Runaway Fiancee

Runaway Fiancee is a 1998 Harlequin Presents romance by Sally Wentworth, published as a 186-page paperback and also issued in large print.

Milo's engagement collapsed a week before the ceremony, and the woman he was going to marry reappeared in public attached to somebody else, which is the humiliation the story opens on. He spends a year locating her, and when he does the novel becomes a negotiation about an explanation. Paige has reasons he has not guessed, and the book withholds them while showing how much damage the unanswered question has done to both of them.

The romance is therefore a reconciliation rather than a courtship, and it depends on whether Milo can hear the answer without treating it as a grievance of his own. Wentworth wrote many titles for the Harlequin lines through the 1980s and 1990s, and this one uses the publisher's standard length and pace, with the couple's history doing the work that a longer novel might spend on events. It appeared in Harlequin's The Big Event series, a line built around weddings and the other occasions a short romance can be hung on.