If Two Were One

About the Book

     Can love really conquer all?   Can a grand romance overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles, endure through decades?    Is destiny undeniable?  If Two Were One tells the story of a love that refused to quit, a romance that spans    sixty  years and three generations .

      It started in wartime Britain when an American fighter pilot , Greg Mackensen, fell in love with a beautiful young English woman, Anne Harrington.   They planned to marry after the war but the pilot’s death intervened.   Anne Harrington went on with her life but never stopped loving Greg.  

        Almost sixty years later,  Mackensen’s grandson,  Charley Mayhew, a graduate student at Edinburgh University  in Scotland, meets Anne Crosswaithe, a genetics researcher, at a regatta in Cambridge, England.     Neither knows about  the wartime romance of their grandparents.  In fact, Charley does not even know he had a grandfather named Greg Mackensen.  Nevertheless, Charley is seized with an overwhelming obsession that he and Anne had once been lovers.  Ordinarily, Charley is a rational, sensible young man, the quintessential yuppie--bright, athletic, good-looking and with a knack for making and spending money.  He knows he has never met Anne during his three years in Britain.  Still, he can't escape the feeling that they'd been together before.  

       Anne thinks he's a little crazy but amusing and harmless.  Still emotionally shattered by a  broken relationship a few months earlier, she has no intention of starting a new one with Charley  But she sees no harm in having dinner with him.

    They go to a country inn near an old World War II air base.  The elderly innkeeper addresses Charley as "colonel" and Anne as "flight officer."  After dinner he shows the young couple the inn's banquet room  Its walls are covered with photos of fliers from the old air base.  In one photo, an American fighter pilot is lovingly entwined with a WAAF flight officer.  The pilot looks exactly like Charley; the WAAF like Anne.  In fact, Anne recognizes the WAAF as her grandmother--Anne Harrington.

   While Charley does not recognize the look-alike pilot, he feels a kinship with him.  This feeds his obsession about Anne which she dismisses as romantic nonsense. Nonetheless, Charley is not dissuaded.  Anne rebuffs him.  Charley persists and overcomes Anne's resistance.  They become lovers.   Anne tells herself it's just a casual sexual fling.

   But she's falling in love with Charley no matter how hard she fights against it.  Much about Charley disturbs her.  He's something of a mystery man.  For one thing, where does he get all the money he so freely spends?  When she learns from the newspapers that Charley, in addition to being an Economics doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh, is also a big-time currency speculator, she's appalled by his financial sideline.  They fight.  Charley walks out.

   A series of events over which they have no control keeps them apart for over a month.  Charley returns to the U.S.  He realizes he's deeply in love with Anne and must win her back.  By now, Anne has told him that the woman in the photo is her grandmother.  Charley believes that if he can prove a connection with the American fighter pilot, Anne will realize she must marry him to complete her grandmother's wartime romance.  It’s their destiny, so thinks Charley.  

   He hires a private detective agency to research the maternal side of his family, not a simple task since Charley's mother and grandmother had seven marriages and divorces between them.  A war hero pilot was n

About the Author

Ken Ford is an incurable romantic with his head in the clouds but his hands firmly on the keyboard. He has been a newspaperman, news agency correspondent, magazine writer and editor and a corporate ghostwriter. He has written more than five hundred speeches for the chief executives of several major corporations and an equal number of articles for leading business magazines. In retirement, he turned to novel-writing because he wants to see his own name on the store for a change. The father of two sons, he lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, with his wife, Joan, who is also a writer.