With the exception of a moment I’ll mention later, Bedding the Baron, first in Alexandra Ivy’s Illegitimate Bachelors trilogy, was the most predictable book I’ve ever read. Warning : spoilers ahead.

It starts with an intriguing situation. Fredrick Smith, the bastard son of a baron, meets with his two best friends, all of them gorgeous but illegitimate, because their late tutor’s will left them each twenty thousand pounds. What takes them aback is that the will reveals that the funds originally came from their fathers as hush money.

Fredrick, a successful businessman who supports young inventors, decides to investigate this. He travels to visit Lord Graystone, his estranged father, but stays at a local inn called the Queen’s Arms. The proprietress is Portia Walker, and he’s struck by how lovely she is. Not surprisingly, she’s overwhelmed by how handsome he is. Despite the instant, mutual and constant lust-think, Portia is immediately prickly and hostile towards him, because she distrusts all noblemen.

This reminded me of the hero of the ‘80s who was wronged by one woman and therefore decides all women are liars and sluts and I would have felt sorry for Fredrick if he hadn’t proven himself deserving of Portia’s suspicions. He calls her by her first name without being asked to do so, insists that she call him by his first name despite her attempts to address him formally, and nicknames her ‘poppet’. He then makes improvements to the inn’s front yard, without her permission. When she tells him this is her property, he says, “And?” If I made a drinking game of his microaggressions, I might have passed out before I got to the end of the book.

For her part, Portia is so befuddled by desire that all she does about his heavy-handedness is make token protests. As a character, she’s a collection of clichés – beneath her dull gowns she wears sexy underclothes to feel more feminine, and all her employees are people she’s rescued, like ex-prostitutes, and so on. Throughout the story, Fredrick is trying to unravel the secret of his past, but Portia has no such goals or agency. Her role is to be his love interest.

Likewise, Fredrick’s legitimate half-brother’s role is to be the villain. He’s a fat, spoilt wastrel (I nicknamed him Dudley) who doesn’t look much like their father. Fredrick, naturally, is the spitting image. Guess which of them the servants adore? The half-brother also does nothing except show up for one scene, where he’s utterly ineffectual and is bested easily by Fredrick, who has by now been revealed as the real heir. After all, the story is not called ‘Bedding the Baron’s Bastard’.

Like the characters, the plot is poorly constructed. For instance, at the start of the story, Fredrick goes to see his father and is shown into a room upstairs to wait for him. It’s a tense moment. The chapter then ends, and the story cuts to Portia’s shock as a bloodstained Fredrick is helped indoors by her servants.

I thought the meeting had ended in violence. But no, as Fredrick was riding back, his horse threw him. As for the meeting with Lord Graystone, they exchanged a few cold words we’re not privy to, and that was that. I have no idea what this was supposed to accomplish, other than showing that head injuries don’t stop Fredrick making moves on his poppet. Later on, Portia and Fredrick take a walk and she reveals she was engaged to a nobleman (she’s the daughter of a peer), except her fiancé abandoned her at the altar. Then she points out her daughter’s gravestone. There was no emotional buildup to this revelation, so rather than feeling anything, I blinked, reread the dialogue to make sure I’d understood correctly, and settled back into a stupor.

I would recommend this book only to die-hard fans of the author’s historical romances. There was nothing enjoyable about Bedding the Baron except for the interesting start, a coin the rest of the romance quickly squandered. It more than earns its D grade.

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