Marriage on Demand

Marriage on Demand is a 2001 Harlequin Romance by Susan Fox, published as a 186-page paperback in the Contract Brides series and also issued in large print.

Rena is marrying Ford Harlow to hold on to property she is not prepared to lose, and he is marrying her to acquire it, which makes the union a transaction that both parties understand. The novel sets her expectations against his intentions. She has assumed the arrangement will be a formality and that the marriage will not be consummated; Ford, who has been interested in her for longer than she realises, has no such plan.

The book is therefore about the collision between a contract and a desire that was never written into it, and the countdown to the ceremony gives the story its shape. Fox wrote many titles for the Harlequin Romance line, and the Contract Brides sequence existed precisely to collect variations on this premise, with the heroine's mistake about what she has agreed to supplying the emotional turn. The sequence collected novels built on the same premise, and the title names the arrangement plainly, so a reader can see the shape of the story before opening the book.