These two romances by Penny Jordan feature likeble characters facing echoes from their past filled with emotional bludgeons.
Gemma in Hired by the Playboy has rich, snobby parents with whom she has little in common. Years earlier she had made friends with Luke from the wrong side of the tracks, an older guy that she spent a summer sharing everything she had picked up about the construction industry and polite etiquette. Their summer friendship ended when she asked him to teach her how to kiss in case her brother’s friend should be interested. Of course that spawned emotional trouble for her!
Now Luke is rich and even her mother invites him to larger gatherings. Gemma never realizes that Luke had been on the edge of falling in love with her years earlier and believes Luke only tolerates her. Events progress, the two fall into bed and end up married.
Unspoken Desire is less believable from both a plot and an emotional perspective. Rebecca was in love with older 2nd cousin Fraser and when she was 18 Fraser’s bother Rory had an affair while his new wife was expecting twins and convinced Rebecca that she should take the fall with Fraser as the other woman. Of course Fraser was livid and full of contempt for Rebecca; she naively thought he’d realize that the story was a lie and that Rory was sleeping with Fraser’s girlfriend, not with Rebecca.
The action centers around Rory’s 8-year old twins whom Rory ignores; the only use he has for his children is if he can use them as weapons to hurt Fraser, the brother he hates. Eventually Fraser learns the truth about Rebecca and he and Rebecca end up married and with the twins.
Both novels are preposterous in terms of plot and both have over-the-top emotional stories. Yet they work. Author Jordan makes us care about these people and her excellent secondary characters.
For example, Gemma’s snobby mother and father are stereotypes, true, but Jordan makes them people we can visualize acting as these do. Little snippets give the story verisimilitude. For example, Gemma learned to ride as a child but when her mother realized the other students in her riding class were from families just like theirs – and not the country gentry – she lost interest in Gemma’s riding. Why spend the time and money to ride if it won’t result in social advancement? This is a good way to show us snobbery instead of telling us.
Rory, the twins and Aunt Maud are great characters in Unspoken Desire. Rory is a cad, selfish, uncaring, jealous, hating, but charming. The twins are alone, essentially abandoned by their parents and reliant on Fraser, Aunt Maud and each other for any friendship or caring. Jordan shows us how they act.
Jordan makes good use of sexual awareness that simmers just below the surface and gets in the way of the two main characters as they try to navigate through painful memories. In both books she allows the characters to come together; making love initially causes even more problems that eventually get explained away.
I’m going to give both books 3 stars for the emotional content.
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