Family Secrets

Weddings by DeWilde #9

by Margaret St. George

In an attempt to get on with her life, Grace DeWilde leaves her new store and her new romance to return to England, where she makes a discovery about the DeWilde family that has shocking implications for her children and her estranged husband, Jeffrey DeWilde, whom she still loves. Original.

Genres: Contemporary

256 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published November 1, 1996

About the author

Maggie Osborne aka Margaret St. George

Maggie Osborne is the author of I Do, I Do, I Do and Silver Lining, as well as more than forty contemporary and historical romance novels written as Maggie Osborne and Margaret St. George. She has won numerous awards from Romantic Times, Affaire de Coeur, BookraK, the Colorado Romance Writers, and Coeur du Bois, among others. Osborne won the RITA for long historical from the Romance Writers of America in 1998. Maggie lives in a resort town in the Colorado mountains with her husband, one mule, two horses, one cat, and one dog, all of whom are a lot of aggravation, but she loves them anyway.

Reviews

[reeder (reviews) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weddings by DeWilde is a multi-author miniseries published by Harlequin detailing the lives and loves of the wealthy DeWilde family and the staff of their international jewelry and bridal stores. At least, that's what the summaries suggest. I was only reading for one thing: the dramatic arc that ties the whole series together, which is the breakdown of Jeffrey and Grace DeWilde's 32-year marriage after Jeffrey has an affair.

Unfortunately, I don't know exactly how their story ends, because the only books in the 13-volume series I was able to find are Shattered Vows (book 1), To Love a Thief (book 6), and Family Secrets (book 9). But I am strangely content, because these three books tell the story of the affair from the perspective of the husband, the OW, and the wife. And -- unspoiler alert -- I can easily see that the trajectory of the story will result in reconciliation.

What really impresses me about this approach (dragging their marital woes through a 13-book series) is that we get a real sense of time passing. Although I'm not a fan of multi-author sagas because different authors usually can't manage to sustain the characterization established by the primary author tasked with a particular couple's storyline, Jasmine Cresswell and Margaret St George (aka Maggie Osborne) coordinated well for their contributions.

** Shattered Vows **

In Shattered Vows, we get the story of the affair entirely from Jeffrey's perspective. We also experience the frustration of Jeffrey and Grace's only son (this volume is ostensibly his romance, which I ignored entirely to skim the juicy parental bits), who doesn't understand why his mother left his father and placed their jewelry store empire in jeopardy. This aspect of the story agitated me tremendously because it's clear from Gabriel's conversation with Jeffrey that he knows nothing about the affair and he's angry at his mother. Jeffrey came across as really self-serving for not telling the truth, which can be attributed to his deeply private nature combined with the fact that he blames his wife for fracturing their marriage.

One night in bed, Grace revealed to her husband that she hadn't loved him when she married him. A couple of months later, Jeffrey was in Paris on business where he met Allison Ames when she was injured while out jogging late one night. Ever the gentleman, Jeffrey took Allison back to his hotel, arranged for the hotel doctor to tend her sprained ankle, and then paid for her cab fare home. Allison was smitten. Despite knowing Jeffrey was married, she pursued him with persistent invitations to dinner (to thank him for his kindness), then the theater, then the ballet, then they ended up in bed. He broke it off when he realized the much younger woman had feelings for him:

After two months of stolen weekends in Paris and midweek encounters in various discreet London hotels, he'd realized that she wasn't at all in the habit of having casual affairs, especially not with a married man. Appalled, he'd taken immediate steps to end their relationship.

Any guilt he expresses in Shattered Vows revolves around the other woman and her feelings. Although he had no intention of dissolving his marriage, he also expresses no remorse or loyalty toward Grace when thinking about the affair. He blames Grace's revelation completely for the failure of their marriage. And when Grace finds out about the affair from a friend and confronts him, the "inarticulate" Jeffrey tells her he never wants to see her again: "...in the very week when he broke off all contact with Allison Ames and planned to grovel at Grace's feet, begging for her forgiveness, his wife had walked out and left him. At his behest."

