Published: Verve Magazine, February 2013, Verve Diaries
Illustration by Wyanet Vaz

They may not all be tall, dark and handsome, but they have the ‘It’ factor that makes women swoon as they stride across the pages of fictional offerings through the years. The Verve girls pick their literary soulmate – men who have made them go weak at the knees. Mr Darcy apart!

A MAN OF SUBSTANCE
Richard Kane;
The Prodigal Daughter
Oh, those that weep over Heathcliff and turn into mush over Darcy and get all hot-and-bothered over a Grey or a Cullen, haven’t really met a regular guy – a banker-type person. Or really, a guy who had everything going for him and gave it all up to be with the girl he loves. Remember Jeffrey Archer’s Kane and Abel? Well, think about William Kane’s son, Richard, who appears in the sequel, The Prodigal Daughter. Tall, good-looking and ridiculously rich, he is the modern American Romeo, screwed over by a family feud. He falls in love with a Bloomingdale salesgirl – so much so that he goes in to buy gloves every day until he can muster up the courage to ask her out. In the midst of the courtship, he discovers she is actually an heiress to a fortune. Florentyna Rosnovski is the daughter of his father’s arch-rival and nemesis. After incurring the wrath of both families, they are forced to marry before he’s even finished with Harvard Business School.

He becomes an out-of-job, would-be banker, with nothing but a cello and $100, who has the gumption to tell his furious father, ‘You suffer like generations of our family, Father, from imagining money can buy everything. Your son is not for sale.’ While charting a banking career for himself, he joins forces with his entrepreneurial wife to make her the brand she is destined to become – quitting his job to come on board her venture. He has the courage and will to be independent of obligatory wealth and prove himself to the world and society…and he is secure enough in his own self-worth to help his wife become successful!

Oh, I can’t feel my knees.