A word of advice: if you’re writing a romance and are desperately trying to find a way to keep your characters from consummating their relationship, try to make the reason seem remotely plausible. Unless that reason stems logically from the plot or the characters themselves, it’s just a gimmick. And Pillow Talk by Kathleen O’Reilly is full of gimmicks, none of them good.

Jessica Barnes is a small company’s finance director who’d like to be the VP. Her gimmick is that she sneezes whenever she’s stressed. Adam Taylor is the consultant brought in to arrange a friendly takeover by a large corporation, which will probably mean the end of Jessica’s job. His gimmick is that he talks to his dead mother. No… really. He evokes Norman Bates, and not in a good way. Jessica and Adam are attracted to each other immediately, but she’s understandably antagonistic towards him, calling him the axe-man.

For his part, Adam puts the moves on Jessica while he tries to convince himself that it isn’t right for them to date. After a few childish run-ins over who knows more statistical trivia and who can beat whom in a foot race, she feels challenged by him. Naturally he easily talks her into going out on a date.

Things quickly get hot and heavy while coming home from their first date, so what does Norman Adam do? He calls things to a halt and she gets understandably pissed. An incredibly confusing conversation follows, resulting in Jessica betting Adam that he can’t seduce her in ten days. This gimmick becomes the crux of the plot, such that it is, even though there are no stakes – and no reason for the bet at all, other than the apparent bullheaded joy of competition between these two lovebirds. He decides to lose the bet for Jessica’s own good and invites her on a series of boring dates.

Think about it. If she wants to win this inane bet (and we’re supposed to believe that winning is everything to her), why should she accept any dates at all? But that would make sense and this plot doesn’t. More dates lead unsurprisingly to more and more heavy petting until he finally tells her he’ll just content himself with bringing her to orgasm by foreplay alone for the next six days until the bet is over. Huh?

The relationship between these two is solely based on sex, so you might hope that their relationships with secondary characters would help flesh them out as people. And indeed there are any number of conversations between the heroine and her friends (who are going to get their own books), the hero and his dead mom, and the hero and several faceless women – but none of them add anything except length to the story. And if the Instanct Messages between the heroine and her friends were an attempt to be modern, they instead came across as irritatingly gimmicky.

Logic is utterly lacking in this book. That first argument they have over statistical trivia? Jessica mentions to Adam that she hopes her recently married friends will be among the lucky 50% of couples who don’t divorce. He smugly points out that the real statistic is that 75% people who are married have never been divorced. And she doesn’t call him on this! Statistics about how many married people have been divorced have no relevance in a discussion of how many married couples will divorce. As a math/statistics geek myself, I can tell you: Jessica’s a fake.

But by far the most teeth-clenching bit of illogic here is what constitutes Adam’s idea of bliss. We learn in the course of the novel that: a) he hates his job; b) Jessica loves her job; c) he dreams of a simple life on a farm; and d) she hates being domestic. So how does he plan to make them both happy? Get her fired and have her at home baking cookies while he continues to work. That this may not, in fact, be how it all turns out is irrelevant. He just seems to think this is a dandy idea for most of the book and even manages to convince her of it.

I really want to say something good about this book, so here it is: Kathleen O’Reilly knows how to write hot sex scenes without a hint of purple prose. But we have to wade through more than half the book to get to it, and it just isn’t worth it. So one last bit of advice: if you decide to read this book, just skip ahead to the “good parts.” Maybe it’ll even make more sense that way.