Dark Secret

Dark Secret is a romance novel by the American writer Christine Feehan, published in 2005 and part of her Dark series.

The dispute over the children has a history behind it that the novel takes seriously: Colby was illegitimate, the man she thought of as her father was disinherited by his own family for marrying her mother, and the letters he wrote asking for help went unanswered for years before his relatives discovered them. She is therefore defending not only custody but the memory of a man the family is now pretending to honour, and Rafael is simultaneously pursuing her as the woman his race's condition says is his. Feehan uses the ranch and the working life of a young woman with dependants to give the romance a practical weight, and the Carpathian rules that were established in the earlier novels are used to raise the stakes beyond a family argument. The series is one of the largest in paranormal romance, and it continued with many volumes about the same race and its extended families.