All it takes is one word, infertile, to send eighteen-year-old Jess’s world crashing down. It haunts her. The hit-and-run injuries have healed but the emotional scars are permanent. IVF is out of the question. Not that she wants children now, not with university beckoning.
Then her parents are left five million in her aunt’s will. What they don’t tell Jess is that she is to inherit ten million when she’s twenty-one, once she has graduated.
She meets Dan, a streetwise young journalist, who makes her tingle in all the right places. He sweeps her off her feet, determined to seduce, woo and wed her. It takes all Jess’s courage to wait till they are married to reveal her secret.
Now Jess really does want a baby. Enter Marti Lomax, an American sculptress living in the UK who comes across as the perfect surrogate – but she is a woman with secrets of her own.
Jess is devastated when Marti seduces Dan and they keep baby Luke as their own. The intensity of Jack’s sexual obsession stuns her. There is more to come. Jess is shell shocked when she discovers Dan has inveigled her fortune by deceit and that he knew all about her inheritance long before they were married.
What choice does Jess have but to kidnap Luke and go on the run?
But Jack, despite his initial plan to find an easy way to become rich, has awoken from his fixation with the increasingly unstable Marti, one moment new age freethinker, the next a raging harridan who wants to ‘do a deal for the baby’.
Dan and Marti track down Jess to her parents’ isolated Scottish manse in the midst of a snowstorm where Jess protects Luke with a service revolver. When Marti goes to pick up Luke Jess pulls the trigger. Marti is hit. Dan moves then ducks as Jess pulls the trigger again.
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MISCONCEPTION is based on a real life story. When we couldn’t have children a friend offered to be a surrogate. I taught my wife a yoga pose and within months she was pregnant.
I wrote a TV drama called THE MATERNAL TRIANGLE, but later, after I had written numerous thrillers, got published by HarperCollins and Orion and then self-published, I decided to turn it from a domestic ménage a trois into a fully fledged, international psychological thriller. To do this I did take liberties with the original but the result is a unique novel of suspense.