cruise ship

Welcome to “Six Sentence Sunday”. I’m back from my break for NaNoWriMo with another fresh six. Thank you for visiting and especially for any comments you might feel inclined to offer.

Today’s six comes from my still in process NaNo cruise ship romance, title to be determined, but if you read my blog you know I’ve been calling it “Cruise Ship Mistress”. That won’t be the title because the book has not sailed that route at all.

In this six, our hero, Paul is in hot pursuit of Lydia. She thinks she’s his boss. He knows he’s hers. They are secret shoppers who can’t seem to agree on what their cover story is but the cement is hardening on them posing as newlyweds.

Pacific Princess, aka “The Love Boat” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

She gazed up at him with those conflicted eyes of hers, almost an Irish green in hue. “Because it’s not professional, and we’re here to do a job not hook up!” The last few words she spat out from between clenched teeth, her tone dropped to an intimate level.

“This is so ironic, you know. Everyone on this ship already thinks we’re hooking up, but we can’t because you don’t want to look unprofessional. Did you forget the part that looking overly professional runs counter to being a good secret shopper.”

He does have a point, albeit a lame one, but so does she. Tsk, tsk…oh what a tangled web we weave.

Be sure to check out the host site, Six Sentence Sunday, for links to more tantalizing snippets from some very talented writers.

A little more from my cruise ship romance that is now at over 47k. I’ve already won 2012 NaNoWriMo but I have a secondary goal of achieving a minimum word count of 50k on this work alone. That may sound weird but I had three projects for NaNo this year, the first two were the completions of two manuscripts already in process. Amazing that I do have the need to finish most of my projects. My mother would be shocked.The better news is I’ve already edited AND contracted one of those other projects, so my strategy was a worthy one.

But back to the big kahuna project about a woman and the man who claims to be her new hire trainee, but is actually her boss’s boss’s boss’s boss and maybe a few more boss levels. Unbeknownst to Lydia, Paul’s onboard to investigate why his cruise ship is sinking fast, financially speaking, and what better way than to do a little “Undercover Boss” work than as a secret shopper.

In this scene our heroine, Lydia, senses Paul is not who he claims to be, sadly because she can’t believe he’s pursuing her as vigorously as he has been without some sort of ulterior motive. That’s enough to taint her entire perception of him. Remember, all first draft material, so be kind.

A gambler she knew him to be. Was that why he was on board? Maybe he was a con artist? She didn’t have any money so she couldn’t be his mark, but perhaps he’d been spending more time in the casino than he let on. The other passengers might be his targets. But why go to the bother of hiding behind a day job?

And what about his name? John-Paul Thomas. Could it be any harder to research? He could have used any combination or any order and they would all be difficult to narrow down to a single person. He said he’d gone to UCLA. Sure, only one of the largest public schools in the country. She’d already done a check for him on Facebook before they’d set sail only to find over three hundred Paul Thomas’s, over five hundred John Thomas’s, and about one hundred and fifty John-Paul Thomas’s. A healthy percentage of all those counts included profiles without pictures or set to private. All three names were about as generic as an American male could get.

Only Paul wasn’t generic in person. Not the least bit, not with the way he could with a single look, make her heart race. He wasn’t generic in the way his smile could unleash a maelstrom in her belly, nor was that a generic facility with words that made her pant with desire so potent she’d nearly been willing to bury her career at sea.