If I seem unimpressed by that promise of a grovel, it's because whatever Jeffrey thinks he "planned," he was clearly unprepared to carry through.

We leave Shattered Vows with an angry Grace calling her husband's former lover a whore and threatening to sell her shares in DeWilde's to set up her own bridal store in San Francisco, a move that only further alienates her from her son.

** To Love a Thief **

Five books later, in To Love a Thief, we pick up the other woman's story. It's nine months after Jeffrey and Grace's separation has been announced, and bitter Allison has accepted that Jeffrey isn't going to contact her to resume their relationship. Not only did he break her heart when he left, he also made her feel tawdry by trying to give her a bracelet as a parting gift. Allison wants revenge. (Please don't look to this review for details of the revenge, which somehow involves security expert Allison stealing a tiara from DeWilde's Monaco location. I care nothing about Allison's need for vengeance. I am all about the affair.)

Allison's version of the affair closely mirrors Jeffrey's memories, with this added insight:

How could she have guessed that the last thing he wanted was for her to fall in love with him? Or that it would appall him when he discovered she had known from the first who he was, that he was the Jeffrey DeWilde? How could she have guessed that her praise and admiration of his success had been the reason behind his periods of coldness? Too late she had realized that he wanted to be Jeffrey the man and not Jeffrey the international corporation. And last of all, she couldn't possibly have intuited that a man who allowed himself to be seduced by the respect and admiration in a young woman's eyes could possibly be in love with his wife.

Yeah, Allison, I'm having a hard time intuiting that last bit, myself. But more importantly, I'm enjoying the schadenfreude of Jeffrey learning that his mistress had ALSO been attracted to him because of his wealth and position. So much for your escapist affair, cheater.

(Interestingly, in one of his phone conversations with Grace in Family Secrets, Jeffrey asserts that "'It made no difference to Allison that I was connected to the DeWilde stores.'" I don't know whether to attribute that to a continuity error or Jeffrey lying for reasons of pride.)

As Allison works through the pain of her heartbreak and begins a new romance with her partner in the revenge caper, she comes to realize that she was seeking a father-figure in Jeffrey, a superior substitute for her recently deceased (but dishonorable) father. Deeply ashamed, she confesses all to her new lover re: her reason for wanting to steal the tiara, and he is disgusted by her affair with a married man. She then confesses her theft of the tiara and desire for vengeance to Jeffrey. Lastly, she confronts Grace:

"I came to tell you that I am solely to blame for what happened between Jeffrey and me.... I knew Jeffrey was married, but I pursued him, anyway. What happened was not his idea and he resisted involvement."

(Not hard enough, Allison. He didn't resist hard enough.) She also unsubtly pushes blame on Grace, noting that Jeffrey seemed very lonely and vulnerable when she met him, and Grace might know the reason for that. Grace remains icy throughout this confrontation, then cries when she is alone.

** Family Secrets **

Family Secrets is a bit of an anomaly, an unromance that ends in divorce rather than marriage. Although it's an important interlude in the saga, I think it's unsatisfactory as a standalone title, being neither women's fiction nor a complete romance. Nevertheless, the author does a brilliant job with the heartrending, conflicting emotions surrounding a divorce.

Grace is the protagonist of this volume. There is no secondary romance except for an OM attempting to woo Grace before the divorce. Here, we learn a bit more about the circumstances of Grace's revelation that she hadn't married Jeffrey for love: she had been reminiscing about how much they had changed over the course of their marriage, and apparently thought a 32-year relationship could withstand the casual drop in of "I married you for your money and name but came to love you soon after." Grace also reconciles with her son, Gabe. She doesn't tell him about his father's affair but takes the responsibility for the divorce on herself by telling him about that conversation with Jeffrey. Normally, the betrayed wife protecting her husband like this would have me eyerolling, but Gabe has the most marvelous response: he can't believe his father is being such an idiot. It's obvious to him that his parents have been in love his whole life; what does it matter when that happened? He even advises Grace against having this talk with his sisters. Unlike him, they had been striving to remain neutral regarding their parents' break-up, and he sincerely feels this would make them think less of their father.

