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Valdecarrasca #2
The Man from Madrid
A Mediterranean millionaire
Cally hoped for peace and quiet when she escaped to Valdecarrasca in beautiful rural Spain -- but the arrival of mysterious millionaire Nicolás Llorca changed all that! He made it clear he wanted Cally; he also let her know he wasn't looking for long-term commitment....
The smoldering good looks and charm of the man from Madrid proved hard to resist. But Cally wasn't interested in a brief affair. And, besides, Nicolás was clearly hiding a secret or two! Determined to keep her distance, Cally found her resolve was tested when Nicolás made her an offer impossible to refuse....
Cally hoped for peace and quiet when she escaped to Valdecarrasca in beautiful rural Spain -- but the arrival of mysterious millionaire Nicolás Llorca changed all that! He made it clear he wanted Cally; he also let her know he wasn't looking for long-term commitment....
The smoldering good looks and charm of the man from Madrid proved hard to resist. But Cally wasn't interested in a brief affair. And, besides, Nicolás was clearly hiding a secret or two! Determined to keep her distance, Cally found her resolve was tested when Nicolás made her an offer impossible to refuse....
- GenresHarlequin RomanceSpain
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
5 people are currently reading
32 people want to read
About the author
Anne Weale
227 books49 followersJay Blakeney
aka Anne Weale, Andrea Blake
Jay Blakeney was born on Juny 20, 1929. Her great-grandfather was a well-known writer on moral theology, so perhaps she inherited her writing gene from him. She was "talking stories" to herself long before she could read. When she was still at school, she sold her first short stories to a woman's magazine and she feels she was destined to write. Decided to became a writer, she started writing for newspapers and magazines.
At 21, Jay was a newspaper reporter with a career plan, but the man she was wildly in love with announced that he was off to the other side of the world. He thought they should either marry or say goodbye. She always believed that true love could last a lifetime, and she felt that wonderful men were much harder to find than good jobs, so she put her career on hold. What a wise decision it was! She felt that new young women seem less inclined to risk everything for love than her generation.
Together they traveled the world. If she hadn't spent part of her bridal year living on the edge of a jungle in Malaysia, she might never have become a romance writer. That isolated house, and the perils of the state of emergency that existed in the country at that time, gave her a background and plot ideally suited to a genre she had never read until she came across some romances in the library of a country club they sometimes visited. She can write about love with the even stronger conviction that comes from experience.
When they returned to Europe, Jay resumed her career as a journalist, writing her first romance in her spare time. She sold her first novel as Anne Weale to Mills and Boon in 1955 at the age of 24. At 30, with seven books published, she "retired" to have a baby and become a full-time writer. She raised a delightful son, David, who is as adventurous as his father. Her husband and son have even climbed in the Andes and the Himalayas, giving her lots of ideas for stories. When she retired from reporting, her fiction income -- a combination of amounts earned as a Mills & Boon author and writing for magazines such as Woman's Illustrated, which serialized the work of authors -- exceed 1,000 pounds a year.
She was a founding member of the The Romantic Novelists' Association. In 2002 she published her last novel, in total, she wrote 88 novels. She also wrote under the pseudonym Andrea Blake. She loved setting her novels in exotic parts of the world, but specially in The Caribbean and in her beloved Spain. Since 1989, Jay spent most of the winter months in a very small "pueblo" in the backwoods of Spain. During years, she visited some villages, and from each she have borrowed some feature - a fountain, a street, a plaza, a picturesque old house - to create some places like Valdecarrasca, that is wholly imaginary and yet typical of the part of rural Spain she knew best. She loved walking, reading, sketching, sewing (curtains and slipcovers) and doing needlepoint, gardening, entertaining friends, visiting art galleries and museums, writing letters, surfing the Net, traveling in search of exciting locations for future books, eating delicious food and drinking good wine, cataloguing her books.
She wrote a regular website review column for The Bookseller from 1998 to 2004, before starting her own blog Bookworm on the Net. At the time of her death, on October 24, 2007, she was working on her autobiography "88 Heroes... 1 Mr. Right".
aka Anne Weale, Andrea Blake
Jay Blakeney was born on Juny 20, 1929. Her great-grandfather was a well-known writer on moral theology, so perhaps she inherited her writing gene from him. She was "talking stories" to herself long before she could read. When she was still at school, she sold her first short stories to a woman's magazine and she feels she was destined to write. Decided to became a writer, she started writing for newspapers and magazines.
At 21, Jay was a newspaper reporter with a career plan, but the man she was wildly in love with announced that he was off to the other side of the world. He thought they should either marry or say goodbye. She always believed that true love could last a lifetime, and she felt that wonderful men were much harder to find than good jobs, so she put her career on hold. What a wise decision it was! She felt that new young women seem less inclined to risk everything for love than her generation.
Together they traveled the world. If she hadn't spent part of her bridal year living on the edge of a jungle in Malaysia, she might never have become a romance writer. That isolated house, and the perils of the state of emergency that existed in the country at that time, gave her a background and plot ideally suited to a genre she had never read until she came across some romances in the library of a country club they sometimes visited. She can write about love with the even stronger conviction that comes from experience.
When they returned to Europe, Jay resumed her career as a journalist, writing her first romance in her spare time. She sold her first novel as Anne Weale to Mills and Boon in 1955 at the age of 24. At 30, with seven books published, she "retired" to have a baby and become a full-time writer. She raised a delightful son, David, who is as adventurous as his father. Her husband and son have even climbed in the Andes and the Himalayas, giving her lots of ideas for stories. When she retired from reporting, her fiction income -- a combination of amounts earned as a Mills & Boon author and writing for magazines such as Woman's Illustrated, which serialized the work of authors -- exceed 1,000 pounds a year.
