Sara Craven - More Books than Time

So… what’s wrong with this picture?

You’re English, a tax accountant, in Greece on a holiday and meet a guy on the beach.
You really (REALLY) hit it off with him. He’s kind, compassionate, fun to talk to and you really (REALLY) like kissing him.
But… You know nothing about him. Does he have a family? Is he or has he ever been married? Where does he live?
You think he is a fisherman who may augment his livelihood by judicious flirting with ladies on holiday and/or dancing in the hotels. But you don’t know because he kind of deflects these questions.
You don’t have his phone number but it apparently is possible to get in touch by phoning the local tavern.
You’re good at your job. You don’t know what he thinks of working wives.
He asks you to marry him within two weeks of meeting.
You say yes.

OK, I get it. He’s wonderful. But you really don’t know anything about him. Where will you live? Should you keep working? Does he in fact chat up ladies for a living as you suspect?

Our heroine first says yes, then when she returns to pack up at her hotel on a neighboring island gets a call from her uncle that her dad is in the hospital and likely to die. Now that she’s away from Draco (our gorgeous hero) and they haven’t been necking for a couple hours she’s gotten ~~cold feet~~/~~common sense~~/a chance to step back and reassess the situation. Now here comes the big, huge, horrible mistake: She leaves for England and Daddy without talking to Draco!

Just as in so many Harlequins, a simple phone call could save tons of heartaches. A simple “Hey Draco. I’ve got to go home. Dad’s in the hospital in a bad way. And it’s probably a good idea to take a breather here and give us a week away from ~~necking~~/each other. OK? I’ll get in touch in a week.”

Now let’s look at it from Draco’s perspective. (Sara Craven does a great job letting us see his thinking, albeit after the fact.)

This really (REALLY) hot blonde thinks you’re super. Super as in super sexy, super easy to talk to, super (REALLY REALLY) super kisser.
She’s the real thing too. You investigated her (because after all she could simply be a better schemer than all the others) and of course, why not? She truly is a tax accountant – not a profession whose adherents are known for doing crazy spontaneous things like falling in love with a guy they met on holiday and marrying them two weeks later. And her dad was rich until his sugar doll wife conned him out of every penny.
On the other hand you told her nothing about yourself and she might even suspect you’re a part time gigolo.
You’ve never talked about the future in any concrete terms. You know, stuff like where you’ll live, what you’ll expect from her (Black dresses and five paces behind? Get good internet and work from home? Cook and clean in a shack with or without electricity and running water? Two kids or eight?) Right. All those pesky detailed things.
You are falling in ~~lust~~/love and she is/was a virgin and you really should get married some time and she said “Yes!”
So you organize a big hot party in your mansion (oops, you forgot to tell her that) and call all your friends and family (oops, not about them either!) and wait for her to come back from getting her stuff in the fancy hotel just across on the other island.

That’s where it went south for me. Would you seriously organize a party before she returns? Or would you possibly have just a niggle of worry that she might, oh, I don’t know, get cold feet or need a bit of reassurance or even want you to come home with her to meet her family?

The engagement party bust is not a trivial incident either but a major plot point. Draco was humiliated and fell apart emotionally when he finally twigged she took off.

Now if you’re a Greek tycoon whose expected wife failed to show you do the obvious thing. You track her down to her family home where you immediately take over all her father’s debts and issue a nasty ultimatum: Come sleep with me for three months or else! Dad’s going to be broke, your housekeeper will be homeless and, and, oh gee, gosh, well, you’ll be miserable and guilty because you didn’t help dear old Dad when you could. Yes, we now have a Miffed Greek Tycoon Seeks Revenge story.

This is the second plot point that fails. Heroine Cressida tells herself that she can find a larger apartment and move Dad in, that he has his pension so he isn’t completely destitute, that she has a decent salary. But when Draco summons her to appear before him she meekly agrees to play unmarried shack-up mistress kissy face for three months instead of telling him to go pound sand. She has very little monetary motivation to agree to his humiliating proposition.

Dad will be more comfortable in his old home. Yes. But ask yourself. Would you accept mistress-hood in exchange for your dad being more comfy? I don’t think so!

That leaves the other possible reason for Cressida to say “yes”. She loves Draco and regrets taking off without a word, especially when she finds out that he truly was heartbroken and embarrassed. So our guilty-feeling heroine agrees and trots off to sunny Greece, leaving dear old Dad behind to grieve himself into an early grave.

In the last part of The Tycoon’s Mistress author Sara Craven explains that Cressida has a hard time trusting and particularly trusting love, due of course to Dad’s disastrous second foray into marriage. That’s nice but not terribly pertinent. Even people who trust easily might find it overwhelming to marry someone after two sunny holiday weeks.

Craven could have played up Cressida’s cut and run – without any notice – which, while possibly understandable, was mean. There was no reason she couldn’t have at least left a message at her hotel or called the taverna where she stayed on the second island. Draco was justifiably angry about being stood up.

The other unsatisfying thing about the story is that Draco never did the formerly-nasty-Greek-tycoon-with-loving-bride grovel. I missed that!

Sara Craven wrote many marriage of convenience novels and a few of the tycoon-meets-innocent-girl type and I find her MOC novels are far more satisfying and better written. (She combined both tropes in a couple stories, notably Wife in the Shadows, and those were also very good.) The Tycoon’s Mistress lacks the dramatic tension of the MOC A High Price to Pay or the deeply emotional characters in MOC Wife Against Her Will. Nonetheless, I enjoyed The Tycoon’s Mistress and followed Cressida and Draco love affair and was sad to reach the novel end.

