No one but Jake knew Sasha's secret pain. — Sasha never dreamed she would meet Jake Redway again. It would mean having to relive that terrible day three years ago when Phillip had died. — She had managed to put her life back together again slowly, hardly realizing that a strong, mature woman had emerged in place of the young frightened girl Sasha had once been.
But suddenly, Jake was back in her life, the man she held responsible, however indirectly, for Philip's tragic death. He seemed determined to dredge up memories -- and feelings -- better kept hidden!
Sheila Ann Mary Coates was born on 1937 in Essex, England, just before the Second World War in the East End of London. As a child, she was moved from relative to relative to escape the bombings of World War II. Sheila attended the Ursuline Convent for Girls. On leaving school at 16, the convent-educated author worked for the Bank of England as a clerk. Sheila continued her education by taking advantage of the B of E's enormous library during her lunch breaks and after work. She later worked as a secretary for the BBC. While there, she met and married Richard Holland, a political reporter. A voracious reader of romance novels, she began writing at her husband's suggestion. She wrote her first book in three days with three children underfoot! In between raising her five children (including a set of twins), Charlotte wrote several more novels. She used both her married and maiden names, Sheila Holland and Sheila Coates, before her first novel as Charlotte Lamb, Follow a Stranger, was published by Mills & Boon in 1973. She also used the pennames: Sheila Lancaster, Victoria Wolf and Laura Hardy. Sheila was a true revolutionary in the field of romance writing. One of the first writers to explore the boundaries of sexual desire, her novels often reflected the forefront of the "sexual revolution" of the 1970s. Her books touched on then-taboo subjects such as child abuse and rape, and she created sexually confident - even dominant - heroines. She was also one of the first to create a modern romantic heroine: independent, imperfect, and perfectly capable of initiating a sexual or romantic relationship. A prolific author, Sheila penned more than 160 novels, most of them for Mills & Boon. Known for her swiftness as well as for her skill in writing, Sheila typically wrote a minimum of two thousand words per day, working from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. While she once finished a full-length novel in four days, she herself pegged her average speed at two weeks to complete a full novel. Since 1977, Sheila had been living on the Isle of Man as a tax exile with her husband and four of their five children: Michael Holland, Sarah Holland, Jane Holland, Charlotte Holland and David Holland. Sheila passed away on October 8, 2000 in her baronial-style home 'Crogga' on the Island. She is greatly missed by her many fans, and by the romance writing community.
This is another Charlotte Lamb HP that I struggled with in terms of rating. I mean, her writing is superb and if I were to rate this solely on the basis of the strength of her portrayal of a completely neurotic woman with more thorns than a cactus, then I could easily five star this. But since I usually go with my emotional response to the romantic aspect of an HP, then I would say this is really not the kind of characters and story that left me with a good feeling. In fact, I was very happy to leave the hero and heroine, as well as the secondary characters, behind me. Hence, my 2 star rating.
The heroine is the picture of the neurotic actress. Being inside her mind, with its irrational and paranoid ramblings, was both hilarious and horrifying. Her mood swings are simply astounding as she goes from a sweet and flirty ingenue to a snarling beast with delusions of grandeur.
Granted, she has a Great, Big, Traumatic Past to justify it a bit but the author also suggests that this "artistic temperament" was always there from birth. And yes, her suspicions about people's underlying motives and phoniness are not totally imagined. There is a lot of suspicious tension for example between the hero and another, married woman who is supposed to be just a platonic friend, and the heroine picks up on it. But still, she really comes off as loony when she sees 10 layers of schemes and plots behind every innocent gesture.
If the OW offers her a job babysitting her daughter, it is because she wants to facilitate an illicit relationship with the hero behind her husband's back, using the heroine as a scapegoat. Never mind that the OW already has a housekeeper she could have dumped her daughter on if that is what she really intended to do.
If the hero calls her up to take her out on a date, it is because he wants to use that excuse to come half an hour earlier and linger at the house with the OW. Never mind he could meet her in private in town any time and any place since the OW's husband is always busy at work and the heroine and OW's housekeeper can hold down the fort at home while the OW can arrange her alleged trysts.
If her employer, the OW, looks at her candidly and speaks to her in a friendly manner and without guile, it is because she is an actress herself, and trained to lie.
Suspicious, much?
But wait, when she "catches" the OW and the hero in conversation, in broad daylight, at her home, where hero is actually waiting to take the heroine on a date, she imagines something in the posture of their bodies [betraying] to her an involuntary drift towards each other, consciously restrained. They were not touching because they dared not, she thought...She saw only two nameless lovers, trapped in pain. She felt she had seen this before, she was looking into the past or the future; this moment was not real, it was projected from elsewhere.
CALL 911, please!!!!
