a paler green, with a front zipper and short sleeves, went over the tank. Wedge-heeled sandals and bold jewelry completed the look.

The most amazing thing, though, was the fact that she had cleavage. Scarlet had found her a really clever push-up bra that made her A cups look like Cs.

Lucy kept putting her glasses on to look at herself from far away, then taking them off and peering at her face from close up. She just couldn’t believe it. She did look like someone who could be Bryan Elliott’s girlfriend. Someone who belonged in New York. When she’d lived here before, she’d never felt quite at home, never really shed her Kansas persona.

“This is just amazing,” she said for about the third time.

“The models you see in magazines don’t have anything we don’t have,” Scarlet said. “Hairstylists, makeup artists, good lighting and a skilled photographer can turn the plainest-looking woman into a knockout.”

Lucy was convinced. But she wasn’t sure the Lucy Miller on the inside matched the one on the outside. Beautiful women—like Scarlet—had an inner confidence, a way of moving and talking that Lucy lacked.

“What if I can’t carry it off?” she asked in a small voice.

“You’ll manage. Listen, I can’t imagine Bryan hooking up with a woman who isn’t really, really special. He saw something in you, something inside. Just remember that, and you’ll be fine.”

Oh, yeah. What Scarlet didn’t know was that Bryan didn’t pick her at all. She’d dropped into his lap, and now he was stuck with her.

“So are you close to Bryan?” Lucy asked, figuring this was a golden opportunity to find out more about her supposed boyfriend.

“All the Elliott cousins are close. Here, stand up on the bed and let me shorten those pants. You’re as slim as a model, but not quite as tall as one.”

“Do most of you work for the magazines?” Lucy asked, trying not to think about the fact she was standing on Bryan’s bed, trying not to think of him sleeping there. Or doing something else.

“We all work for Elliott Publication Holdings in one capacity or another. Except Bryan. He’s the only one to escape that fate.”

“Why is that, do you think?”

“Oh, he had other ideas from the time he was young. His heart problem kept him somewhat separated from the rest of us, I think. Until he had his operation, he couldn’t run and play with us, and we were an extremely active bunch. Turn.”

Lucy obediently turned, but her mind was reeling. Heart problem? Bryan?

“By the time they fixed his heart, his interest in food and cooking had already developed. Then he got into sports, bigtime—had to outdo his brother and all his cousins, as if he was making up for lost time. The magazines just didn’t hold any appeal for him, I guess. Oh, he studied finance in school with some vague notion of going to work for the company, but that didn’t last long. He wanted to do his own thing. He may have been the smartest one in the bunch.”