Kathleen Creighton: Undercover Mistress

“You what? ” His voice soared upward an octave. “Are you nuts? There’s no way you’re doing this. No way. Out of the question.”

Up ahead on his deck, she could see Doc standing, watching them. She lifted her arm and gave him a smile and a wave as she said sweetly, “Well…it’s a good thing it’s not up to you, isn’t it? It’s up to me-and Max, of course. And the director. Naturally. I’d have to go to Quantico for training. And it doesn’t look like I’ll be playing Nurse Suzanne any longer.

“You know…” she paused to give him a radiant smile, her heart quivering with delight and overwhelming love at the look on his face “…there really isn’t that much difference between acting and undercover work. That scene on the deck, when we dropped the bottle overboard-you were quite good, you know. I think maybe you’re a natural.”

Dazed, Roy could only stare at her. It never occurred to him in that moment that the woman smiling up at him was Celia Cross, TV star, Hollywood princess and one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen, or even that she’d saved his life once. The face he saw before him now and would forever after was the one imprinted on the part of him referred to, poetically if erroneously, as the heart. That part of him-his heart-didn’t register homely or beautiful, young or old. His heart knew only one thing: This was the face of the woman he loved more than life itself.

And if that’s true, the reasoning part of him asked, how can I even consider a life that doesn’t include her in it?

How that might work he didn’t quite know, but he couldn’t see the white picket fence working for either one of them.

“Did you know,” he said in a wondering tone, “that you’re an amazing woman?”

“Really?” She lifted her face to his. “I thought I was exasperatin’.”

“That, too,” he murmured as he kissed her.

Whatever a future with Celia might hold, he knew for sure it wasn’t ever going to be dull.

has roots deep in the California soil but has relocated to South Carolina. As a child, she enjoyed listening to old-timers’ tales, and her fascination with the past only deepened as she grew older. Today, she says she is interested in everything-art, music, gardening, zoology, anthropology and history, but people are at the top of her list. She also has a lifelong passion for writing, and now combines her two loves in romance novels.