3 Stars. I’d give it 4 except the two characters fell into misery because they didn’t bother to get to know each other, too busy necking!

All Amazon links are paid ads. I borrowed this through the Archive.org and there are copies on Amazon and Thriftbooks as of October 2020. Please note there is a comic book version but I read and reviewed the original text story.

At first I was not terribly impressed with Sara Craven’s A Place of Storms. It didn’t affect me the way some of her other books do, but after a bit I found myself wanting to re-read and I enjoyed the story more each time I read it.

A Place of Storms is one of Sara Craven’s earliest Harlequin Presents novels, written in 1978 and has her trademark strong emotion and well-done characters. English Andrea and older Frenchman Blaise are interesting people we want to know although the character development is not quite as strong as in Craven’s later novels.

Andrea is used to helping her flighty cousin Clare avoid richly deserved trouble and now Clare wants her help to avoid a marriage of convenience to an unknown distant relation, Blaise. Blaise is blackmailing Clare with her letters promising to marry him, to force her into marriage even though they never met. Clare now is engaged to a wonderful man and doesn’t want any part of scandal and certainly not a temporary marriage!

What neither Clare nor Andrea know is that Blaise is desperate to marry to secure custody of his nephew from his unscrupulous ex-fiancé – who is the boy’s aunt, greedy and heartless, unwilling to marry a poor man or one with a scarred face.

Blaise lives in a crumbling chateau where every bedroom room leaks, the bathrooms are ancient and fussy and the furniture huge and is barely eking a living from his vineyards. Plus Blaise himself is scarred inside and on his face from the fire in the family’s former island plantation home that killed his brother.

Blaise isn’t a particularly attractive potential husband. Unfortunately for Andrea he is also not dumb. He researched Clare’s family before asking her to marry him and knows all about Clare, her father’s ill health and her cousin Andrea and knows immediately who Andrea is when she arrives at his chateau to retrieve Clare’s foolish letters.

Andrea is shocked to see the dilapidated state of the house and by Blaise’s intention to foist not just a marriage of convenience but a 5 year old nephew onto her cousin. She is terrified because Blaise is attractive and she recognizes the huge potential he has to hurt her emotionally. Blaise will use every trick and pressure possible to get his own way and confronts Andrea when he finds her going through his dresser, threatening endless scandal and publicity if she will not marry him. Andrea agrees, assuming that he is offering the paper marriage he offered to her cousin and that he stressed the evening she met him. Fortunately for our novel, he is intending and demanding far more, a real marriage in every way.

We now have the set up for a delicious romance: A man who is ruthless and determined to marry the woman who is determined not to lose her heart. But wait! There is still more! Sara Craven has three other characters that add complexity.

Alan is researching the Gallic wars and lives in the chateau’s gatehouse. He is the neutral character who is a friend to Andrea and not any threat to Blaise and Andrea’s marriage.
Five year old nephew Phillipe lost his parents and now must live with his scarred uncle; Phillipe is not a strong child, he is polite but timid.
His aunt Simone is nasty, vindictive and cruel, tells Phillipe stories about a distant ancestor who threw his wife’s bastard son out of the tower window and makes him frightened of his uncle Blaise, claiming Blaise will kill him for the non-existent insurance money. Andrea learns only after a week or so that Simone and Blaise had been engaged until Blaise was scarred.

The author hints that Blaise was disillusioned about Simone even before he got hurt in the fire, but Simone implies that she dumped him because of the scar. There is no love lost between them now. Simone tries her best to make trouble with Phillipe and trouble between Andrea and Blaise and even tries to drag Alan into the mix. She’s the arch-Other Woman and nasty.

The real story is how Andrea and Blaise end up in love. Craven only tells us through Andrea’s eyes so we don’t get a good idea how Blaise feels. He calls Andrea “his heart” or “his love” (in French of course) and gives her a beautiful nightgown for a wedding gift and tries to seduce her a couple of time but we don’t see many loving gestures or comments. In fact he’s mean and uses kisses and threatens forced seduction to punish Andrea. He tells her to obey him and threatens but does not do violence. Try to ignore these (thankfully) outdated elements and enjoy the story.

One indicator of a good story and great characters is that I want to put myself in there, to come up with what I would say to Blaise, how I would react. He has a nasty habit of threatening Andrea sexually, and claiming the high ground. For instance, when he is trying to seduce her Blaise says “be a little merciful. Don’t force me to take you like this.” Andrea should say “No one is forcing you Blaise. If you don’t want to feel like a rapist then don’t be one!” (He wasn’t raping her, but he was trying to gain a response Andrea didn’t want to give.) Or when he tells her that he didn’t offer her a paper marriage as he did to her cousin, Andrea should have reminded him that he did exactly that the first night they met, and he claimed he knew who she was at the time. OK, I’m splitting hairs here but some of these overly domineering types give me a pain!

Sara Craven creates a moody, atmospheric setting too, using the gloomy old chateau set in a gorgeous hilly region of France to heighten the tension. Andrea tries to brighten the place with lighter paints and fabrics while Simone uses the setting and old history to frighten Phillipe.

Overall, on second or third or fourth reading I have to give this one 4 stars. I got my copy from Thriftbooks.com and as of this writing Amazon has copies but it is not available on Archive.org.

All Amazon links are paid ads.

The Tycoon’s Mistress – by Sara Craven, Harlequin Presents Romance

A Place of Storms – Married Forced by Blackmail in France