Some books just scream that they were written by the seat of the author’s pants with no pre-plotting whatsoever. Typically, they start off in one genre or subgenre and slide off into another without warning, leaving the reader perplexed and confused. This is one of those books.

After work one night in Washington, D. C., government demolitions expert Noah McLeod, having narrowly missed blowing himself up as he dismantled a bomb, spies a woman who intrigues him. He sees her at a party on the second floor of the building across the street where she is standing by a window.

When he starts to head home as snowflakes begin to fall, he sees the woman walk down an alley and follows her, only to discover that she is rescuing a cat. As a blizzard sets in, Noah helps her rescue the cat mama and her kittens, and takes Grace Lindstrom and the cold, hungry animals to his parents’ home for safe keeping during the storm.

Grace isn’t looking for a new boyfriend, not since her fiancé recently died and was found afterward to have a girlfriend in every port, including one pregnant with his child. But as the author tells us, poor orphaned friendless Grace finds comfort and hope in Noah’s busy house that smells of home cooking and feels like a homemade quilt settling over her shoulders.

At the Lindstrom home, Grace discovers that she and Noah’s mom share a love of knitting as well as cooking. Grace tells Noah about the big project she came to D. C. to interview for, a White House online cookbook that would be the culmination of her career as a food historian.

During and after the snow storm, Grace and Noah grow closer, but his top secret job and her work schedule which will take her to Paris for three months are roadblocks to anything permanent occurring between them.

Then Grace’s grandfather, the man who raised her and who runs a volunteer animal shelter, has a stroke in Oregon and Grace flies there to be with him. Suddenly, the poor orphaned friendless Grace turns out to have a loving grandfather who raised her and two bosom buddies who are working to turn the area’s historic Dragon Cottage into a knitting shop and café.

Halfway through the book, it’s as if a new Grace appears, belying the character background of the Grace who stayed at Noah’s house in D. C.

The new Grace ignores the fact that she’s won the coveted cookbook project, not even informing the people she spoke with that her grandfather is ill and she can’t make a decision about the job. The highly-organized, career-minded Grace is gone, and a free-spirited, friend-oriented version of Grace has taken over.

While the rest of Grace’s love story plays out through text messages and phone calls, she becomes more involved with her friends’ plans and decides to join them in the renovation of the cottage. As a reader at this point, I was confused and kept going back to the beginning of the book where the mystery surrounding the fiancé and his deceptive life seemed to be the focal point.

Evidently that storyline was going nowhere, so Skye switched horses to write a chick lit finale. While neither plot is horrible, it’s definitely confusing when one is tacked on to the other without giving readers a clue to the switch that’s about to occur.