Born out of Love [Paperback]

BACK COVER: Charlotte stared at the man through a mist of confusion. It was Logan. An older Logan, of course, but unmistakably the man who had ravaged her emotions and then abandoned her all those years ago.

She ought to feel angry. She ought to feel resentful and cheated. Instead, she was apprehensive--terrified at the complications he could create.

"We are not through, Charlotte," he told her flatly. "I sometimes think we haven't even begun."

REVIEW: The original copyright for this book is 1977, although I think I have had my copy since about 1983. This is a sad story, and one that I thought for a while could not be resolved. The bottom line is that an older man, Matthew Derby, had been in love with Charlotte's mother during the war, but she had loved and chosen an air corpsman for her husband. Both of Charlotte's parents were killed when she was young, and Matthew took her under his wing, keeping her from being raised in an orphanage.

Matthew works for a local university, and, as Charlotte grows into maturity, she becomes a teacher for a local pre-school. Enter Logan Kennedy. Logan is from Brazil, but is studying for a time at the university, and Matthew becomes interested in his work. One night, he invites the young Logan home for dinner, where he meets Charlotte, and inevitably, they fall in love. Charlotte is torn between love for Logan and duty to the older Matthew, who is possessive and ultimately, is making Charlotte pay for her mother's jilting him. Charlotte becomes pregnant with Logan's child, but it is years before she learns the great extent to which Matthew has gone to ensure that the lovers never meet again.

Finally Matthew dies, and then the story truly begins. Unknown to Charlotte, Logan has kept a distant eye on her for years, and under the guise of offering the new widow a job with a home for herself and her son, he invites them to San Christobal, the island that is the home base for his marine biology.

This is a tense story of lies, twists and impossibly situations, not all of which I liked, and it took most of the book to unravel them. I gave it five stars, however, because I felt the characters were truly in love, and despite impossible odds, they finally came to love each other and their son in the end...and after all, aren't happy endings what romance novels are all about? You must have patience, but in the end, this is a great story! Enjoy!

Spoilers**********

This book shows how much un-pc the older HP books were willing to be. Although I still don't quite understand why Charlotte feels she has to leave, she does leave the island while Logan is away and actually leaves behind her son. She tells herself that her son deserves to have a father now and so returns to London alone. It's quite unheard of in today's HPs. Obviously everything works out, this being the HP universe.

But really, 11 years? Ms. Mather often reunites her h/h after prolonged periods. But sometimes that time seems stretched too much.