No Second Parting

by Lilian Peake

Christmas in Colorado… The men in Marti Johanssen’s life seem determined to ruin her Christmas. Her teenage son wants to move in with his dad; her father wants her to reconcile with her ex so the Colorado family ranch will be in “capable” hands. And for some reason, Gil, her ex-husband, is being more attentive than he ever was during their marriage. Rick Dennehy, the attractive widower next door, seems quite happy not to be involved in Marti’s life. He’s made it perfectly clear that he’s back in Colorado only for as long as it takes to sell his property. Too bad. Marti’s beginning to wish she had a man like Rick under her Christmas tree.

Genres: Harlequin Presents, Marriage Of Convenience, Romance, Harlequin, Second Chance

192 pages, Paperback

First published December 9, 1977

About the author

Lilian Margaret Peake was born on 25 May 1924 in London, England, UK. During the World War II, she moved to the countryside.

Her early ambition was to be a journalist, and she ended up working at various newspapers and magazines around England. She also married and started a family, and eventually she decided start to writing romance novels. She wrote over 65 romance novels for Mills & Boon from 1971 to 1996 as Lilian Peake.

Lilian passed away in 27 May 1997.

Reviews

[Debbie DiFiore · Rating 1 out of 5]

Horrible, horrible book and I am sorry I read it. I read it before but forgot and I think I know why. Because it sucked. The hero is a pig and he totally was mean to the heroine. He left her, married another woman, had a child, wife died and then he 'lived hard' for 6 years until he decided oh yeah, theres that TSTL heroine back home and I can use her to be a domestic/nanny loser!! I used her as a teenager and I still can. I honestly threw up in my mouth 27 times reading this book. I had to gargle with Hydrogen Peroxide just to get the bad taste out of my mouth. And my eyes, my poor eyes, I had to bleach. My vision should be back later so I can read another Lilian Peake and repeat the process. I am such a glutton for punishment. I can't believe I loved these stories when I was young. I wish I could go back and have a long talk with myself warning my young self about these evil authors. And the jerk heroes. I may be TSTL too at this point. Now I need to go shower to get the stink off me. DNR on this one.

[Grrrrace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Certain realities must be accepted before traveling to Lilian Peake’s dark corner of Harleyland, where bitterness sprouts like poisonous mushrooms and the angst rushes and flows like icy waterfalls (LP likes her similes, so I gave it a go). Without foreknowledge of its character types and customs, you, like many readers before you, may be baffled and outraged by the Hs, hs, and HEAs of Peakeville. So keep the following in mind before embarking on your journey:

- LP often writes tales of the sexual and emotional domination of the h by the H.
- An LP h is often a former wild (but virtuous) child whose youthful exuberance has been subdued into a repressed adulthood—but the (re)emergence of the H into the h’s life frees the h’s untamed nature.
- The H and h fight. A lot. BITTERLY. Their verbal exchanges are often a bloodbath. Be prepared.
- They often share a tortured past, leading to their current mutual distrust and enmity. The h has never gotten over the H (love or hate) and is frozen in her emotional and sexual development.
- The cynical, misogynistic Hs have lived and “loved” hard but are embittered by the past (often involving an unwilling/unsuccessful marriage to another woman, leaving him divorced or widowed).
- LP hs hit; LP Hs don’t but they’re pretty free with the brutal kisses and the punishing grips. The h is, at some point, forced to acknowledge the H as her master.
- The OWs are particularly pernicious, with vampish, hard, sharp names: e.g., Vanda, Coral.
- The Hs are jealous and can be passionate but also coldly punishing to the h, who doesn’t have the same reserves of self-restraint and self-preservation.
- There is often a neutered OM whose presence makes the H angry and jealous.
- Sometimes the h is the one who grovels, her pride ground to dust. Yeah, that’s right, the long-suffering HEROINE GROVELS.
- The Golden Rule of Peakeville: the amount of emotional punishment an LP h suffers from the H is directly proportionate to the amount of love she will receive in the HEA. More suffering=more love.

Many readers are enraged and horrified by the hellish depths of despair the h endures, so why would anyone recommend, let alone enjoy, LP’s books? Well, for me, it’s the wreckiness, the sheer wtfery, the D/s-y undertones, the angst that evokes strong emotion. For those of us who find a twisted satisfaction in emotional trauma, there’s harvest aplenty. So if angst is your bread and angry misunderstanding your butter, feast on, friends, feast on!

You’ve been warned, fellow travelers, so let’s board the crazytrain and ride it to the bittersweet end! Will it wreck? Full-on spoilage ahead for one of LP’s best examples of the above principles.

Eight years prior, 16-going-on-17 Marianne Conway fell in love with 24-year-old Logan Tate. For six weeks, she wore his engagement ring , wildly in love. Then his bottom-feeder brother whispered lies in their ears, and hot-tempered, impulsive Marianne threw Logan’s ring back at him, and Logan walked away for good.

