The Darker Side Of Loving

The Darker Side of Loving is a 1986 Mills & Boon romance by Yvonne Whittal, published as a 189-page paperback and filed under contemporary romance. The book puts its couple into a shared working arrangement, which is the device that keeps them together after an unpromising first meeting.

Amy Warren is a partner in Aloe Tours, a business that runs organised trips through the South African countryside, and Luke Tanner becomes someone she has to work with whether she wants to or not. Four years earlier a tragedy ended her marriage, and the novel treats her caution as the consequence of that experience rather than as a temperament. She is determined to keep the professional relationship narrow. His parting words after their first evening sound to her more like a threat than a promise, and the novel spends the rest of its length testing that reading.

The difficulty is her own attraction. Whittal wrote many titles for Mills & Boon, several of them set in southern Africa, and this one uses the touring business to move the pair through a landscape while keeping the emotional problem firmly between the two of them.