One Night for Love

Title: One Night for Love
Author: Mary Balogh
First Printed: 1991
Purchase Date: 17th December 2005
Purchase price: £4.87
Retail price: $6.99
Purchased From: Amazon.co.uk
On book cover:

It was a perfect morning in May…

Neville Wyatt, Earl of Kilbourne, awaited his bride at the altar – when a ragged beggar woman raced down the aisle instead. The cream of the ton saw him stare, shocked, then declare that this was his wife! One night of passion was all he remembered as he beheld Lily, the woman he’d wed, loved and lost on the battlefield in Portugal. Now he said he’d honour his commitment to her – regardless of the gulf that lay between them.

Then Lily spoke her mind. She said she wanted only to start a new life – wanted only a husband who truly loved her. She had to leave him to learn how to meet his world on her terms. So Lily agreed to earn her keep as his aunt’s companion and study the genteel arts. Soon she was the toast of the ton, every inch a countess fir for the earl, who vowed to prove to his remarkable wife that what he felt for her was far more than desire, that what he wanted from her was much more than One Night for Love.

Comments on book:

I’ve always loved stories that start with childhood love or young love. Example of such stories is Lisa Kleypas’ Again the Magic and Mary Balogh’s Beyond the Sunrise. I can almost feel the yearning the couple feels for each other, as I do think that the more young and innocent their union is, the more heart wrenching and bigger the sacrifice made when they part and the more sweetly agonizing their reunion will be later in the story. This story is not really of young love but perhaps a ‘younger’ and pure love which bloomed in the middle of a war, where no titles nor inheritance nor money was taken into consideration. And plus the fact that he thought she was lost to him forever, that she had died due to his misjudgement, made their reunion very, very touching. I loved Neville Wyatt, the hero of this story. His pain was raw but he managed to contain his grief and remained composed for the sake of everything and everyone. And when he saw his ‘dead’ wife walking into the church when he was going to marry another woman, I can only try to imagine his pain and joy and confusion. And so he declared to everyone there that yes, she was indeed his wife and he took her hand and pulled her along away to the beach, where it is private and he can really look at her, without saying anything, probably composing his thoughts and feelings and the words to say to his wife he loved so dearly and thought long dead. Mrs Balogh did his character justice by describing his actions and emotions quite brilliantly.

However, I had a problem with Lily. During the period when she was thought to be dead, Lily, the heroine of the story went through a horribly long period when the Spanish partisan leader who captured her thought she belonged to one of the French officers and used her for sex. Although she showed her trauma once, when she was alone with Neville in the cottage, she would always otherwise be quite calm and serene and although the author explained her nature and character from the beginning to justify this behavioury, I worried that she was just being too strong for all the baggage she carried and that she would just turn to be deeply scarred and incurable. But of course, the author made her to be just so very at peace with the world that she was able to overcome everything. To do the author justice however, Lily did spill all the horrors she went through to Neville for some closure of that episode of her life but somehow it did not satisfy me. I needed her to cry and scream and kick and yell and punch and breakdown just for a few minutes before she can resume her life for it to be more believable, at least to me.

In conclusion, although the plot of this story in my opinion was good albeit a little predictable, the main characters and their feelings were also very well written but for the development of Lily’s emotions which I mentioned above and this made this story just a little short of brilliant.

Rating: 7/10 - A very good read - a must before reading its sequel; A Summer to Remember and the Bedwyn/Slightly series that follow.