The Trouble with Trent!

The Trouble with Trent! is a contemporary romance by the British writer Jessica Steele, published in 1997. It was issued in the Harlequin Romance line.

Alethea is living at home with her mother, her sister and three young nieces, and the noise and the demands of the household have brought her to the point where leaving is the only thing she thinks about. When Trent de Havilland comes into her life she is relieved simply to have some adult male company for a change, and then he makes a proposal that is more than she expected: that she come and live in his house. She refuses at first, on the grounds that she hardly knows him and that any man who makes her feel the way he does is going to mean trouble. The arrangement is nevertheless part of the deal under which he has agreed to help her sister, and Alethea finds that she cannot let her family down, which leaves her sharing a house with a man she is determined to keep at a distance.

Living under the same roof makes the distance she wants between them impossible to keep, which is the situation the book sets up. Steele wrote a large number of category romances for Harlequin, and this one turns on a practical domestic arrangement that becomes something else.