“Ah, God. Celia.” He kissed her tear-drenched mouth, then clasped her tightly to him. “Love…my love…it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t. I have no choice. You know that.”

Suddenly, there in the warm protective circle of his arms, she felt a great stillness come over her. A kind of peace. And she nodded and whispered brokenly, “I know.”

They were standing like that, holding each other, when it occurred to both of them at about the same moment that the thumping sound they were hearing wasn’t heartbeats. Drawing apart and lifting their eyes heavenward, they watched the Apache helicopters swoop in out of the darkness. Only when the dark shapes began dropping into the water and swarming up over the sides of the yacht Bibi Lilith did Roy finally pull Celia to the deck and cover her body with his.

Early in the evening of the first day of the new year, Celia went for a walk on the beach. She was alone; Roy had stayed behind with Max, the first of what would undoubtedly be many briefings. She’d turned back toward home, because the sun had slipped behind an angry-looking bank of clouds and a wind had sprung up, carrying the promise of storms. And she looked ahead and there he was, coming toward her along the water’s edge.

She checked, her heart lifting frighteningly under her ribs. As she went to meet him she felt it thumping madly in her chest and her belly quivering with nervous anticipation, like the worst case of stagefright she’d ever known. She’d said so much, there on the boat when she’d thought she would lose him forever. And he’d said so little. There’d been no time, before all hell had broken loose, or since then, either.

Wordlessly now, he took her hand, turned, and they walked on together.

“Did Max leave?” she asked, her voice showing no signs of the turmoil inside.

He nodded. “Lotta loose ends to tie up, but he wanted us out of the way when it all hits the media. They’ll find us anyway, I’m sure. You, anyway. You don’t mind, do you?”

She shook her head. Watching her bare feet in the sand, she said, “What about Abby?”

“He’s claiming he didn’t know anything. His crew’s been…detained-they’ll be sent to Gitmo for interrogation. The yacht’s been impounded-CSI’s going over it with a fine-tooth comb as we speak. The public’s not being told what the nature of the threat was. Which is probably for the best.”

“So,” Celia said after drawing a careful breath and lifting her face to the wind, “I guess we done good, huh?”

She heard his exhalation…a soft chuckle. “Yeah, we did.”

“We made a pretty good team, didn’t we?” She felt him look over at her. Oh please, she thought. Please don’t make me beg for this. But he didn’t say anything, so she went on. “Our cover didn’t even get blown.” She paused, but he still didn’t say anything. “Just think what we could accomplish if we-”

That did it. “Don’t even think about it,” he growled. “I mean it. There’s no way in hell I’m doing this again.”

Fear and hope were warring furiously inside her, but somehow she managed to keep her voice light. “But why? When we work so well together.”

“I can’t, that’s all. It’s just too damn hard, workin’ with someone I-”

“Someone you…” she paused and turned, forcing him to stop, too, as she squeezed his hand, gathered all her courage and said it for him: “Love?”

He gripped hers tightly while he glared at her. Then he shifted that fierce gaze to the horizon, drew a ragged breath and on its exhalation said, “Yeah. That.”

She went light-headed with happiness; her knees all but buckled. “Well,” Celia said, after a long, sweet moment, “I already talked to Max about it. He thinks it’s a great idea. He’s going to run it by the director.”

“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.

KATHLEEN CREIGHTON

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.