4 Stars! ~~~ This is a story of star-crossed lovers who both have to overcome the traumas of their youth.
Passionate Betrayal by Jacqueline Baird
Harlequin Presents #1431 – February 1992
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She’d been a naïve seventeen year old, named Goldie Brown when she fell in love with Rayner Millard whose father allowed the hippie trailers to stay on his farm. Her parents had camped on the farm, so close to Stonehenge, each summer. That year the peace movement had drawn more attention and a definite police presence. And on the eve of the summer’s solstice, she gave all her love to him and it ended in her humiliation and his arrest. She’d never known what had happened after that night as her mother had whisked her off to France. Shortly after her mother introduced her to her French family, her parents had died in a landslide in Turkey. And now, the passionate girl who had been Goldie has become the shy and reclusive Marie Doumerque. It’s seven years later, and the last person she expects her grandfather to bring to their Chateau is Rayner. But it’s him, and though he keeps the secret of their past, he pursues her relentlessly. Believing that he loves her, Marie is ecstatic when he proposes marriage, but on their wedding night after passionate lovemaking, she learns that he has married her for justice. Rayner brutally tells her what had happened upon his arrest; he’d been charged with rape and had spent three months in prison before he was finally released. The stigma of the charge had stuck to his family name and he’d had to leave the family farm. When Marie insists that she cannot stay married to him, Rayner threatens to tell her ailing grandfather all the details of her past, and even exaggerate for good measure. And Rayner also insists she will be his wife in all ways, proving to her that her body wants him. So begins a bitter and loveless marriage.
The Marie at the beginning of the book is almost the same naïve seventeen year old who had given Rayner her virginity. She may have aged but she had kept herself repressed and reclusive. Slowly every innocent illusion she had held is striped from her and she is bitterly introduced to her new “reality”. She comes out strong but without the innocence that Rayner had always held dear. Rayner is a man in his own torment, and though he is absolutely brutal sometimes in his treatment of Marie, he has regret and attempts to make their marriage work. There is love in Rayner but he’d buried it when he had thought Marie had died with her parents. With all the mistakes and guilt over the past, neither seems to know how to move forward. There are several black moments in this book, as Marie wakes up to reality, but the final black moment is written with an emotional intensity that will pull at your heart. Rayner lives a personal hell as he realizes that he’d forever destroyed the innocent woman who had loved him with all of herself. Though this book is written from Marie’s point of view, I’m glad Ms. Baird kept showing us hints of Rayner’s own vulnerabilities. If a reader misses those glimpses, they may find Rayner a brute and not very likeable. This is a story of star-crossed lovers who both have to overcome the traumas of their youth.
Excellence: Very Good ~ Steaminess: Yummy
My Totals = 55 ~ Harlequin Imprint = 55 ~ Other Publisher = 0
~~ KatherineT ~~ I'm a Harlequin Addict, and I'm proud of it!
~~ Quiet Canadians ~ 2008 Book Challenge Blog
