Late Harvest

Late Harvest is a 1982 Mills & Boon romance by Yvonne Whittal, published as a 186-page paperback. The book's problem is legal before it is emotional, which is a device the line used to put two people who dislike each other into a shared life on the first page.

The will is the whole engine of the plot. Kate is told she and Rhyno van der Bijl will inherit the estate jointly only if they marry inside thirty days of her father's death, and she is outraged at the condition because it gives her no choice that she can live with. Her attachment to the house is what makes the refusal impossible; Rhyno's own inheritance gives him the same reason to go through with it.

He proposes treating the marriage as business rather than feeling, and the arrangement is fixed at a year, which gives the novel its countdown. The change of heart arrives late and against expectation, and the last movement turns on what happens when one of them starts making plans that leave the other out. It is a short, single-focus story of the kind Mills & Boon published in great numbers, working the marriage of convenience through the economics of a family estate.