The Black Hunter (Harlequin Romance, 2187)

by Jane Donnelly

Book Overview

Coll Sullivan had been just as self-assured when he was a boy in rags. Now he was a man with power, and he oozed arrogance. He had bought their old family home, but why did he want her, too?... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0373021879
• ISBN13: 9780373021871
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: Harlequin
• Length: 187 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

One of my Favorite Harlequins of the 1970's

I read a ton of Harlequins from the 1970's and 80's. Most of them were forgettable, or you wanted to strangle the characters. This is one of a handful I thought well of, probably due to the back-story, and the fact that the hero and heroine were close in age - 4 years apart. (You get tired of the 15-20 year age difference in some of these novels). Coll Sullivan was a childhood friend of Dora's brother Simon, but she had hated and resented him while growing up. Back then he had been a poor gypsy boy and they had been wealthy and indulged kids who lived in a mansion. Coll has arrived in town again after a ten year absence and he is a man with a mission. Their money situations are reversed, Coll is a wealthy man, Simon a struggling antiques dealer, and Dora a secretary who lives in the small lodge of the family mansion. The mansion itself has been sold and resold over the years, and the first thing Coll does is buy it. The second thing he does is ruin Dora's relationship with her fiance. The reader doesn't resent this because the fiance is an unappealing mama's boy with trust issues. The third thing Coll does is enlist Simon and his wife's expertise in buying period furniture for the mansion. He wants the house restored to the way he remembers it when he use to visit them as kids. But it's his fouth move that sets up the tension. Coll proposes to pay off the mortgage on the antique shop, IF Dora comes to work for him for six months as his housekeeper/secretary. To Simon and his wife its an obvious decision, but to Dora who has hated him for the past ten years and suspects (rightly) that he has an alterior motive, she won't do it. She does do it though, her brother's financial situation is worse than she knew and she is in a position to help him and his family. Ten years before, when Dora was sixteen and Coll was twenty, she had been on the verge of falling in love with him. But Dora's pearl necklace went missing the same night Coll had admired it, and when she had accused him of taking it he had challenged her to prove it. It had been obvious to her that he hated her and over the years she has come to hate him too. Now Dora suspects that her necklace had helped him in his quest to become wealthy, she thinks he wants to humiliate her for what happened years ago, and she doesn't trust him to not swindle her brother. Over the course of the novel we see Dora's opinion of Coll change. She comes to believe he didn't take her necklace and she starts to fall for him again. But what happened when her necklace disappeared? And what are Coll's plans for Dora, and how can she escape them without breaking her heart all over again?