The Wade Dynasty

The Wade Dynasty is a 1986 Harlequin Presents title by Carole Mortimer, published as a 189-page paperback. The imprint specialised in short, intense romances with a powerful male lead and a heroine who has to decide how much of herself to risk.

The story opens on a refusal. Brenna turned Nathan Wade down a decade earlier, at the point where she discovered that his interest in marrying her lined up with his interest in the family property, and she has measured the relationship by that discovery ever since. The wedding that started everything was not hers: it was her mother's marriage to Nathan's father, an event that ended her parents' marriage for good and moved her into a household and a landscape she had not chosen.

A crisis in the family brings her back to the ranch, and the novel spends its length on the gap between her resentment and her wanting. Alberta ranch country gives the book its furniture and its economics, since land and control of it are what the marriage would have been about. It is a second-chance romance in the strict sense, with the first chance already over before the first page.