The Wedding of the Year

St. Piran's Hospital #1

by Caroline Anderson

Your invitation to the wedding everyone in Penhally has been waiting for…

Dr. Nick Tremayne and midwife Kate Althorp have a love that's lasted a lifetime, but a love that's been unfulfilled. Apart from on one fateful night—a night so emotional, so passionate, that nothing else mattered…a night that resulted in the birth of their son, Jem!

Now this precious little boy is fighting for his life in St. Piran's Hospital. Seeing how much their son needs them could be what it takes for Nick and Kate to find their way back to each other….

If so, bells could be ringing out over Penhally Bay as the town gathers to watch Nick and Kate finally say "I do"!

Genres: Romance, Medical, Contemporary Romance, Second Chance

256 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2010

About the author

Caroline Anderson's first romance novel was published in 1991 by Mills & Boon, and she specializes in medical romances. Her most long and popular series is "The Audley Memorial Hospital", where romance is the best medicine of all. In 2002, she published the original Double Destiny Duology, where Fran Williams lives two different lifes and loves. Now, she has created a new successful series, Yoxburgh, a tycoons's series.

Caroline Anderson continues to write her romances from her home in Suffolk, England, UK.

Reviews

[Lu Bielefeld · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't feel any sympathy for the hero.
My only comment is that if he had kept the zipper of his pants closed none of this would have happened.
He had no respect for the love of our heroine and a night of drinking he made another woman pregnant and had to marry this other woman leaving the heroine with a broken heart. A one-night stand turned into a marriage full of children and regrets.
And worst of all is that our heroine living in the same town had to witness everything live and in color.
And while married he had a night of love with the heroine and made her pregnant but buried his head in the sand and ignored the son for twelve years.
No sympathy for him.
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==>Highlights<==

She couldn’t leave. She couldn’t. She’d lived in Penhally for ever, her entire life. He’d known her since she was twelve, dated her when she was fifteen and he was seventeen, left her at eighteen to go to university, intending to come back for her—but then he’d met Annabel, and everything had changed.

Kate he’d loved, all those years ago. Had loved, and lost, because of his own stupid fault.

He’d known it would come out at some time, he’d known it would be hard, but like this, with Jeremiah’s life hanging in the balance

And, boy, would they be judging, and talking, and there would be plenty to say. Nick had been well and truly married twelve years ago, at the time of Jem’s conception, and the good people of Penhally held no truck with infidelity. When they found out…

Rob Werrick was a good man, a decent man, who’d stood by her last year during her treatment for breast cancer, who’d supported her through the most dreadful days of fear and uncertainty, a role Nick had sorely wanted to play, but all he had been able to do was sit, isolated from her, and pray for her.

‘Only if you can’t avoid it. Seeing him reminds you of your human frailty, and you don’t like that.’ He didn’t. He hated the constant reminder of what they’d done that night, of how he’d betrayed Annabel, tarnished the memory of James.

‘I can’t lean on you, Nick. I won’t let myself. Every time I do, every time I think I dare, you let me down.’

Nick, the only man she’d ever really loved, keeping her at arm’s length when all she’d really wanted was for him to hold her and tell her it would be all right. Tell her that if it wouldn’t, he’d be there for their son.

‘Because I didn’t accept that he was my son. Because I was letting you down again, hiding from the truth, hoping it would go away, but it won’t, will it?

‘We don’t always get what we’re expecting in life,’ she said gently. ‘I always thought you’d come back from university and marry me and I’d have your children. Instead you married Annabel, and I married James, and we couldn’t have any, and you ended up with loads.’

Had Annabel known she wasn’t his first choice? Had she known he’d only done the decent thing and made the best marriage he could with the hand fate had dealt him?

You were always my soul mate.

[reeder (reviews) · Rating 2 out of 5]

The protagonists in The Wedding of the Year were secondary characters with tragic romantic tension running throughout the Brides of Penhally Bay series. I've only read Sarah Morgan's book from that series, so I am left wondering if the other books could possibly provide additional background information that would make this book -- this hero -- less revolting.

Here's the romance part of the story (I'm completely ignoring the medical part of the story, which details the heroine's son's treatment and recovery after sustaining serious injuries in a automobile accident...I really don't get the appeal of the dreary medical details in HQN/M&B's medical line):

Thirty plus years before the story begins, the 18-year-old hero and 16-year-old heroine were dating and in love when the hero left their Cornish village for college in London, where he got drunk during a freshman welcome week, slept with a pretty blonde, got her pregnant, and married her. Deciding to be cruel to be kind, the hero tells the teenaged heroine he had fallen in love and breaks it off with her. His wife has twins, then gets pregnant again the following year. After completing college and medical school, he eventually moves his family back to Cornwall.

