An Elusive Mistress

An Elusive Mistress is a 1986 Mills & Boon romance by Lindsay Armstrong, issued as a 187-page paperback and also printed in a large-print edition.

Hillary was nineteen when her first marriage ended, a girl married to a man who was already established in his work and a long way ahead of her in experience. Clive Eastman left, and she spent the following years constructing a life that did not depend on him, qualifying as an interior designer and becoming the best known in Brisbane, then reaching the point of considering a new partner.

His return undoes the distance she has organised, and one encounter is enough to show her that the old feeling was never really dealt with. The novel stays inside that discovery rather than ranging far from it, which is what the category form is for. It is a second-chance romance in which the first chance failed on grounds of age and confidence rather than betrayal, and the interest is in whether the second attempt can be made on different terms. Recovery and freedom are not the same thing here, and the book tests whether Hillary can tell them apart now that the man who caused the first wound is back inside her ordinary weekdays.