Dark Enchantment

Dark Enchantment is a 1986 Mills & Boon romance by Helen Bianchin, published as a 189-page paperback and also issued in a large-print edition. It is a contemporary romance whose obstacle is money and the control that comes with it.

Kris Laurensen has grown up inside a family fortune that organises everything around her. Her stepmother and Jared Chayse, the guardian appointed to manage the family's affairs, have arranged that she should marry Jared, an alliance that would consolidate a financial empire. Kris has no say in the matter as it is presented to her, and her own feelings about the man are complicated enough that she cannot simply refuse on the grounds of dislike.

The novel opens with her return to Sydney after finishing school in Europe, at the point where she wants to experience independence and is instead being asked to consider a life bound to a man who may never return her feeling. Wealth as a trap rather than a privilege is the book's central idea, and the romance has to be worked out inside it. It sits with Bianchin's other titles for the same publisher.