Only he could unlock her secrets… 

Can desire and obligation …

No one would expect that modest minister’s daughter Joan Brown has a secret identity. But to her many fans, Joan is the author of a popular erotic romance series. And to fellow writer Ronald Montgomery, whom Joan met at an author panel, she is every bit the seductive diva. While their passion ignites instantaneously, Joan has another life to return to. 
 

Come between love and passion?

Ron Montgomery has been burned one too many times by love and can’t help but harbor a grudge…until he meets sensual Joan Brown. And while he longs for her touch, he’s not sure he can trust someone who is living a lie. When inhibitions become too much to bear, Ron and Joan find themselves locked in a romance that neither wants to ever escape.

Joan was enjoying her Cleopatra persona, perhaps too much. Under the suffocating watch of her minister father, she’d never flirted so outrageously. Even though she was twenty-six years old, a business owner and living on her own, her father’s approval was still important to her.

But her home in Columbus, Ohio, was almost twenty-three hundred miles from this Los Angeles writers conference. It was the perfect opportunity to let her hair down. And the ever-so delicious Ronald Montgomery seemed to be the perfect man with whom to lose her inhibitions.

Ronald had stopped coughing. His reaction would have intimidated Joan. Wait. Who was she fooling? Joan wouldn’t even be in this bar. She’d be hiding somewhere with her sketchbook or laptop.

But for this night – the last night of the conference - she wasn’t Joan. She was Cleo, and Cleo wanted to play. “What’s your position on that statement?”

Ronald cleared his throat. “It depends on the consenting adults. Are either in a relationship with someone else?”

Very clever. He was good at this game. “No.”

“That’s good to know.”

She laughed. “Go ahead and ask me.”

“What?”

Joan ran an index finger lightly over the hand Ronald used to grip his empty beer mug. The lure of his warm skin made her want to touch even more of him. His wrist. His forearm. His do-me-baby chest. “Ask me if I’ve ever tried the positions I’ve described in my books? That’s what everyone wants to know.”

“I haven’t read them.”

“I won’t hold that against you later.”

Ronald’s eyes flared. “That’s very generous of you.” His voice had deepened.

Her ability to get a reaction from this man amazed her. Joan had felt an instant attraction when the moderator had introduced them. She’d shaken Ronald’s hand, and she hadn’t wanted to let it go.

Even as he’d angered her during the panel, she’d been aware of him. He was sex in a navy-blue, double-breasted suit. The intelligence in his coal black eyes, the clean lines of his chiseled features, the width of his shoulders and the length of his hands had appealed to her. A man like him – successful, worldly and hot as hell – would never notice Joan. But he’d bought Cleopatra a drink.