This HaBO comes from Emmy, who’s hoping to find two books:
My school library stocked these romance novels with very large print fonts, and usually pastel blue or pink colored covers. I am actually looking for two novels – one had a heroine whose dead husband had been a spy and she was scarred because he had been abusive. Enter our hero who is a spy himself and needs the heroine’s help in stopping South China Sea pirates, which our heroine had done research on.
In the meanwhile, they pretend they’re married, he buys her an extremely expensive black opal ring, they fall in love, and when the pirate leader asks her to show her devotion, she agrees to slice off her little finger for the hero’s sake. Ring a bell, anyone?
The second novel had our hero and heroine infiltrate a dubious pseudo-communist country to search for her lost father. They dance the csardas, he calls her ‘gypsy’ a bunch of times (UGH), and then he gets caught so she and her dad can flee. And later they are reunited after the hero’s country ransoms him back or something.
I am being driven mad, since my Google-fu is not working. HELP!
Not sure if the second romance is related to the first or not.
The first one sounds like an Elizabeth Lowell. Will have to research which one.
I hope you find your HaBO, but hold up–your school stocked romance novels? What gloriously relaxed society did you grow up in?
The closest we got to tales of romance was a red-faced gym teacher pouring a blender full of sugar into a tray to demonstrate the amount of sperm just flying about willy-nilly on any given date with a teenage boy.
Maybe Pearl Cove but Elizabeth Lowell?
This isn’t exactly the same, but there are pirates, a widowER and an opal ring. “Captainess”? https://tinyurl.com/y7t5wtct
I believe the second one is “Gypsy Dancer” by Kathleen Creighton!
Lindsay McKenna’s Heart of the Tiger has a black opal, a couple pretending to be married and the heroine is commanded to cut her finger off to prove her devotion to the hero. I read it in 1988 the first time it came out (it has been reissued since) and I still vividly remember the part where she takes the knife and tries to decide if she should cut her finger off at the joint or try to cut through the bone.
The second one sounds a lot like a Helen MacInnes plot (MacInnes’ romantic suspense novels are favorites of my mom’s; having only read a few of them, I’m afraid I can’t get more specific, but people DO tend to spy sexily in vaguely-identified Eastern Europe in them.)
I have no idea what these two books are, but I am bemused by a man giving a pretend wife an expensive ring.
As for books in high school… romance did not exist as we know it today. The raciest books in our public library were Emilie Loring, Mary Stewart. somebody Yerba or Yerby and a long series of very fat books about an unfortunate Frenchwoman named Angelique. Who wasn’t.
However, the high school library had the Tale of Genji which is pretty damn explicit.
Sorry to go off topic, but @Gloriamarie, do you mean the Angelique books by Sergeanne Golon? I loved those books and they were pretty racy for the day. I’d love to see new–and complete–translations of them. Sadly, Anne Golon just died last month.
And I never read the Tales of the Genji, but I did read a biography of Lady Murasaki, the author. I’ve been looking for a replacement copy of my misplaced book.
Your school library wasn’t too shabby if it had those books.
@Susan, I have no idea who wrote the Angelique books but there were a bunch of them, in the public library, not the high school library. As I recall, Angelique was married to her One True Love but life kept separating them and she would do what she had to do to survive I recall her being a Puritan in New England, living through the French Revolution and I think, the Terror.
The Tale of Genji was in the high school library.