But mostly the book is about the "family secrets" revealed in her husband's great-grandmother's diary, and the story's uncanny parallels to Grace's own. Anne-Marie was wildly in love with Maximilien DeWilde when they married, working by his side as a jewel cutter and designer in the store that would become the foundation for the DeWilde empire. Unfortunately, Anne-Marie appeared to be barren, and Maximilien -- bitter he wouldn't have sons to start a DeWilde dynasty -- began an affair with an actress. Devastated by the discovery that the actress was accompanying her husband on a business trip to Italy (where the couple had gone on their wedding trip), Anne-Marie found comfort with their mutual friend Martin. Surprise! Anne-Marie turns up pregnant. Maximilien can now love her again and he confesses that his affair was "from the pain of loving to distraction a woman ... who could not give him children." (Maximilien is a jerk. How I delight in Anne-Marie's dawning realization -- after a second encounter with Martin leaves her pregnant again -- that she is not the barren one in their relationship.) Anyway, the eventual revelation of her children's parentage decades later leads to Big Tragedy and estrangement from both her husband and son.

When I find myself struggling with a cheating spouse romance, I ask myself a series of questions which I can't answer fully here without knowing the end of Grace and Jeffrey's saga:

1. Does the infidelity serve as a catalyst to surface an overlooked/unresolved issue that has always been present in the relationship?

No. Grace's revelation had done that. What I'm wrestling with is if that revelation was sufficiently devastating to make the affair an understandable response. Both authors note that Jeffrey is insecure because of childhood events (WWII was raging when he was a young child, and his father was off fighting with the forces françaises libres, and this apparently makes Jeffrey sensitive about his worthiness for love). Even though I think 30 years of a loving relationship ought to be enough to deflect from any pain Grace stirred up, I can see where wounded feelings contributed to a classic middle-aged crisis. But unlike Allison and Jeffrey, I cannot attribute any blame to Grace for the affair.

2. Is the cheater's contrition genuine?

WHAT contrition? Jeffrey had better step up his game in the final reconciliation, because so far all his remorse has been for the damage he did to the OW, not to his wife or their marriage.

3. Does the cheater gain insight into his actions that will prevent the behavior from recurring?

So far, no. Jeffrey's internal narrative offers some pretty clear-eyed analysis of the affair, but as long as he is willing to blame Grace for the destruction of their marriage, there's no clear indication he wouldn't cheat again if feeling similarly hurt in the future. Even his regret for misreading the OW wouldn't be enough to prevent it; he would just choose his lover more carefully.

I wish I could get my hands on the later books in the series or even just accurate synopses of them. I hope at least that, as with this book, Grace and Jeffrey are the protagonists in the novel that brings about their reconciliation and not just side characters in someone else's romance.

[Su · Rating 2 out of 5]

What!!! No resolution.???
Anyone knows what happened to this couple? If I know this was a book in a 13 book serial I would never touch it.

[ANGELIA · Rating 1 out of 5]

More like Family Toilet! Generations of adultery, passing off one guy's kids as another's, incest, knocking up your sister, suicide, mental collapse, mercenary marriages, lusting after your (so-called) best friend's wife, lame excuses for getting horny, confessions that shouldn't be confessed and no confessions where there should have been, and other assorted crap.

It's like not only viewing the dirty family linen but having to smell it as well!

Talk about a giant PEW!!!!!

[Lesley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the book, a friend loaned it to me and she got it from BookMooch. I was introduced to this author by said friend and we discovered that this author writes as Maggie Osborne when she writes 1800's westerns and I love those books.