At first I was not terribly impressed with Sara Craven’s A Place of Storms. It didn’t affect me the way some of her other books do, but after a bit I found myself wanting to re-read and I enjoyed the story more each time I read it.
A Place of Storms is one of Sara Craven’s earliest Harlequin Presents novels, written in 1978 and has her trademark strong emotion and well-done characters. English Andrea and older Frenchman Blaise are interesting people we want to know although the character development is not quite as strong as in Craven’s later novels.
Andrea is used to helping her flighty cousin Clare avoid richly deserved trouble and now Clare wants her help to avoid a marriage of convenience to an unknown distant relation, Blaise. Blaise is blackmailing Clare with her letters promising to marry him, to force her into marriage even though they never met. Clare now is engaged to a wonderful man and doesn’t want any part of scandal and certainly not a temporary marriage!
What neither Clare nor Andrea know is that Blaise is desperate to marry to secure custody of his nephew from his unscrupulous ex-fiancé – who is the boy’s aunt, greedy and heartless, unwilling to marry a poor man or one with a scarred face.
Blaise lives in a crumbling chateau where every bedroom room leaks, the bathrooms are ancient and fussy and the furniture huge and is barely eking a living from his vineyards. Plus Blaise himself is scarred inside and on his face from the fire in the family’s former island plantation home that killed his brother.
Blaise isn’t a particularly attractive potential husband. Unfortunately for Andrea he is also not dumb. He researched Clare’s family before asking her to marry him and knows all about Clare, her father’s ill health and her cousin Andrea and knows immediately who Andrea is when she arrives at his chateau to retrieve Clare’s foolish letters.
Andrea is shocked to see the dilapidated state of the house and by Blaise’s intention to foist not just a marriage of convenience but a 5 year old nephew onto her cousin. She is terrified because Blaise is attractive and she recognizes the huge potential he has to hurt her emotionally. Blaise will use every trick and pressure possible to get his own way and confronts Andrea when he finds her going through his dresser, threatening endless scandal and publicity if she will not marry him. Andrea agrees, assuming that he is offering the paper marriage he offered to her cousin and that he stressed the evening she met him. Fortunately for our novel, he is intending and demanding far more, a real marriage in every way.
We now have the set up for a delicious romance: A man who is ruthless and determined to marry the woman who is determined not to lose her heart. But wait! There is still more! Sara Craven has three other characters that add complexity.
- Alan is researching the Gallic wars and lives in the chateau’s gatehouse. He is the neutral character who is a friend to Andrea and not any threat to Blaise and Andrea’s marriage.
- Five year old nephew Phillipe lost his parents and now must live with his scarred uncle; Phillipe is not a strong child, he is polite but timid.
- His aunt Simone is nasty, vindictive and cruel, tells Phillipe stories about a distant ancestor who threw his wife’s bastard son out of the tower window and makes him frightened of his uncle Blaise, claiming Blaise will kill him for the non-existent insurance money. Andrea learns only after a week or so that Simone and Blaise had been engaged until Blaise was scarred.
The author hints that Blaise was disillusioned about Simone even before he got hurt in the fire, but Simone implies that she dumped him because of the scar. There is no love lost between them now. Simone tries her best to make trouble with Phillipe and trouble between Andrea and Blaise and even tries to drag Alan into the mix. She’s the arch-Other Woman and nasty.
The real story is how Andrea and Blaise end up in love. Craven only tells us through Andrea’s eyes so we don’t get a good idea how Blaise feels. He calls Andrea “his heart” or “his love” (in French of course) and gives her a beautiful nightgown for a wedding gift and tries to seduce her a couple of time but we don’t see many loving gestures or comments. In fact he’s mean and uses kisses and threatens forced seduction to punish Andrea. He tells her to obey him and threatens but does not do violence. Try to ignore these (thankfully) outdated elements and enjoy the story.
One indicator of a good story and great characters is that I want to put myself in there, to come up with what I would say to Blaise, how I would react. He has a nasty habit of threatening Andrea sexually, and claiming the high ground. For instance, when he is trying to seduce her Blaise says “be a little merciful. Don’t force me to take you like this.” Andrea should say “No one is forcing you Blaise. If you don’t want to feel like a rapist then don’t be one!” (He wasn’t raping her, but he was trying to gain a response Andrea didn’t want to give.) Or when he tells her that he didn’t offer her a paper marriage as he did to her cousin, Andrea should have reminded him that he did exactly that the first night they met, and he claimed he knew who she was at the time. OK, I’m splitting hairs here but some of these overly domineering types give me a pain!
Sara Craven creates a moody, atmospheric setting too, using the gloomy old chateau set in a gorgeous hilly region of France to heighten the tension. Andrea tries to brighten the place with lighter paints and fabrics while Simone uses the setting and old history to frighten Phillipe.
Overall, on second or third or fourth reading I have to give this one 4 stars. I got my copy from Thriftbooks.com and as of this writing Amazon has copies but it is not available on Archive.org.
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