Marianne never got over it. She moved to London, dated rarely and briefly, and basically shut down her emotional and sexual side.

At the story’s opening, Marianne is visiting her mother. She walks her old haunts, hoping at long last to bury ghosts, but instead the ghost is made flesh. Logan Tate has come back. He has recently returned from Africa, a widower, and needs a mother for his little girl, Jilly. She is blonde and blue-eyed, like the h. Logan offers an MoC.

Marianne is agonized by his return and his offer. He is cynical and harder than the youthful Logan she knew. They clash from the start, and she pretends to be more worldly than she is. His cool offer hurts her on a deep level, and, after agreeing initially to think about it, she refuses (after a savage, hot kiss that scares our vulnerable h).

But when she is ruthlessly tricked into meeting his young daughter, Jilly, she’s caught by her enduring love for the H and her sympathy for the little girl. She agrees to the MoC. Logan tells her that they’ll lead separate lives other than co-parenting.

They marry, a church wedding. She wears blue (hurt when he says white would be inappropriate). That night, they listen to music together and fall asleep in the living room. She wakes entwined with him and they share a tender moment before he leaves her. And so it begins.

The next morning, he is unwelcoming and annoyed by her references to their “honeymoon.” She gets upset and leaves, changing from a sophisticated outfit into casual clothes and sees in the mirror her former self: “challenging, defying the world.” She thinks maybe she can discard the regret of the past 8 years; he may not love her but he married her.

They go to the beach. He soon angers her by implying she is promiscuous (as she has suggested). He calls her his chattel, goading her, and she begins to hit him, and he lays her flat on the sand, her wrists above her head, and won’t let her go until she gets it straight “who is master here,” making her admit that he is in charge. She’s turned on (LP h’s are so subby!) but he let’s her go and moves away. She humiliated and upset, and goes for swim alone. A young man hits on her, and since she’s angry, she encourages him a little. Logan has swum out unseen, and punishing kisses ensue, and he forces her again to admit that he’s in charge. He warns her about encouraging men under his nose.

Back home, he is remote. She calls her mother in tears. “Think of the little girl,” her mother tells her, “maybe she’ll bring you together.” Attraction/repulsion—days of mostly conflict until she finally tells him despondently that she can’t take another quarrel with him. She goes to leave, but he tells her he feels like “a woman’s company” and starts to kiss her “persuasively and possessively,” to their mutual pleasure. The phone interrupts them; the h answers and it’s a sexy voice calling him “darling” and “honey.” Logan dismisses the h and takes the call.

The woman on the phone is Logan’s colleague, Coral Morland. Jilly says the beautiful Coral “likes Daddy—I heard her say once that she loved him.” Marianne tucks Jilly in and spends the rest of the evening tormenting herself about Coral and feeding her own insecurities.

She’s despondent, then resentful. Logan invades her bedroom looking sexy and rakish. She sarcastic and angry, objecting to “being cuckolded” so soon in her marriage. She’s in a rage, and he drags her into his connecting bedroom so Jilly won’t hear them fighting. She is even more furious and tells him she wants an annulment and throws her rings into his face.

He’s had enough, “a man consumed by a burning rage … a ruthless pursuit of revenge.” He starts to ravish her, and she’s frightened, because he thinks she is experienced. She pleads with him, telling him it’s her first time. “His hand lifted and a strange gentleness crept into his look as he stroked her hair back. ‘All right,’ he said softly, ‘so now I know. I’m the first. But you won’t stop me now, chick. There’s no going back.’” They make love, and she’s “lost in his ardor.”

The next day she wakes to a terse note saying he’s gone to the lab. His colleague's wife, Mina, comes by. She warns the h about Coral and tells her to fight for her man. Marianne agrees to help out in the village charity shop. She meets Quentin Royle, the gentlemanly potential OM, an antiques dealer.

She doesn’t see the H the day after their hookup—she feels too shy to invade his cottage. Mina calls and asks the h to take some books to the lab. We meet OW Coral Morland, who has come-hither eyes and a superb figure. When Marianne is leaving, Coral mocks her that Logan will be late getting home. “However late he is he’ll almost certainly wake me up,” Marianne snarks back, even though it’s unlikely.

Logan doesn’t come home that night, calling the next morning to say he was at the lab. The h is sarcastic and disbelieving. He jibes that she can’t possibly think he committed adultery, and the h spits fire at him like the hot-headed teen he once knew, telling him infidelity works both ways.

That night, he comes into her room again. She asks what he wants, and he says, “a woman”-- company in his bed, her company. She protests, but he scoops her up, and she pleads with him, not like this, without love, and he tells her he just wants to sleep with her platonically, and so they do.

