The Waiting Man

The Waiting Man is a 1986 Mills & Boon romance by Jeneth Murrey, published as a 189-page paperback and recorded under contemporary romance. The book's problem is safety rather than courtship: a woman in hiding, a man sent to find her, and an offer that solves one danger while creating another.

Eden Nairn has kept out of her grandfather's reach since her son was born, because the boy is the estate's only male heir and the old man is described as tyrannical. Brett Allard is the person sent to locate her, and her first assumption is that he has come for the child. He offers marriage instead, explaining that he has his own reasons to want the grandfather's power broken, and proposing a match that would give her standing he does not otherwise have.

She needs protection and distrusts the arrangement, particularly because Brett is exactly the sort of man she could fall for, and the book works through that contradiction. The Northumbrian setting provides the isolation that makes her position dangerous, and the title's waiting figure is the man who has spent time looking for her. It is a compact category romance with marriage as a defensive strategy rather than a happy ending in itself. The child at the centre of the dispute gives the couple a shared obligation before they have any shared feeling.