She was a founding member of the The Romantic Novelists' Association. In 2002 she published her last novel, in total, she wrote 88 novels. She also wrote under the pseudonym Andrea Blake. She loved setting her novels in exotic parts of the world, but specially in The Caribbean and in her beloved Spain. Since 1989, Jay spent most of the winter months in a very small "pueblo" in the backwoods of Spain. During years, she visited some villages, and from each she have borrowed some feature - a fountain, a street, a plaza, a picturesque old house - to create some places like Valdecarrasca, that is wholly imaginary and yet typical of the part of rural Spain she knew best. She loved walking, reading, sketching, sewing (curtains and slipcovers) and doing needlepoint, gardening, entertaining friends, visiting art galleries and museums, writing letters, surfing the Net, traveling in search of exciting locations for future books, eating delicious food and drinking good wine, cataloguing her books.
She wrote a regular website review column for The Bookseller from 1998 to 2004, before starting her own blog Bookworm on the Net. At the time of her death, on October 24, 2007, she was working on her autobiography "88 Heroes... 1 Mr. Right".
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 25, 2024
Santa Maria Della Grazie but this book was B-O-R-I-N-G! DNF at Chapter 5 :(
March 31, 2013
While Cally is helping run her parent’s boarding house in a Spanish village in the province of Alicante, there comes a mysterious guest called Nicolas Llorca. It seems he is interested in doing some trekking and climbing in the zone, but he is always skipping questions about what he does for a living and other personal questions.
When Cally finds out by chance that Nicolas has the intention of converting an old rambling house in a hotel, she throws him out of her parent’s boarding house. But the information was not correct and she has lost contact with a man she felt much attracted to and was learning to appreciate his company.
But naturally, they meet again when they are both guests in a dinner at a private home. The fact is that he is a very rich and important man (later on we shall even discover that he is an aristocrat). So they are worlds apart. She an unemployed editor, seeking for new opportunities and he a succesful businessman. And he offers her an estimulating job in his company and she shall have to travel with him. But this means, as H states, that their relationship is going to be purely professional. Ha!
I do not know much about the deceased author’s biography, but on reading this book it is clear that she must have been really leaving in the here mentioned zone, because she has an in depth knowledge of many things impossible to know if you are not familiar to it. Her descriptions are very accurate and next to the reality and credit must be given to her for her ability to reflect many of this aspects so well.
I can tell because I know the zone and the ambiance reigning there quiet well, in spite of being at a distance of about 530 km from my home town Barcelona. A zone where there are many British and other expatriates, who have bought properties there in order to take advantage of a very mild Mediterranean climate, with blue sky and sunshine even in the middle of winter.
When Cally finds out by chance that Nicolas has the intention of converting an old rambling house in a hotel, she throws him out of her parent’s boarding house. But the information was not correct and she has lost contact with a man she felt much attracted to and was learning to appreciate his company.
But naturally, they meet again when they are both guests in a dinner at a private home. The fact is that he is a very rich and important man (later on we shall even discover that he is an aristocrat). So they are worlds apart. She an unemployed editor, seeking for new opportunities and he a succesful businessman. And he offers her an estimulating job in his company and she shall have to travel with him. But this means, as H states, that their relationship is going to be purely professional. Ha!
I do not know much about the deceased author’s biography, but on reading this book it is clear that she must have been really leaving in the here mentioned zone, because she has an in depth knowledge of many things impossible to know if you are not familiar to it. Her descriptions are very accurate and next to the reality and credit must be given to her for her ability to reflect many of this aspects so well.
I can tell because I know the zone and the ambiance reigning there quiet well, in spite of being at a distance of about 530 km from my home town Barcelona. A zone where there are many British and other expatriates, who have bought properties there in order to take advantage of a very mild Mediterranean climate, with blue sky and sunshine even in the middle of winter.
abrierto-to-read-hr-other
June 8, 2020A Mediterranean millionaire
Cally hoped for peace and quiet when she escaped to Valdecarrasca in beautiful rural Spain -- but the arrival of mysterious millionaire Nicolás Llorca changed all that! He made it clear he wanted Cally; he also let her know he wasn't looking for long-term commitment....
The smoldering good looks and charm of the man from Madrid proved hard to resist. But Cally wasn't interested in a brief affair. And, besides, Nicolás was clearly hiding a secret or two! Determined to keep her distance, Cally found her resolve was tested when Nicolás made her an offer impossible to refuse
Cally hoped for peace and quiet when she escaped to Valdecarrasca in beautiful rural Spain -- but the arrival of mysterious millionaire Nicolás Llorca changed all that! He made it clear he wanted Cally; he also let her know he wasn't looking for long-term commitment....
The smoldering good looks and charm of the man from Madrid proved hard to resist. But Cally wasn't interested in a brief affair. And, besides, Nicolás was clearly hiding a secret or two! Determined to keep her distance, Cally found her resolve was tested when Nicolás made her an offer impossible to refuse
August 2, 2024
"The Man from Madrid" is the story of Cally and Nicolas.
Heroine is running her parent's boarding house during her sabbatical, where she meets the hero. They initially hit it off, then loads of drama, before HEA. I found it very boring and forgettable.
Safe
2/5
Heroine is running her parent's boarding house during her sabbatical, where she meets the hero. They initially hit it off, then loads of drama, before HEA. I found it very boring and forgettable.
Safe
2/5
January 26, 2015
A very nice book. the H was totally worthy of the heroine. Also Simon and Cassia Mondragon from "A Night to Remember" make a cameo appearance in this story.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews