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On the Tycoon's Terms

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Luke McRae's dark good looks made him a magnet for women, but no one had managed to break in to his heart...until he met the beautiful and alluring Katrin Sigurdson.

However, making Katrin his mistress soon forced him to consider that he might need more in his life than work. But allowing Katrin in meant letting secrets of his past out....

192 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

4 people are currently reading
35 people want to read

About the author

Sandra Field

212 books35 followers
Jill MacLean was born on 1941 in England, UK. In 1950, her family moved to Nova Scotia, Canada.

After receiving her Bachelor of Science with honours from Dalhousie University, she married. She worked at the Fisheries Research Board until her daughter was born. Following the birth of her son, she was employed by the pathology laboratory of Sydney City Hospital and the biology department of Mount Allison University. More recently, she completed a Masters in Theological Studies at the Atlantic School of Theology; her thesis juxtaposed Hebrew concepts of chaos in the book of Job with modern chaos theory.
When her husband joined the Armed Forces as a chaplain, she had to stop working. They moved three times in the first 18 months, the last move was to Prince Edward Island. By then her children were in school; she couldn't get a job; and at the local bridge club, she kept forgetting not to trump her partner's ace.

However, she had always loved to read, fascinated by the lure of being drawn into the other world of the story. So one day she bought a dozen Harlequin novels, read and analyzed them, then sat down and wrote one. Her first book, To Trust My Love, typed with four fingers, was published in 1974 as Sandra Field (she believes she's curiously the first Canadian to write for Harlequin). During the four years she lived in Prince Edward Island, she researched an 18th century French settlement located near present-day Brudenell, resulting in a historical book, Jean Pierre Roma, published in 1977 under her real name. She also started to write in collaboration with other Martimer writer under the pseudonym Jan MacLean. She also used to singed her novels the pseudonym of Jocelyn Haley. Her pseudonyms was an attempt to prevent the congregation from finding out what the chaplain's wife was up to in her spare time.

Before she turned 40, her life was changed, she had lost three of the most important women in her life: her mother and sister to illness, and her seventeen-year-old daughter to a car accident, and she separated from her husband in 1976. One of the lasting legacies of the grief caused by these losses has been the idea that it is impossible and undesirable to live every waking moment in the knowledge that loss can strike at any time.

She's been very fortunate for years to be able to combine a love of travel (particularly to the north - she doesn't do heat well) with her writing, by describing settings that most people will probably never visit. And there's always the challenge of making the heroine's long underwear sound romantic. Her novels has been translated into Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Greek, Dutch, Swedish, Yugoslavian, Japanese... and sold in more than 90 countries. Her first collection of poetry, The Brevity of Red, was published in 2003. When her nine-years-old grandson, Stuart, asked him a book for him, she wrote her first Children's book and decided continued writing this type of books.

Jill now lives in Bedford, Nova Scotia, and she's lived most of her life in the Maritimes of Canada, within reach of the sea. Kayaking and canoeing, hiking and gardening, listening to music and reading are all sources of great pleasure. But best of all are good friends, some going back to high-school days, and her family. In Newfoundland, she has a beautiful daughter-in-law and the two most delightful, handsome, and intelligent grandchildren in the world (of course!).

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5 stars
7 (13%)
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10 (19%)
3 stars
21 (41%)
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9 (17%)
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4 (7%)
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
Profile Image for Naksed.
2,224 reviews
December 20, 2019
"Yes, Luke, I still want you. That's why all that roast beef went flying."

ROFL. THIS is why I read Harlequins. The sheer campiness of lines like these. What a riot! :D

This time, Sandra Field's Canadian travelogue takes us to a small Manitoban fishing village on the Manitoba-Ontario border, where the titular tycoon hero is staying at a resort hotel for a business conference.

There, he meets the waitress heroine who works at the hotel restaurant. At first, he finds her "deadly dull" in her shapeless black uniform and giganto plastic eyeglasses. Nevertheless, he keeps following her around with googly eyes.

He stalks her mercilessly, all the while loudly proclaiming that he is only interested in a no-commitment fling with her. Eventually, the heroine takes off her glasses and waitress garb to reveal a Hollywood wet dream bod and a face to launch a thousand ships.

