Hell is My Heaven is excellent. Hero Jerome, who wants to be The Boss, has blackmailed heroine Kate into marriage expecting a “loving and obedient wife”. Hah. Just how loving would you be if someone forces you to marry them by a) threatening to take custody of your nephew and prevent you from seeing him and b) threatening to send copies of girlie calendar pictures to all the schools in England to prevent you from working? Loving? Heck no. Obedient? No way. The rest of the story shows Kate gradually falling in love with Jerome while he works to overcome her suspicions, distrust and detestment.
Plot Synopsis – Click to Skip Spoilers
The backstory here is important and told at the beginning based on what Kate thought was true, then adjusted to what really happened. Kate was happily teaching school when her younger stepsister Shirley showed up pregnant and tearful. Shirley was hiding from her husband Theo and his nasty mother and older brother and she claimed Theo and his family treated her horribly. Kate took her in, and supported her through pregnancy and childbirth at first by teaching, but when Shirley’s baby arrives the teaching salary wasn’t enough. (Especially given Shirley’s expensive tastes.)
Kate is lovely, tall, slim, red haired, and had earlier turned down offers to try her hand at modeling. Now, with the baby and Shirley needing ever more income, Kate reluctantly quit teaching and became a very successful model under the name Noel Lowe. Unfortunately her first foray into modeling was to pose in risque outfits for a girlie calendar. She was never nude but the photos were suggestive and Kate hated them. Shirley went back to Theo after a while. Kate doesn’t ever meet Theo or his family, and it later comes out that Shirley never mentioned Kate to them. She pretended she took care of herself while away from Theo.
Shirley never fooled older brother Jerome and he had her investigated. It took quite a while but he discovered Shirley had an older stepsister who taught school. He couldn’t understand why Shirley never talked about Kate but he figured Kate had been responsible for Shirley and baby Phillip.
Shirley last visited Kate just before the book begins. She and Theo were going on a second honeymoon and would Kate take care of 2-year old Phillip? Shirley and Theo died in a crash.
The book opens with Kate at her friend Helen’s house talking about how Kate will have no chance if Jerome and his mother want custody; not only must Kate work, but she has been (gasp!) a model while Theo’s family is rich, ruthless and upper crust. Kate tells Helen that she must hide herself and Phillip and she intends to stop modeling and go back to teaching. Helen is an artist and realistic. She warns Kate that she is gorgeous and model-trained and that it will be impossible to hide from Theo’s family. She offers to rent Kate her remote cottage, the one with no running water, electricity or central heat.
After four cold months in a drafty cottage Kate is bathing Phillip. Jerome walks in, coolly tells Kate he wants the boy, that he would win any custody suit, that he has the girlie negatives and will ruin Kate with every education authority in the country if she does not go along. But that’s OK because Kate can come too. As Jerome’s wife.
From what Shirley had said Kate knows Jerome is ruthless and vindictive enough to do this so she very reluctantly agrees in order to keep Phillip as she sees it, unspoiled by Jerome’s vicious, rich family. Jerome makes it clear that he expects a loving and obedient wife and we can infer that “loving” means sexually affectionate and emotionally warm.Kate tries to wriggle out of this but she cannot.
Jerome brings them back to his London apartment but not without an argument. Kate wants to clean the cottage and Jerome gives her one hour to get herself packed, cottage cleaned and in the car or he’ll take Phillip and leave. Kate seethes all the way to London. Jerome kisses her, and although she does not like him, Kate does respond.
Jerome gets his mother to come help get the wedding ready and Kate is surprised to discover she likes his mother a lot, that she is kind, not at all ruthless or vicious, down to earth. This is the first chink in the Shirley story.
The wanna-be Other Woman, Estelle, 19 and spoiled, is a neighbor of Jerome’s in the country and bursts into Jerome’s apartment to tell Kate to bug off, that Jerome is hers, that his little flings never last long and that (shock!) Kate is a model and Jerome will kick her out when he learns that! Mother tells Estelle to control herself, that Jerome knows what he’s doing, and that if Estelle decides to kill herself to do it somewhere else where she won’t get the carpets dirty. Kate realizes that Jerome’s mother would have had no patience with Shirley’s drama and tantrums. Kate still doesn’t like Jerome and she doesn’t trust him. She decides she will fight back by making herself so boring and dull he won’t want her.
They marry and go to southern Italy to honeymoon. Phillip comes too because Kate refuses to go without him. Kate dreads the wedding night (postponed a couple of days to allow her to get used to Jerome) but she promised. In fact she is surprised to discover she enjoys making love with Jerome, that he makes her feel what she does not want to feel. She tells him that she hates him now more than ever, especially when Jerome is amazed that it had been her first time. Kate resents that he thought her a tramp and she tries several times to talk to Jerome about letting her take Phillip since he now knows she is not a loose trollop. That doesn’t work and they return to England together with Phillip.
