Prisoner of my desire

Prisoner of My Desire is a historical romance by the American writer Johanna Lindsey, published by Avon Books. It is set in the medieval period, in a world of inheritances, forced marriages and open violence.

Rowena Belleme is the daughter of a family whose lands have been taken over by a stepbrother, and she is given an impossible instruction: produce an heir or lose whatever claim she has left. Her decision to have a knight captured and held until he has given her a child is the central act of the novel, and the book is honest about what it means. Warrick deChaville is a warrior with lands and obligations of his own, and being imprisoned by a woman he regards as beneath his station is a humiliation he has every intention of repaying. What follows is a story about two people who begin from a position in which neither has any reason to treat the other well, and the book uses the power they hold over each other in turn to work out what any sort of agreement between them could look like.

Lindsey wrote a long series of such novels from the late 1970s onwards, and the book belongs to the subgenre in which the historical setting supplies the terms of the conflict rather than only the décor.