So Near, So Far

So Near, So Far is a 1986 Harlequin romance by Jessica Steele, published as a 187-page paperback and listed under contemporary romance. The office provides the whole of the setting, which lets the novel start from a professional insult on the first day and turn it into the relationship's central problem.

Elliot Quantrell opens with two slights at once: he implies that Kacie's reputation with men is poor, and he instructs her not to pursue him because he intends to remain unmarried. She nearly resigns immediately. Instead she stays, drawn by something in his manner that she cannot explain, and the book then has to work out how she can earn his approval without behaving in a way that would prove he was right about her.

The appeal of the story is that constraint. Everything they do takes place in a working office where a complaint about her conduct would be taken seriously, and so the romance has to develop inside a situation that is already unsafe for her. Steele wrote numerous titles for Harlequin, and this is a representative example of the short, single-conflict shape the line published through the 1980s. The line published through the 1980s on a short, single-conflict shape, where the obstacle is a man’s fixed idea about a woman and the resolution is his giving it up.