Love's Encore

Two years ago, Camille Jameson and Zack Prescott shared a single night of passion. Now Camille has the chance of a lifetime - the opportunity to renovate Mississippi's proudest plantation house. The decorator accepts the dream job, not knowing that it's the Prescott family who has commissioned her. Or that Zack, the man she couldn't forget, would be there daring her to risk heartbreak - and love - again.

Original Publisher: Dell
Original Year of Publication: 1981
Page Count: 185

What a bizarre book. It started off well enough, but then took a turn to left field and more or less completely lost me.

Camille Jameson is a burgeoning interior decorator in Atlanta. She is hired by a wealthy old Southern gentleman to completely refurbish his beloved house Bridal Wreath in Natchez, MS. She is excited about the job, until she arrives and realizes that said Southern gentleman is the father of Zachary Prescott, the man she'd had a one-night-stand with two years prior during a ski trip to Utah.

Camille is a weird woman. She considers herself to be desperately in love with Zack, but ran away from him after their night together, feeling ashamed and humiliated to have given her virginity to him, a virtual stranger, when it should've been a special gift for her future husband (gag gag gag). She left him without a word, and wants to leave him again, but considering Zack's father is at the end of his life and his last wish is to restore his home, she agrees to stay and complete the job.

So these two basically flit and flirt with each other, and that's all well and good, until Zack's grandfather overhears them talking about their one-night-stand in Utah and decides that since Zack took Camille's virginity, he ought to marry her, like any gentleman would after compromising a girl. So he sets up and wedding and ambushes them, forcing them to go through with it - and they do. It was so weird, and so contrived. The marriage of convenience trope was totally not the right one to use here, and it basically ruined the second half of the story.

The other thing that ruined it was Camille's incredible stupidity. The entire novel is from her POV, so we never get inside Zack's head to understand why he's so attracted to her, which frankly would've been helpful because she is about as dumb as a box of rocks. She constantly jumps to the wrong conclusion about everything, and stubbornly refuses to tell him that she loves him, and gee, if only he'd say that back to her would she willingly accept his embraces. Even a secondary character basically telling her outright that he's been in love with her since their one-night-stand goes completely over her head. She makes herself and him absolutely miserable because she's too childish to just open her damn mouth and get what she wants.

There's a rocks-fall-everyone-dies moment before the two declare their love for each other in the final few pages and live happily ever after. I'm certainly glad this author went on to write 50+ more books, because I shudder to think what would've happened if she'd been limited to only a few and tried to shoehorn every trope in existence into them, as she does here o.O

⭐⭐