Freedom to Love

Freedom to Love is a 1981 Mills & Boon romance by Carole Mortimer, published as a 188-page paperback.

Adam Wild is a successful photographer with a stated philosophy: freedom is the only route to happiness, and the women in his life are companions who do not stay. Katy ends up sharing a holiday with him in the Canadian Rockies because she has no alternative, and she decides in advance not to be persuaded by him, precisely because she can see what she would be risking.

The novel is about the gap between that resolution and her actual feelings, and about whether a man who describes himself in those terms can be believed when he begins to behave differently. Mortimer wrote steadily for Mills & Boon across several decades; this early title is a short, single-relationship romance, and the mountain setting keeps the pair together in a place with no distractions and no easy exit. The holiday itself supplies the clock, since the arrangement ends when the trip does. Adam's own summary of himself is that women are playmates and that only freedom gives happiness, and the novel's question is what happens when one of them refuses the part he has written for her.