A Man Possessed

A Man Possessed is a 1986 category romance by Penny Jordan, published by Mills & Boon as an English-language paperback of 189 pages. It belongs to the second-chance pattern that the line used often: two people with a shared past, one wound, and a fresh situation that forces them to reopen it.

Kate Hammond offered herself to Dominic Harland eight years before the novel opens, while she was still unhappily married, and was turned down in a way she experienced as humiliation rather than honesty. The pain outlasted the marriage. By the time Dominic reappears she has decided that a life without men is the safer arrangement, and she is in the middle of two practical upheavals, selling a house and starting a business, that the return of the past interrupts.

The book runs on the difference between what Kate remembers and what she comes to understand, and on her fear of the feeling that replaces her anger. Mills & Boon published a great many novels of this length and shape in the 1980s, and this is one of them: a short, tightly focused story in which the emotional problem is the plot.