She finally tells the hero that she is not a small-time, hick waitress ready to be seduced by every hotel guest looking for an easy lay. She is a wealthy widow from San Francisco who came back to her Canadian birthtown because she wanted to live a simple, incognito life after being wrongly accused (and rightly acquitted) of the murder of her wealthy husband.

Hero has secrets of his own: Behind his suave San Francisco millionaire persona, he is just a poor boy originally from the dilapidated Ontario mining town just across heroine's Manitoba village.

It takes a long time for the heroine to break through his barriers. An evening dress made out of fishnet stockings adorned with dyed rooster feathers goes a long way to melt the hero LOL! Where did she find that get-up? In a Bob Mackie clearance bin after EVEN Cher rejected it? It's so 80s I can't even.

Finally, a bout of pneumonia makes hero realize he loves heroine and they reunite on a camping ground for the most Canadian HEA ever.

Read it strictly for the laughs is my recommendation :)
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Wendy Darling.
2,258 reviews34.2k followers
January 5, 2026
Looking at the sea of low ratings and I don’t know what to tell you, haha. This is exactly the kind of angst porn I love and the fact that this is entirely from his POV is the icing on the cake.
Profile Image for Daisy Daisy.
706 reviews41 followers
April 10, 2018
On getting through a 1/4 of this book I realised i'd read it before several years ago.

The H didn't really seem to want to take no for an answer at first as he really wanted our h but at the same time he certainly wasn't in the right mindset for a relationship because he was all messed up from a rubbish childhood.

Our h had backbone at first and I really liked her for that but by the end it had been removed and she just gave up on life literally - grrrr hate it when that happens.

She had been accused of bumping off her previous husband so she was also damaged but she took a chance on the H and he kinda fluffed it. Sure he had a major work disaster but it also seemed like it was also an excuse to get away from her after the danger passed and he panicked.

H eventually wises up and chases the h down for their HEA

This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for More Books Than Time  .
2,521 reviews18 followers
August 5, 2025
Boring, so slow with some obvious plot signals and boring. I haven’t liked most of SF’s books.
Profile Image for Jennifer (lecturama).
199 reviews4 followers
June 28, 2025
Desde el inicio, Oscuros pasados me atrapó con esa tensión íntima y contenida entre dos personas que, aunque intentan mantener la distancia emocional, terminan viéndose arrastradas por sentimientos que no pueden controlar. Luke McRae, frío y calculador, entra en escena como el típico hombre que cree tenerlo todo bajo control, incluso su corazón. Pero cuando aparece Katrin Sigurdson, con su mezcla de fragilidad y fuerza, lo que parecía ser solo una relación sin compromisos se transforma en algo mucho más profundo.

Lo que más me gustó fue cómo el pasado de ambos personajes —oscuro, cargado de heridas no sanadas— va emergiendo a medida que se va desarrollando la historia. Hay dolor escondido, pero también mucha ternura escondida entre líneas. Aunque por momentos sentí que la trama seguía fórmulas conocidas, no me impidió disfrutar de la evolución emocional de los protagonistas, sobre todo de Luke, que poco a poco va cediendo terreno y dejando ver una vulnerabilidad inesperada.

Es una lectura corta, pero intensa, que ofrece lo que promete: romance, pasión y esa sensación cálida (aunque a veces melancólica) que dejan los libros donde el amor logra vencer las barreras internas más difíciles de derribar.
247 reviews
October 16, 2023
This is NOT my kind of trope. And I wasn’t a fan of the h. So there are parts I skipped over and got annoyed with just on principle. But the H was written really well. The story was in his POV. There is some humor that is interesting to find in a HQ. He falls hard for the h, and she forces him to deal with his past. Based on his personality, and allowing for the fact that this is a HQ, I think his HEA would stick.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Mattie.
1,989 reviews8 followers
July 22, 2020
It wasn't the worst but started getting boring in the middle. I did like that it was purely from the heroes perspective. Np.
Profile Image for Tia.
Author 10 books141 followers
January 28, 2013
To be honest, I found this novel a little boring compared to others I've read recently. The hero was an ass and then all of a sudden he made a change and wanted the heroine to accept him, be with him. However he said so many hateful things before hand and she just forgave him. Ugh.
146 reviews1 follower
December 27, 2013
The book didn't do much for me. Read it all the way through.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews

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