Heaven's Price

Heaven's Price is a 1983 contemporary romance by Sandra Brown, published under a category imprint. Its heroine is a dancer, and what is at stake in the book is her body as a working instrument rather than her reputation.

Blair Simpson has organised her life around dance to the exclusion of nearly everything else, and the novel opens at the point where an injury threatens that arrangement. Sean Garrett is the man who treats her, and the physical work of rehabilitation is also the way the book introduces intimacy, since the massage that restores her legs is described as an act of attention she cannot easily refuse.

The question the novel poses is whether she can afford the price of love, and the answer requires her to separate the discipline that made her a dancer from the isolation it produced. This early title belongs to the shorter contemporary form Brown was writing first, published under a category imprint rather than as a standalone novel, and the rehabilitation material is what gives the romance its physical stakes. The setting is Long Island, and the rehabilitation is written as a physical intimacy rather than a medical interval. Blair is a ballet dancer whose body had never betrayed her before the injury, which is what makes the recovery a question about her work and not only about her health.