This HaBO request is from Tam, who wants to find this particular romance for a friend. Please be warned that there are potentially triggering plot details below:
About ten years ago, I read a romance novel (I want to say it was from the Mills and Boon line, one of the contemporaries) about a couple who fell in love after being named joint guardians of her brother’s children – the hero was the brother’s best friend, and they all grew up together in the same small town.
The deceased brother was your typical golden boy, except that he’d been secretly abusing his sister, and no one knew. I remember that the heroine only tells the hero near the end of the book, and he’s violently ill at the thought of his best friend being capable of such things. It also comes out that the best friend committed suicide (he died in a supposed hiking accident) when he realised that the same urges were manifesting towards his young daughter.
The other things I remember about the book were the hero describing what their first date would have been like, if they’d dated in high school, and just holding hands (maybe kissing) on their wedding night, nothing more.
I mentioned the book to a survivor friend of mine, and she expressed an interest in reading it, except I can’t remember the title or author for the life of me. Any help finding it would be much appreciated!
These details sound pretty unforgettable. Does anyone know this book?
Sounds a little bit like Table for Five by Susan Wiggs. Except the hero is the brother of the dead father, and the heroine is the friend of the dead mother. Not sure about the abuse, but there was something dark going on with the dead parents.
Definitely not Table of Five… there wasn’t an abuse issue in the story. And Sean McGuire in Table for Five is one of my favorite cads turned H! 🙂
While I immediately thought of Table of Five, I also rejected it as soon as the abuse issue came up. I’d be interested to read this book because I’d like to see how the heroine heals from her abuse.
Is it maybe a Janice Kay Johnson Superromance? A lot of her books deal with very heavy subject matter.
In The Word of a Child, the heroine’s marriage falls apart after her husband is accused of sexually abusing a child – the hero is the detective investigating the case, and they get together several years afterwards. The heroine has a young daughter.
Or maybe it’s A Match Made in Court? Hero & Heroine are granted joint custody of their niece after her parents (hero’s sister, heroine’s brother) die in a tragic and suspicious accident.
If you’re up for a heavy but cathartic read, Janice Kay Johnson is great. Quite a few of her books have characters dealing with traumatic incidents in their past, and she treats the storylines and the characters with sensitivity and care. I really enjoyed the trilogy about three siblings adopted out to separate families. And I’m not a fan of the ‘falling in love with my best friend’s widow/er’ trope but she made it work in With Child.