When I read passages like this:
She found herself watching Caroline [the OW] all the time, speculating about her feelings behind that light smile, hurriedly smiling back if their eyes met, and angrily recognised that they were in competition, each vying to show how rosy the world looked to them.
I wanted to reach into the pages, shake the OW, and beg her to call the police! This should NOT be the woman you allow into your house to watch over your child. *shudder*
I am pretty sure that this is one of those CL couples who are going to end up in a murder/suicide down the line :-(((
Naksed wrote a great review, with gifs, so make sure you read that one, too.
This is the sequel to Dark Dominion. The OM, our hero, is still hanging on the periphery of the DD family. In fact, when the actress heroine meets the hero, he is escorting the heroine of DD to the play she is in. They stop by the dressing room to see another actress and the heroine is swept into their domestic drama.
Seems the DD mom needs a helper for her baby who is now two. Now that the play is over, the heroine is out of work and the time spent in the country, eating their food (melon and ham alert!) will help her with the rent. The heroine has great antipathy to the hero and we don’t find out why for awhile.
Seems he rescued her from drowning four years before but he couldn’t save her husband. They had been on their honeymoon and they only had a few days together before he died. The heroine has frozen herself off from the world and she is angry the hero is there to remind her of the pain.
If we compare/contrast this heroine with the hero of DD, we see they have the same reluctance to talk about their feelings and that they live in their own heads. It’s true the heroine images all kinds of things about DD mom and the hero. (It’s jealousy – same as DD hero.) The DD hero doesn’t help matters because he is just as rude and tense about the SI hero as he was back in DD.
The hero in this story, as in DD, still seems like a shallow puddle compared to all the other characters in this universe. He is glib, is known for his Donald Duck impressions and how many ladies he’s bedded. (Reviewer’s note – I’m sorry but the Donald Duck impression is not endearing – it’s so junior high boy that I can’t even.) But – he is persistent. He keeps after the heroine – even when she questions his motives and morals. She leads him on a merry dance until the last page – when they agree to go to bed together, making this a HFN rather than a HEA.
I was happy with the consistency of the characters in both of these stories. The heroine of DD is still fragile and sucks up all the attention in the room in her beautiful, neurotic way. The hero of DD is still a cold fish to everyone but his daughter and his wife. The hero of SI is still Mr. Charm who isn’t all that introspective. While this heroine is a tad neurotic, I’m glad the love triangle is finally squared off. These people shouldn't be running around on their own.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Hmm not my favorite CL - if I’d bothered to have read the blurb before I started, I likely would have never opened it. Are they in love?? Meh? 🤷🏼♀️
It did make me want to go back and reread Dark Dominion though. I was more intrigued by the OW and her hot broody husband… why is this man allowing the H to monopolize the OW? It was odd.
I smiled at this one quite a bit, it was certainly funny and heart warming in other places. I loved how the heroine goaded the hero every chance she got. The needling made the hero more attractive in my mind.
Interestingly, I recognized the H, actor/heart throb, Jake and the other couple, James and Caro as I'd read the J&C romance already. Can't remember the title. James was (and is in this one) the excessively stern and obsessive lawyer who is very possessive of his wife Caro who gave up acting (rather reluctantly, understandably) for domesticity. Jake was the OM in their story and there was still a lot of unresolved tension there which is maybe why I wasn't overly convinced by Jake and Sasha's romance. It was well written but just lacking something. Jake had saved Sasha from drowning 3 years earlier, in an accident which killed her husband. She irrationally blamed Jake for not saving him. She is now a stage actor herself and they mostly bicker throughout while he "unfreezes" her from her complicated grief. An ok read.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
This is a linked book to one of my all time favourite keepers with a jealous, aggressive hero most people would write off as a jerk. The 'other man' in Dark Dominion is Jake Redway, an actor who is bigger than Robert Redford back in the day. This is his story.
Sasha is a young actress who is just starting out, her career the only consolation for losing her husband tragically on their honeymoon when she was only twenty, three or four years ago.
Jake is the man who rescued her from drowning, leaving Philip to die and she's resented the stranger ever since. So meeting Jake and realising who he is brought back a whole lot of unwelcome memories.
Combine this with the fact that Jake is a bit of a player and her suspicions about his relationship with Caro from Dark Dominion and you have the makings of some passionate conflict.
This is a nice complement to the original book and we see quite a lot of Caro and James and their child. The ending was well done.
The hero saved the heroine from drowning but her husband drowned.
She therefore doesn’t like him. She’s an actress on stage and he’s a Hollywood star. Somehow I never like the books with film stars as main characters.
There is a whole side plot with the hero terribly in love or something like love with a retired actress.
The heroine takes a job as nanny to the OW’s baby girl.
