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Desirable Property
It wasn't really any of her businessVerity didn't approve of her married girlfriend Gussie's affair with Captain Benedict Dysart, but she wasn't personally involved. All she had to do was sell Gussie's Cotswold cottage and try to keep out of the lovers' way.It was all rather sordid, she thought. What kind of man would play around with another man's wife?Then, surprisingly, she discovered Ben wasn't quite the cad she'd imagined after all....
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
25 people want to read
About the author
Catherine George
444 books73 followersDeirdre 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 19, 2025
Catherine George's 80s romance, Desirable Property, is firmly set in familiar Harlequin territory. We have a nasty, slimy, glamorous, adulteress OW, a down-on-herself, insecure, plain Jane, good girl heroine, and the Big, Sexy Bone of a Hero they fight over.
The desirable property of the title is a lovely English cottage in the outskirts of the town of Stratford that has always been the heroine's dream house. Unfortunately for her, it is owned by the slimy OW, who wants to sell it and asks heroine to act as her realtor. h goes to the cottage per her appointment only to walk in on a disgusting seduction scene between the married OW and the “hero,” her ex-boyfriend.
The hero spends the rest of the book trying to apologize to h for the very nasty first impression he gave to her, assuring her he never went through with the affair with the OW, and that he is interested in the heroine. After much hesitation and second-best speculation on the part of h, she agrees to date H and they actually have a great time together. But when the marriage proposal finally comes, it is posed to her as a business arrangement. Seriously, it is one of the worst, non-romantic proposals in a sea of MOC stories, prompting the h to ask H why he doesn't merely hire her as his assistant instead of burdening himself with an actual wife. H dangles the tempting prospect of becoming the owner of the desirable property that h has always had her eyes on, telling her that he is the one who bought the lovely cottage from the OW, gotten rid of all her horrible pink and white decor, and wants h to renovate and decorate it to her liking as it will be their marital home.
The H and h obviously seekretly luuuuurve each other but go with the pretense of entering into a pragmatic, rational MOC because they are both too immature and insecure to reveal how they really feel. As such, they let the slimy OW manipulate them with her obvious, blatant lies that she is having a stormy affair with H and is even pregnant by him and that the MOC to the h is a convenient cover for the two lovers.
This leads to a horrible honeymoon where the H practically clubs h over the head and pounds her into the mattress (and being the Harlequin heroine that she is, she loves it) but otherwise they keep a cool, detached distance from each other, with no tenderness, affection, or even friendship.
If it wasn't for a torrential storm that all but engulfs the h’s cottage, forcing the H to swim through the ice-cold river current in nothing more than his old Marine-issued swimming trunks, this marriage would have disintegrated beyond repair.
The OW never gets her comeuppance in this book and that's always a disappointment for me :(
The desirable property of the title is a lovely English cottage in the outskirts of the town of Stratford that has always been the heroine's dream house. Unfortunately for her, it is owned by the slimy OW, who wants to sell it and asks heroine to act as her realtor. h goes to the cottage per her appointment only to walk in on a disgusting seduction scene between the married OW and the “hero,” her ex-boyfriend.
The hero spends the rest of the book trying to apologize to h for the very nasty first impression he gave to her, assuring her he never went through with the affair with the OW, and that he is interested in the heroine. After much hesitation and second-best speculation on the part of h, she agrees to date H and they actually have a great time together. But when the marriage proposal finally comes, it is posed to her as a business arrangement. Seriously, it is one of the worst, non-romantic proposals in a sea of MOC stories, prompting the h to ask H why he doesn't merely hire her as his assistant instead of burdening himself with an actual wife. H dangles the tempting prospect of becoming the owner of the desirable property that h has always had her eyes on, telling her that he is the one who bought the lovely cottage from the OW, gotten rid of all her horrible pink and white decor, and wants h to renovate and decorate it to her liking as it will be their marital home.
The H and h obviously seekretly luuuuurve each other but go with the pretense of entering into a pragmatic, rational MOC because they are both too immature and insecure to reveal how they really feel. As such, they let the slimy OW manipulate them with her obvious, blatant lies that she is having a stormy affair with H and is even pregnant by him and that the MOC to the h is a convenient cover for the two lovers.
This leads to a horrible honeymoon where the H practically clubs h over the head and pounds her into the mattress (and being the Harlequin heroine that she is, she loves it) but otherwise they keep a cool, detached distance from each other, with no tenderness, affection, or even friendship.
If it wasn't for a torrential storm that all but engulfs the h’s cottage, forcing the H to swim through the ice-cold river current in nothing more than his old Marine-issued swimming trunks, this marriage would have disintegrated beyond repair.
The OW never gets her comeuppance in this book and that's always a disappointment for me :(
November 25, 2023
Shades of PJ property porn in this. A kind of "when I saw his Pemberley" (not a euphemism). Former marine Ben makes a very unromantic proposal to estate agent/surveyor and eminently self sufficient single girl Verity. The fact that he's the ex of a school 'friend' who was offering him modern day benefits despite her marriage to someone else didn't help. It was fine.
November 21, 2019
The story begins with the H making a decision to cheat with a married woman, Augusta and is busy kissing her when he meets h who is Augusta's school friend. The h leaves H in the home that Augusta is wanting to sell. Augusta continues to pursue H and H is now busy chasing h just because she scorns him and has a low opinion of him. He even compounds it with breaking and entering into h's house at 1:30 in the night after a ball where the h was leaving with her boyfriend without so much as an invite of any kind from h. What a prize! This author's H have one thing in common - they all have very fragile egos which cannot stand it if their ex lover or the current h is the one to call off the relationship. It's ok, for the Hs to jilt but they can't stand it the other way around. And, neither can they control their libido if the h tempts them by wearing anything that is even slightly different from their usual jeans and blames them for his own lack of control on his libido.
December 29, 2025
Pick-me h. She roundly claims— to both OW and H— that she is not interested in hearing about their affair, but is hostile and judgmental to the H, even while saying “I don’t really care about what you have to say/what happened” If she didn’t care, she wouldn’t need to rub his face in it or make snide remarks every time now would she?
DNF Did not like the h
DNF Did not like the h
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews