Lifelong Affair

Lifelong Affair is a 1983 Mills & Boon romance by Carole Mortimer, published as a 192-page paperback.

Morgan is told by a television bulletin that her sister, her sister's husband and everyone else aboard had died, and that turns out to be wrong. Her baby nephew survived, and custody of him passes to her. Alex Hammond has been appointed a guardian on the other side, and the family behind him is described as vengeful, which means the dispute over the child is really a dispute about which of them is fit to have him.

The romance develops out of that contest, with affection for the baby as the ground the two of them share while everything else is in dispute. Mortimer wrote for Mills & Boon for decades and this is one of her early titles for the line, using a short, tightly focused structure in which a single practical crisis forces two people into contact and holds them there until they can agree. Courtney is the whole of the argument: the sister's dying wish and the Hammond family's claim are two readings of one guardianship, and neither side can test the other's fitness to parent without living alongside the baby.