There are several small incidents. Jerome makes Kate pick out a nanny for Phillip, makes Kate take an interest in her new home, drags her off to his mother’s house in the country. Basically he keeps her so busy she doesn’t have time to think about her grievances nor to work on her dull and boring act.
Right about the time Kate is beginning to feel something for Jerome Estelle comes to dinner where she tells Kate that she needs to leave Jerome, that if she cannot afford to go that Estelle can help her, and that Estelle will help Kate get a few pounds from Jerome when they split – maybe even a few thousand! (A few thousand pounds in the mid 1980s would be around $10,000 today, not a lot.) Kate can’t believe that anyone would talk like this and she suspects Estelle is mentally off. She tells Jerome about it but he doesn’t see either the humor or the insult.
Jerome has forbidden Kate to go anywhere alone but she does anyway. (As she put it, if you wanted obedient you should not have married me!) She runs into the guy she had desultorily dated before Shirley died and realizes that he’s a jerk and that he hates her for selling out for money and a comfy lifestyle. Jerome is not impressed when Kate tells him about meeting ex boyfriend.
Jerome decides that Kate needs to learn a few things about her darling step sister. He tells her that it was not Theo but Shirley who did not want Phillip, in fact she had an appointment for an abortion when Theo found out and made her come to the country house with him. Shirley insisted Theo get a vasectomy because she did not want children. It was Theo who took care of Phillip, it was Shirley who decided at the last minute to leave Phillip with Kate and it was Shirley who did not tell anyone else where Phillip was. Jerome and his mother thought Phillip must have died along with his parents at first. Jerome drags Kate to his so-called yacht, actually a small dinghy, which Shirley had claimed he used to womanize around Europe. Kate is shattered by these revelations. She had known Shirley was spoiled but she hadn’t realized how little she had cared for anyone besides herself.
The final crisis comes when Jerome, his mother, Phillip and the housekeeper are gone and Kate comes downstairs to dry her hair, find Estelle has taken an ax to Jerome’s study and destroyed file cabinets, left files strewn around and is clutching a small envelope that Kate knows holds those girlie negatives. Estelle tells her to get out and to make sure Jerome comes to see her because otherwise she will give the negatives to Kate’s ex boyfriend who would love to publish them in a sleazy tabloid.
Kate tries to find Jerome but he’s en route from New York and she panics. When Jerome comes home she grabs him and can barely speak because she is so worried. Kate tells him that he must go see Estelle, that he should have destroyed the negatives, that it will be his name, not hers, that gets dragged through the media. Jerome calms her down, explains he destroyed the negatives and the envelope was empty, fobs his mother off with a housebreaker story, then we have the happy ever after.
Plot Questions
Which Came First? How Did Jerome Decide to Get Kate? I can’t figure out when Jerome decided to go after Kate. He investigated Shirley, discovered she had a step sister, school teacher Kate Forest, fairly soon after Shirley married Theo, which is some time before Kate started modeling. Kate posed for the girlie calendar after Phillip was born, thus after Jerome knew Kate existed.
He says he started with a missing sister and the negatives. He realized Kate was Noel Lowe when he saw her birth certificate – born at Christmas and mother’s maiden name was Lowe. Then he knew how to get both Noel Lowe and Phillip at the same time. That implies he wanted Noel Lowe the model early on, otherwise how could he track down girlie negatives before he knew she was Kate? That seems out of character.
Emotions and Characters
Kate is wonderful heroine. She’s got class, character, intelligence and she is honest. Kate recognizes that she had been unfair when she assumed Jerome and his mother were vicious and she apologizes for that.
Kate is devoted to Phillip, just as she had been devoted to Shirley before, and she does not want to be devoted towards Jerome, she wants to dislike him and fight him and she is angry with herself for being attracted to him and enjoying making love with him. She’s a little confused.
It takes Jerome and Helen forcing Kate to face facts about Shirley to make her realize that first, she had never even met Theo or his family and that Shirley never had invited her to their home or made any effort to help herself. Shirley was a user.
Kate wants to revolt against Jerome, to either make his life miserable or be so boring that he dumps her. She’s not able to keep up her good intentions though, because she is genuinely a kind, loving, friendly person.
I liked how Kate recognizes that Estelle’s actions would hurt Jerome, but she does not carry that to the logical conclusion. She realizes that Estelle could not harm her without harming Jerome, but she panicked and did not stop to think it through. If Estelle embarrasses Jerome, Jerome would never want her, never marry her in place of Kate. Instead of calmly telling Estelle this, Kate lets her escape through the window, leaving a mess and damaged furniture behind. Then Kate pleads with Jerome to give in to Estelle’s dictates, to let Kate go and to go see Estelle. This is out of character. I read the book several times and each time this scene jars, does not fit, does not make sense, does not align to how Kate has behaved throughout the story. Kate is not the type to give into blackmail and certainly she should know that Jerome is not either.
