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shoot-’em-ups? I would have rather been the King of the Thriller. That was my dream. Then Tess shoved her way into my life, and instead, I’m the Queen of Romance. How the hell did that happen?
    And another thing, this Kay Lake, will I begin to think of her as Tess Delaney? Will she convince me that the figment of my imagination who splintered and became my other half lives and breathes manifest in her body? Jesus, that’s too strange to even think about. More likely she’ll always be an actress to me. Well, I’m hoping after the award ceremony I can retire Tess back to her reclusive life and swear Ms. Lake to secrecy on the life of her first born.
    But it’ll never be the same again, will it? Someone else will know my secret, Tess’s secret, and the way I picture Tess Delaney in my head will forever be tainted by Kay Lake’s version of Tess.
    He laid the pen aside and closed down his computer. Tonight was the night he’d be watching Amy dance the Sleeping Beauty if he’d made the trip to New York. It was over between them. He knew that. He’d known it when he’d gone back to her the last time. He didn’t deal well with endings, and now it felt like he was losing Tess too. He opened the French doors and moved onto the balcony. ‘She doesn’t exist,’ he said out loud. ‘She never has.’ Someone a little less neurotic than he was would have let it go a long time ago. But sometimes it was easier being Tess Delaney than it was being Garrett Thorne.
    He turned and went back into the house, closing the doors behind him. Tess Delaney. He had never assigned her a real physicality. In his mind’s eye, she’d never looked like Amy or any of his other lovers. Strange that he had always been happy with her being physically undefined, but then she wrote the stories, she wasn’t in the stories. Her boundaries were far more permeable than those of the heroines she created or those of the women he’d loved.
    Kendra had spent the better part of the morning trying to find any last-minute information she could about Tess Delaney. There were rumors all right, lots of rumors. They seemed to surface and rise every time Tess released a novel, then fade into the background until there was another new release. But beyond the rumors, it seemed no one really knew anything about Tess Delaney. That made it all the more exciting for her to be the first to have contact with the elusive woman. Oh, she was sure there would be strict protocol, non-disclosure and who knew what other measures set in place to protect the woman’s identity, but that didn’t matter. She wasn’t interested in sharing her experience of Tess Delaney with anyone. That would ruin it, actually. She just wanted to meet the woman, see what she was really like.
    Though she could find nothing of any real value about Tess Delaney. She was pretty sure her knowledge of the woman’s novels would be invaluable. She’d read once that all novels, in some way, were about their authors. She wondered if that meant Tess had lots of passionate lovers or only wished she did. She wondered if that meant Tess was a woman totally out of touch with reality, or if it meant that, just like Kendra, Tess wrote the life she didn’t really believe in, but she loved to fantasize about. Kendra had never fantasized about romance – ever. At least, not until she picked up her first Tess Delaney novel. She was never really sure if she should praise the woman for that or curse her. The jury was still out. One thing was for certain, the woman and her romantic notions had played havoc with Kendra’s sex life. She’d read every novel Tess had ever written, and most of them more than once. She had them all on Kindle as well as in pristine hardback copies on her shelf at home. A few she even had in tattered, dog-eared paperback as well. She had played some of the most powerful passages over and over in her head, her heart racing with an ache she didn’t want, and yet didn’t want to be