The next morning, she wakes to find a “smiling man with provocative eyes… gazing down at her.” He teases her and she laughs and almost tells him that she loves him. The rare warm moment is interrupted by a panicked Jilly, who thinks that this mummy has disappeared, just like her real mummy did. “I’m your mummy now,” Marianne reassures her. “But only a pretend one,” Jilly tells her. And Marianne’s fleeting feeling of hope is swept away by the depressing realization that she is a pretend wife, a pretend mother, with no real place in this family.

Logan goes to work without saying goodbye. He calls her later to ask her to make up a fourth at dinner with him and Coral and a male colleague. Marianne declines—she has plans to see Quentin (she is typing his book for him). Logan is angry, and she she provokes him further, quoting the Dowson poem, telling him that she will be faithful to him, in her fashion.

Marianne is getting dressed to go to Quentin’s when Logan yet again walks into her room. He’s coldly angry. She gets defensive and angry too, telling him he set the terms of their marriage and what’s sauce for the gander…. He says he’ll keep her permission to commit adultery in mind. Give these two knives and they’d cut each other’s heart out. It’s brutal.

She goes home after an innocent evening with Quentin. Logan’s guests are gone. Jilly freaked, so Logan sent everyone home and stayed with his daughter. The H and h quarrel again. She says some harsh, hurtful things. He walks out.

She is sleepless, haunted by the unforgiveable things she said. She goes to his bedroom and apologizes, and he finally says he forgives her, but he is cold, unreachable. She gets into bed with him, curls up next to him, and starts to cry when he just watches her. They end up making love.

Time moves on. They don’t share a bed again. Mina tells her about a dance at the country club and advises her to tell Logan to take her. Logan agrees initially. But after another quarrel, he tells her Quentin can take her to the dance. He’ll be taking Coral. When she accuses him again of infidelity, he quotes Dowson back at her: “I shall be faithful to you…in my fashion.”

She is dressed for the dance, and Logan wanders into her room. “Do I pass,” she challenges, and he tells her she looks nothing at like the spontaneous girl he was attached to years ago. “So you don’t like me like this,” she snarks. He is bitterly angry. He pulls aside her neckline and nips her shoulder hard, marking her. She tries to slap him, but he grips her wrist and mockingly wishes her a good time, reminding her that she’s given him permission to commit adultery with Coral.

After the dance, Marianne recalls the evening. Quentin acted like a lover, pretending to kiss her. Logan was as bad, worse even, with Coral. Coral is in Logan’s cottage until well after midnight; the h hears them in his bedroom talking softly, then, after a “long silence,” a car leaving. She hopes he is just taking Coral home, but he doesn’t come home again that night.

She has lost and can’t take anymore. She asks Mina to keep Jilly until Logan can come for her. But Jilly refuses to stay, so Marianne takes Jilly with her, running away to her mom’s house.
That evening, Marianne walks to the meadow where she threw Logan’s ring back at him 8 years before; where he proposed the MoC when he came back into her life. Logan shows up. He has come to offer her a divorce. It will free her. And him, she says, and he shrugs. Jilly, she says—she only brought her because she refused to stay behind. But she’s Logan’s daughter, so of course, she must go with him.

She is not his daughter, he tells her. He was tricked into marriage -- Gaye told him she was pregnant, but after the wedding revealed she already had a baby by another man. Logan stayed married mainly for the baby’s sake. But the marriage was unhappy; Gaye was unfaithful from the start. After she died, he adopted Jilly. When Marianne asks why he didn’t tell her, he says that he was arrogant enough to think she might love his child but reject one who wasn’t his.

“You’ve never known me really, have you Logan?” she asks bitterly, and he says it hardly matters anymore. Mina told him where to find her. He called Quenton, angry, but hung up when Quentin answered, “Samaritans here.” He knew then they hadn’t had an affair. So Logan is freeing her so she can go to the man he thinks she loves. Marianne isn’t buying it: Logan slept with Coral, she says, so why be a hypocrite? What he means is that he’ll be free to go to Coral. Logan says again it’s over so she can go to Quentin. He walks away.

Marianne loses it. She throws herself into the long grass, crying hysterically, as she had 8 years before. (Oh, the angst! At her best, LP can make me lose my sh*t.) She can’t bear it, he is leaving her forever. But he isn’t—he is crouching beside her, drying her tears, comforting her.

And then comes the part that leaves so many readers breathless with rage: Marianne hears Mina’s voice in her head, telling her to cling. So she does, begging him not to leave her, she can’t live without him again. If he wants an affair with Coral, she can bear it, she loves him too much to have any pride left. I GET it. The h’s complete subjugation is hard to take; the leveling of her pride and self-worth unbearable to read. I can’t defend it, it’s appalling. But it’s a powerful scene; gutwrenching. And whether moved to empathy or to rage, the reader is hit hard—it’s effective writing by an author at the top of her game.