Like all of CL’s books, in this one too, one or both characters is fixated on someone else till almost the end. That spoils the whole meaning of reading a romance.
There is that eponymous scene which had to be there in all mills and boons of the 70s. She dons a bikini and goes to sunbathe in the garden and the hero comes and applies sun tan lotion.
I found the hero’s fascination and tenderness and also his intrusion into the OW’s house irritating. The other woman seemed a creepy self indulgent bitch. She keeps him dangling and makes her husband uncomfortable. Her husband goes to work while she goes on picnics or sleeps or has anemia. Everyone treats her as if she’s fragile.
Couldn’t make out why?
The heroines love for her lost husband was understandable.
The sparks and attraction between hero and heroine never happened. Did they actually fall in love. When? How? Their feelings were too lukewarm to me.
Might have been a nice touch to know he fell in love when he saved her. But no. It’s too realistic. He decides he likes her when she’s nasty at their second meeting. Likes.
In the end he tells her he THINKS he may be in love with her.
He doesn’t make promises. He says he doesn’t know what lies in the future. They both walk towards the bedroom.
Too realistic for my taste.
I didn’t connect with either the hero or heroine. Not my kind of people.
They were human. But not likeable or special. Hero in fact for some reason was dislikeable to me.
It didn’t catch my interest intensely.
Readable of course.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
On the one hand, Charlotte Lamb excels at characterization, and in this one, especially, the heroine Sasha feels very real. On the other hand... not a lot really happens. Sasha was traumatized by her husband's death several years ago and hasn't really processed it; she ends up working as a part-time nanny for a close friend of Jake, the hero, in between auditioning for theater roles; there are a lot of delicately-sketched, realistic and realistically ambiguous side characters; not a lot really happens. When the heat comes, it's at the very (very!) end of the book and it's accompanied by a lot of therapy-speak revelations that were popular in the eighties but are just kind of meh now. I prefer Charlotte Lamb when her books go totally batshit; this is a more restrained and therefore duller Charlotte Lamb.
Charlotte Lamb’s H’s are the best. Arrogant, handsome, succesful, determined, jealous, passionate alpha males who know what they want and who they want. These men are hunters and the women they love, don’t have to doubt if they are the prey.
Charlotte Lamb for me is in the highest category of HP writers. Harlequin should make a statue of her at their head office. Many of her HP’s belong to my all-time favourites.
Anyway, this H is smitten. He wants to be where she is. He can’t stay away from her. She has a trauma from the past and she is pretty feisty, but he keeps coming back.
On a side note: Charlotte Lamb is such an excellent writer that she doesn’t need to hang on to the same kind of story line, the same looking heroine (like Sara Craven who always has a blonde h), she doesn’t need to use a whole lot of sex in the story to describe the sexual tension and the desire between a man and a woman.
Charlotte Lamb’s h’s don’t get oopsie-pregnant, like almost every HP h nowadays. Charlotte Lamb isn’t obsessed with (unplanned) pregnancies and with children like, for instance, Lynne Graham is.
In the end of the book, at the HEA, he tells her again and again that he loves her. And he almost begs her to love him. That made my heart melt.
No one but Jake knew Sasha's secret pain. — Sasha never dreamed she would meet Jake Redway again. It would mean having to relive that terrible day three years ago when Phillip had died. — She had managed to put her life back together again slowly, hardly realizing that a strong, mature woman had emerged in place of the young frightened girl Sasha had once been.
But suddenly, Jake was back in her life, the man she held responsible, however indirectly, for Philip's tragic death. He seemed determined to dredge up memories -- and feelings -- better kept hidden! (less)
Sasha and Jake have a past. Not as lovers but something darker. She remembers him but wonders if he does her. They become reacquainted when he meets up with friends at a stage show. She becomes embroiled in his and friends lives when she is employed by one to be a companion/nanny to a woman who needs help. They have a volatile relationship that turns into much more. But can their past be to much to overcome the love they are now feeling?
كانت صدمة بريسيلا كبيرة عندما التقت بجاك ريدواي مرة اخرى, عادت الى ذاكرتها صور الماضي المؤلمة, لماذا المصير يضع في طريقها الرجل الذي تريد ان تحميه من حياتها ؟ فيليب يغرق و بريسيلا تصرخ باسمه دون وعي وبعد قليل , لاشيء .... لقد انقذ جاك ريدواي حياتها , ولكن مانفع الحياة عندما نخسر كل شيء ؟ وكيف تشرح ذلك الى منقذها؟ فهو لا يعير اي اهمية للمشاعر !!!
Olgunlaşmamış kişiliği oturmamış bir kadın..Karizmatik bir aktör..Adam bu kızın hayatını kurtarıyor ama suçlu oluyor..Sinir oldum gevşemek için okuyayım dedim daha çok sinirlendim.....