A Dangerous Magic

A Dangerous Magic is a Harlequin Romance by Patricia Wilson, published as a 187-page paperback and listed in the record under the Hitched! series with a small-town setting. The story takes the marriage-of-convenience form and states its terms immediately: a rancher proposes, and the proposal is honest about what is and is not on offer.

Zade Mackensie is described as a man of solitude and strength, the kind of figure a small town notices; Catrina is a librarian who never expected to marry a rancher at all. He wants a wife because a companion would suit the life he has built on a Montana ranch, and he makes no secret of that reasoning. She accepts knowing that love is not part of the arrangement, which puts the whole emotional burden of the book on what the two of them do afterwards.

The plot is therefore a persuasion: Catrina loves him and has to work out how to change his mind without pretending that she does not. Wilson wrote many novels for the Harlequin Romance line, and this one keeps to the standard machinery of the format, a short book, a rural setting and a single problem that has to be solved by character rather than by event.