We get explanations and avowals of love everlasting. He didn’t sleep with Coral—he used her to make Marianne jealous. He drove her home because she was drunk then checked himself into a hotel. He rushed after Marianne the next day. He tells her that 8 years ago, he had intended to come back to her when she had grown up a little, but he’d been trapped by his marriage. They have been faithful to each other, in their fashions, all these years.

We leave our H and h lying in the summer grass, anger and bitterness burned away. Do I believe their HEA? I do—misunderstandings are resolved, and they’ve survived the worst they could throw at one another. I like to think that they’ll heal and be happy, raising their daughter within the circle of their love. But then, I’m a romantic at heart.

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the characters extremely unrealistic. Marianne, the main character is still devistated by her extremely short engagement from 8 years ago to a man that dumped her in a very demeaning way. It seems that she basically grew up with Logan and his brother. The brother was the instigator that got them together and then played the go between and ruined their relationship and they let him. Logan was 25 to her 17 when they started dating and were engaged after a week. And the parents thought that was okay? He then broke off the engagement and the relationship telling her she was immature. Hello of course she was, she was still in high school! Now it's 8 years later and she is still emotionally scared from their parting and has dated no one. The book starts with her having just quit her job becuase her boss came on to her. After reading part of the book, she is so naive, he (the boss) might have simply made a sexual joke, and not even suggesting what she thought he was. But they didn't clarify that. She quit her job and went home to her mom. Suddenly Logan appears and proposes to her, he says to take care of his daughter. She refuses him, and he asks her to at least see his cottage/house. Why? She agrees. Why?

My other problem with this part of the story is Marianne went for a walk after arriving at her mom's house, and when Logan shows up looking for her, she tells him where her daughter went. And allows him to stay at the house. After the way he treated her daughter so many years before? Nice way to sell out your own daughter.

After they get married, he treats her like dirt and she still loves him, can't live without him. He then starts acting very jealous, as if he has feelings for her still, but she doesn't realize it.

It ends up okay, but if it wasn't for the ending, I'd have thought this book was a complete waste. Sorry, but just didn't think it was that great of a story.

[Aayesha · Rating 2 out of 5]

First, this cover is gorgeous (but there was no dog though).

Second - 3 words about the heroine. Bitch, bitch, BITCH !!!!

Third, I'm never reading a book again which hasn't been reviewed by Jenny - and it has to have, specifically, a 'heroine she adores', no less. There is nothing I hate more in HPlandia than a horrid h ruining the entire story.

More to come later, am super sleepy right now

[iamGamz · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hated the h and the H in this book! She was an immature doormat and he was a cold, cruel bastard. And these two are raising a child with emotional issues together. That girl needs therapy. Get her some help!

I was left with so many questions at the end of this travesty.
- Why did his brother do his best to split them up? Is he an a$$hole because his parents named him Moss?
- Did the H bang his first wife because she looked so much like the h?
- Why the hell would you marry someone who tells you that he’s only proposing because his daughter from his first marriage looks just like you? And then tells you that it’s a marriage of convenience for him and he will cheat on you?
- And that house?! Are you serious? Two cottages with connecting doors in the master bedrooms, otherwise two separate houses. You live in one with the kid and I’ll continue my life like a free man in the other?! Hell naw! That house would have made the decision easy. Bye baby!
- Guuurl! Where is your self respect!

All this book did was irritate the f*ck out of me. This one should’ve been a miss. I could have live my life without ever reading it.

[Fre06 Begum · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tstl heroine and a cold hero who I really didn't get the feeling that he loved her.

[Dee · Rating 1 out of 5]

Curiosity got the best of me, but unfortunately I have just wasted an hour of my life that I can never get back!....This is a great reminder of why I don't like/read Harlequins written in this period, they may have been good in their day but are now far beyond outdated!

[Tmstprc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining old school HP.

[Mary-jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unrealistic it might be but i love it!
i was hooked from the start and it gets better by each chapter. There was quite a lot of jealousy and some parts were heart-wrenching.
The storyline kinda resembles "Dark Obsession by Valerie Marsh" but it was still a good best second chance romance.

[Martha B. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. I don’t like drama based on stupid misunderstanding and miscommunication that make MCs look stupid. They behaved very immature for two adult people, besides the fact that one was supposedly highly educated. The games they both played using OM and OW were tiresome. His explanations felt like BS to me. I can accept though that the heroine was too young to get married at seventeen. The role Moss had played to separate them years ago was never addressed. Why they behaved like they did eight years later I couldn’t understand .
I also thought that the daughter was too little when her real mother died to remember as many details from the past.