"...I did everything I could to be fair to Annabel, to be good to her, because it wasn't her fault I'd got her in that mess, and she was lovely. It was no hardship being married to her, and if I didn't think about Kate, it was OK."

[Bonus fact: the above quote is the hero talking to his adult children about his marriage to their dead mother.]

Sometime after his return, the heroine marries a guy named James who dies in a tragic storm 12 years before the story begins. This storm is a community-defining event that also takes the lives of the hero's father and brother. The hero's wife sends her grieving husband to check on the heroine, who is cinematically standing on rain-lashed cliffs also grieving her husband. They have sex (they'd moved indoors by then), and she becomes pregnant. When the hero asks if the baby is his, she denies it and raises the child as her dead husband's baby. Meanwhile, she's also working as the office manager for the hero's medical practice.

"I asked you if it was my child, and you said no. And I accepted it without question, with relief, even, because I didn't ever want to have to think of that night again."

Five years before the story begins, the hero's wife dies from a ruptured appendix. We know the hero is angry and grieving because in the first book of the Penhally Bay series, he's objecting to his daughter's relationship with the doctor who failed to save her life.

Two years before the story begins, the hero apparently realizes the heroine's son is his and he...continues to ignore the child's existence. So heroic.

One year before the story begins, the heroine is dating a guy named Rob while going through a breast cancer scare. The hero comes to her house to talk with her (whether about the kid, the breast cancer, or their 30-year non-relationship, I don't know) and spies the heroine and Rob kissing in the kitchen before they turn the light off and go to her bedroom. He immediately drives off to sleep with Louise, the woman he's been seeing since his wife's death. He doesn't support the heroine through her cancer treatment, and tells himself he's ignoring her to give her relationship with Rob a chance.

"Nick, I needed you -- even if you weren't with me, I needed to know that you cared, but you never said a thing."

As is typical with the Mills & Boon medical romances, the present-day storyline is kind of overwhelmed by the details of the injured son's treatment. Plus the hero has to explain his fourth child to his three adult children (who all had stories of their own in the Penhally Bay series). Plus that unacknowledged child has some anger issues when he discovers that the dead man he thought was his father isn't his father. And the protagonists just kind of finally, flatly, pathetically get together.

If I had read the Penhally Bay series, if I had built up any sense of anticipation for this couple's long-awaited HEA, I think I would be twice as disappointed by how selfish and weak the hero is at every key point in their story. His defining emotion is guilt, and this book shows me how very selfish that emotion can be.

I'm giving The Wedding of the Year one star plus an unearned bonus star because I didn't read the lead-in series. (Hilariously, the protagonists in Sarah Morgan's The Italian's New Year Marriage Wish leave Penhally Bay for Italy at the end of their book. It's like she was sending a message to readers to get out while they can.)

[Nancy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I should have read the reviews first and spared myself this!

When I first read this, I thought it was a horrible book. Confusing. Poorly written. Spent too much of my time wondering who the heck the secondary characters were, why they were so important, and the rest of my time positively despising the weak, self-centered “Hero.”

I didn’t know you would be better served to have read the Brides of Penhally Bay Harlequin Romance Medical series first... because the backstory of this book’s “Hero” Nick and heroine Kate was actually woven through all 16 of those books. And all those secondary characters had already been introduced.

Having now read the connected Brides of Penhally Bay series, I can say that Nick the “Hero” was actually an a** for 16 books prior to this one!! Like, a total jerk — irredeemable. He showed zero emotional growth. I have NO IDEA why the heroine loved him all those years because he was short-tempered, curt, curmudgeonly, and self-absorbed all along.

It was really difficult to get past the fact that he had a ONS, cheating on the heroine the first week he was away from her when they had supposedly fallen madly in love as teenagers. That ONS resulted in pregnancy, so he dumped the heroine and then he had a long-term happy (or quasi-happy) marriage with Annabel in the same village as Kate for about 25 years. 25 years!! Just... NO.

But about 11 years before this story, Nick and Kate had sex one time in the aftermath of a huge trauma that rocked the village and Kate became pregnant. Nick was still married to Annabel at the time, and everyone presumed Kate’s baby belonged to the husband she’d eventually married once she gave up on the very-married Nick. (That husband died years ago.)

So this book, basically #17 in their story, is the focused culmination of Kate and Nick’s “love” story, after a 30-year span apart. He had not only spent about 25 of those years married to Annabel, he then was with many *other* women in the same village once he was widowed. (We met some of them in the other books.)

I mean, he could’ve turned to the supposed love of his life once he was widowed, but instead he treated the heroine (and their hidden son) like crap for years. Totally took her for granted, even as they worked together for years and she’d faced breast cancer without his support (he was too selfish to help).

The one thing that was clear throughout those 16 books and this one is that he loved his now-dead wife. He might not have been *in love* with her, but he always spoke of her respectfully and fondly, he went to pieces when she died, and her feelings were always a priority to him.

The “Hero” had put Annabel first before the heroine, even after Annabel was dead!!, and the heroine never seemed like more than a second (or worse) choice at any point in all 17 books. That the heroine was the love of his life was NEVER convincingly portrayed in this book, or any of the others.

After 16+ stories, it would have been nice to truly believe in them, but the author couldn’t/didn’t overcome all the crap this “Hero” had done for years. He seemed as self-absorbed as ever, and I didn’t buy his supposed love now.

The heroine had finally found another romantic option in the midst of those 16 other books, and I’m very sorry she didn’t pick that guy. She would have been treated light-years better, and truly loved.

HEA my a**. Such a disappointment.

[shms · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really really don't know how to rate this. Ultimately I was left with such a feeling of sadness, not joy at the hea. It felt like a partially finished book but what there was of it was good. The resolution was lacking in answering those unanswered questions and there were many but mainly around Jem and how he missed out on so many years without a dad. The attempt to share the blame between his parents see saws and left me somewhat uncertain. I didn't particularly take a liking to either MC's with the h appearing doormatish and the H a coward.

[Cc · Rating 1 out of 5]

I just thought he was a weak, weak, weak man. And don't get me started on his parenting skills. I like Caroline Andersons writing most of the time, but this story didn't do anything for me except make me mad. I didn't think it was romantic at ALL.

[A · Rating 2 out of 5]

The H is a douchebag who didn't support h during her bout with cancer, who cared more about society
and his image rather than about supporting his own son. I really wish h had chosen someone else as her partner rather than this guy. The h totally deserves someone better than him. He was also part of the one night stand when he was married. He just uses h and had been using her for the last 30 odd years! For all that the book is well written and it makes you feel so much of anger and angst on behalf of the h but I really truly wish h had chosen someone else in the end having realized H is not worthy of her at all. I wish for a different ending.

The worst chapter though was him eloquently explaining how much he loves h but the sheer arrogance of calling his feelings as love is horrible considering how many times he let down h and his own son.

[Veronica WordsAreMyDrinkOfChoice · Rating 1 out of 5]

So far not impressed. The hero is a self absorbed, weak man, the heroine a martyr doormat, and not a lover of stories with other plots going on like Josh and Megan.

Awful, qhyndo writers hate their heroines?

[Tia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did wonder what happened with these two characters and was glad to finally find out. It was a bit dull at times but enjoyable never the less.

[Tiffany · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not care for this book.

[Lindsi · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.75*

[Dhaverma · Rating 1 out of 5]

I made it about 1/3 of way through book - it's hunting for lost little boy, bickering, sniveling, why do I want to read this book?

[Ronel Wheeler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love all the Sr. Piran and Penhally books.

[Debra · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first book in this series about St Piran's. Nick and Kate have a long past. They were childhood loves. He left for uni and came back married. This broke Kate. Then years later they have a one night stand on the night her husband dies. This left her with her son. Now years later after his wife died they are brought together when it is revealed that her son is his. Now the story goes on...what will his grown children think of their father? Will they ever get their HEA ending? This story has been touched through out other books within St Piran's life time. Caroline Anderson wove this story just right.

[Kace | The Booknerd · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was bittersweet. My heart broke for them. The angst about killed me. No matter what's going in their lives, Nick and Kate can't deny the feelings they still have for one another. And by the end of the book, I was so invested in their story. I felt so connected that it felt like I was right there in the story, experiencing all feelings, hopes, and heartbreaks alongside them.

[Elli · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked it more than I thould I would, not having read the rest of the Penhally Bay books.

[Alisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

was so glad to finally get to read their story. Have been following them through the other books

[Brianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this story, especially after watching these two characters through so many ups and downs during the books of the previous continutity

[Harlequin Books]

Miniseries: St. Piran's Hospital
Category: Classic Romance