Master of Moonrock

Master of Moonrock is a 1972 romance by Anne Hampson, published by Mills & Boon as a 187-page paperback.

Loren Knight is placed under the guardianship of Thane Benedict, who is to have charge of her until she is twenty, and the arrangement takes her to Moonrock, his cattle station in the middle of the Australian outback, for the next two years. Thane is presented as formidable and ruthless, and the guardianship gives him authority over a girl who was given no say in it. The estate is the setting the book works with: it is far enough from any town that nobody can intervene, and Loren's objection has nowhere to go. Hampson wrote a great many novels with remote settings for Mills & Boon, and this is one of the earlier examples.

The plot thickens with arrivals. Loren's cousin Janet comes to stay and falls in love with Thane, which Loren finds suspicious rather than romantic, and there is a further complication in the figure of Felicity Bradon. Two women, one guardian and an isolated property give the novel its shape, and the heroine's task is to work out what the adults around her are actually doing before it is done to her.