A Family Secret

by Catherine George

A face from the past...

Catherine had come to the glorious Minho region of Portugal to see her friend Ana married. She never dreamed that she'd find Ana's older brother, Conde Eduardo Barroso, so magnetic--or that she'd be a key player in the drama that Eduardo and Ana's family had kept hidden for years!

There was no doubt that Eduardo found Catherine intriguing, too, but the more she found out about Isabel--her haunting double from Eduardo's past--the more Catherine felt she had to pull away from him and the affair he offered. Or could love really banish the shadows from a family's past?

192 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published July 1, 1995

About the author

Deirdre Matthews was born in a village on the Welsh-English border, where the public library featured largely in her life. Her mother, who looked upon literature as a basic necessity of life, fervently encouraged her passion for reading, little knowing it would one day motivate her daughter into writing her first novel.

At 18, she met a future Engineer, who had set in a pendant a gold sovereign, that his grandmother put in his hand when he was born, and she have never taken off since. After their marriage he swept her off to Brazil, where he worked as Chief Engineer of a large gold-mining operation in the mountains of Minas Gerais, a setting which later provided a very popular background for several of her early novels. Nine happy years passed there before the question of their small son's education decided their return to Britain. Not long afterward a daughter was born, and for a time she lived a fulfilled life as a wife and mother who always made time to read, especially in the bath!

Her husband's job took him abroad again, to Portugal, West Africa, and various countries of the Middle East, but this time she stayed home with the family. And spent a lot of lonely evenings in between the reunions when her husband came home on leave. "Instead of reading other people's novels all the time," he suggested one day, "why not have a shot at writing one yourself?" So she did.

But first she took a creative writing course. Encouraged by the other students' enthusiasm for her contributions, she decided to try her hand at romance, and read countless Mills & Boon novels as research before writing one herself. Her first novel was accepted in 1982 as Catherine George, which Romantic Times voted best of its genre for that year, along with more than sixty written since.

These days son and daughter have fled the nest, but they return with loving regularity to where she and her husband back for good from his travels live, with Prince, the most recent Labrador, in a house built at the end of Victoria's reign in four acres of garden on the cliffs between the beautiful Wye Valley and the River Severn.

Reviews

[Naksed · Rating 2 out of 5]

AKA Haunting Alliance

English heroine resembles Portuguese hero's long-dead crush, his distant cousin who tragically drowned when she was 18. He pursues heroine relentlessly but she doesn't want to be a substitute to a dead woman (can't blame her!). After he convinces her that the dead woman of his teen years was an unrequited crush and he loves her for her, her mind, her heart, her soul and not just her pretty packaging, she almost gives in to their mutual attraction BUT THEN the second roadblock appears: Are they related???!!!

For REASONS, she suspects her mom, a never-married single mom who has stayed suspiciously silent about heroine's never-seen biological father, had an affair with hero's long-dead older brother *face palm* Heroine goes back to England distraught but it isn't until after a long month that she confronts her mom and her mom puts her mind at ease. Her father wasn't hero's brother. No, he was just a student at the school where heroine's mom taught. They had a teacher-student 3 week affair then he enlisted in the war in Vietnam and he died. What. The. Hell????

But the fact that her mom was a Mary Kay Letourneau type doesn't faze the heroine or the hero since they can now be together. As to them being related? It turns out they are!!! But not in the way they thought. It was his great-grand-aunt or some such who eloped with heroine's great-grand-uncle making them distantly related cousins. Which explains why everyone in the family thought the heroine looked familiar. She looks like hero's long-dead brother.

I have a headache now :(