No Second Parting by Lilian Peake (HP 316)

Reviewed by ellysoar on April 22nd, 2009, 11:28pm

No Second Parting

Eight years ago Marianne Conway and Logan Tate were engaged for a matter of weeks before she flung his ring back in his face when he accused her of just wanting to brag to her friends about being engaged (v. strange as she was actually keeping secret) and because she had been told by his brother Moss that he considered her babyish. Now he's back and proposing that she marry him for the sake of his daughter, indicating they would live separate lives, to the extent of having adjoining but separate cottages! Marianne turns him down but can't refuse his daughter Jilly when they meet. It's to be a marriage of companionship and parenting only and once Marianne starts to hear the rumors about her husband's beautiful colleague Carol, Logan's warning that they don't necessarily need to be faithful start to all make sense. Marianne is starting to fall again for Logan - or did she never stop? - but there's no way she can compete with his dead wife and this new girl, can she?

SPOILERS: Lonely with her husband working all the time on their "honeymoon", Marianne naively befriends Quentin the widowed antiques dealer who tries to help the marriage by making Logan jealous. Things come to a head when Logan takes Carol to a dance instead of Marianne, and taking Carol home for a nightcap when Quentin tries to make him jealous. Convinced he has for sure cheated on her now, and not sure that she can stand it now that she's for sure in love with him, Marianne leaves him but has to take Jilly, who's petrified of losing this mommy as she lost her first one, with her. Logan chases after her after he realizes Quentin is a Samaritan and would never cuckold another man (note that he does not realize Marianne would never cheat on him, having still been a virgin when they married, etc.). He confesses Jilly is not his - he was trapped into marrying her mother thinking she was pg with his kid, and had previously intended to come back for Marianne before that - in face Jilly reminding him of a young Marianne is how he made it through. It was in fact this marriage to the cheating late wife that tainted Logan's mind so that he could not appreciate Marianne is not the promiscuous type.

I went into this book expecting not to like it (I haven't been able to appreciate the other Lilian Peake books I've read before), but this one wasn't bad. It was dated, but I think it helped that it had a few plot lines I liked (hero mistakenly thinking heroine is a promiscuous slut, but wanting her anyway, maybe - yeah I'm not sure why I like that one either - and the orphaned child the hero is claiming as his own). I'm not sure why the hero has to taunt the heroine about the possibility of his being unfaithful to her, but that seems to be the standard trope in these old skool HPs so what can you do. I also think it read like the author might've been setting up a subplot whereby the hero/heroine were separated by the manipulations of his brother, but this thread was never finished, so I might be mistaken. I might've kept this book to reread it once or twice but the copy I got used has actually got mold on it so I'm putting it out of its misery.