Winter Sunlight by Susan Alexander (HP 1031)

Sophie Carter is a 26 year old nanny living in London, perfectly content with her difficult lifestyle moving from family to family caring for other people's children who she can never let herself get too close to lest the parents' jealousy be arroused.  She's still a virgin and somewhat reticent socially, perhaps as a result of the unequal love her parent's bestowed on her sister (but never Sophie) - which she later learned was because she was adopted when they couldn't get pregnant.  Anyway, Sophie is due for a vacation, but her agency asks her to take a short term position with a family in Austria while their regular nanny recovers from an injury.  Sophie allows herself to be pushed into accepting and she's off to the famous skiing resort town, Kitzbühel.  Fortunately she knows some German (and French) and loves skiing. 

The job should be easy - she's to accompany two kids to their ski lessons, etc., but things get complicated when their uncle, the Baron Maximilian von Hartog shows up and falls in love at first sight with her. Sophie carefully avoids all social involvement with her employers but Max tempts her to break her rules. And when he rescues her from almost certain death buried beneath the snow of an avalanche on the snow hill, forcing them to spend the night together in a remote cabin, she knows she wants him back. But she cannot accept Max's offer of marriage!

First, a disclaimer: from time to time I feel that, living in a French speaking place as I do, I should practice my French skills a bit – and to that effect I read a French translation of this book “Un Soleil dans la neige”. So I can't be entirely sure whether things would've been different in English – plus my French isn't great and I know for a fact it took me at least double the normal amount of time to read this because of that. But anyway, I found the book ok. The French was fun and the book was a pretty standard old skool Presents plot, so no worries there. Some things were very well done – like how the author slips in a trip for our heroine to visit her sister at the beginning of the book so she could work in a description of the hardships of being a nanny unobtrusively (the sister is threatening to leave her husband and kids and thinks it would be glamourous to be a nanny – ha!); other things were significantly less clear to me.

For instance (and all the rest here could be considered spoilers) Sophie refuses to marry Max because she thinks she was born illegitimately and because she can't have kids. Now, she refuses to tell Max this, despite advocating to another character the importance of dialogue in a relationship, etc., and further she refuses to tell anyone why she can't have kids (like is it medically impossible – we don't know). So I was having fun coming up with all sorts of reasons for her (like, what if she was born a boy or a hermaphrodite and is ashamed of that – that would explain why she doesn't want to tell!) but her real is that...get this...she doesn't know! The nuns at the orphanage where she was born just told her that her mom said she was never to have kids (her mom died in childbirth). So of course what does Max do when he finds this out? He flies to England and tracks down the nuns, the priest, you name it, only to conclude that her mom never said this and a nun just told her that to scare her into not having a teen pregnancy! Seriously? Lamest reason ever. But the rest of the book was fun and my French vocabulary expanded so it was worth the read.