In fact, Kate should have realized Jerome loses all blackmail threat once she marries him. If he were to release the girlie negatives it would hurt him. For some reason she didn’t think this through earlier although she clearly recognizes that he is not likely to trash her name once she became Mrs. Jerome Manfred.
I love Kate all through the book although this last scene strikes me as off key. In fact it bothered me more each time I read it.
Jerome is enigmatic all through the story. He is attracted to Kate, believes she will make a good wife, sleeps with her and takes care that she enjoys lovemaking. He does not try to jolly her along or change her attitude from hostile and negative but waits for her own good nature to take over on its own.
Jerome makes it clear that he wants all of Kate, not just her body, but her mind and her heart and her devotion to him. He says several times he is very well pleased with his wife and the bargain they made; does this mean he loves her? At the end Jerome insists that he tells Kate how he feels every time he touches her, which is all the time. But he doesn’t say it verbally. The fact that he held the negatives over her head and didn’t tell her he had destroyed them makes me wonder about his ethics. Does he prize obedience over unforced love?
Jerome admired Kate for being so loyal to Shirley and to Phillip and I suspect (if this were a real person, not a story) that he wanted a wife to be loyal to him. He is rich, good looking, has had girlfriends. Now he wants a family and he wants Kate.
Jerome should have realized that Estelle had escalated from pest to drama queen/stalker to genuinely deranged when Kate tells him about the dinner conversation where Estelle offers her a few thousand (Jerome’s money, not hers) to leave. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t go see Estelle’s parents about her behavior or do anything to curb her. It makes Kate wonder whether he in fact does care for Estelle or that he thinks it’s good to keep Kate feeling insecure in his life.
Minor characters Mrs. Manfred, the nanny and Mrs. Manfred’s housekeeper all have characters. Mrs. Manfred loves dogs and has a bunch of them. She dresses like a bag lady at home in the country and dolls up to the nines in London and can put on a gaudy, posh wedding in a week. Kate likes her immensely.
Kate hires the nanny because Jerome insists. Traveling with Phillip is a miserable experience that puts sticky stuff and dirt all over Kate’s clothes while he demands endless attention and entertainment. Kate is delighted that the nanny is perfectly happy to entertain Phillip on long car rides and doesn’t object to sticky. The nanny does have a few less enjoyable characteristics. She talks in first person plural, even when she is talking to Kate about Kate. Ugh. On the other hand, having someone who will entertain a 2 year old…
The housekeeper is forthright and tells Mrs. Manfred off for leaving dirty buckets all over the house. She had been a sergeant cook in the army and it shows!
The nanny and housekeeper add a lot of humor to the story. That plus Kate’s character and ongoing attempts to revolt against Jerome make great dialogue.
Cover Complaints
On the cover Jerome would be handsome if he weren’t so grim or had so many deep lines in his face. Ugh. Harlequin used this particular face on several books of the era and I don’t much like it. Jerome is determined but I didn’t find him anywhere near as hard as this cover depicts.
Kate looks like a glamour puss on her last legs. She has a hard look and is wearing a rather unflattering dress, sleeveless with low V neck, that I don’t see her wearing any point in the story. Author describes Kate as very attractive, sweet tempered (mostly, except around Jerome) and with excellent taste.
Cover does not fit the story at all.
My Version of the Ending
I’ve read Hell Is My Heaven several times. I loved it the first few times I read it, and I still love it. Kate, the minor characters, the dialogue, the humor, are excellent and make this a wonderful book to read. The last time I read it in order to write this review I found Kate’s odd behavior – panicking at Estelle’s ultimatum – so out of character that it jarred me. I would love to rewrite the scene. Here’s my dialogue:
Kate: “You do realize, Estelle, that Jerome won’t buckle to blackmail? And that if your friend Gerald publishes photos he will name me as Mrs. Jerome Manfred? That it would be Jerome – not me – that is embarrassed? That Jerome would never turn to you after you pull a stunt like that? That even if he were to kick me out he would blame you for embarrassing him, that he would have only contempt for you?”
Estelle: “*$&U#)#*(#%R$ D!!!D!” He will too want me! Me ME MEEEE. You’re nothing!!!! MEEEEE!!! #$%&$%*&&%!!!!!”
Estelle leaves in a flounce. Estelle and ex BF tear open the envelope and find it’s empty. Hahahah!!
Jerome and Kate together pay a visit to Estelle. Jerome presents the facts of life to Estelle and tells her to keep away from him and his family.
Estelle: “%*&)%$$$!!! You love me, ME, MEEEE!!!!! !#$%#”
Jerome: “No. I love Kate.”
Summary
Allowing for the vagaries of time travel, copyright and authorship, I’m not likely to rewrite Hell Is My Heaven. Darn.
Even with the clunky way Kate panics this is still a wonderful book, one of the best Harlequin Romances I’ve read.
5 Stars
I got my paperback copy from Thriftbooks after I had borrowed the pdf version from Archive.org. Amazon has used copies and most likely you can find it on eBay and other used online sites.
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