Can someone tell me what class contemporary romance writers are attending or what deal with the devil they’re signing? Is there a certificate they can earn if they write a romance with an under-forty, commitment phobic, billionaire hero and a ditsy, overly sweet, trust-fund baby heroine? Do they get extra credit if he’s a jerk and she’s impossibly naive? I’m just wondering.

The problem with the reviews I write of these “funny” contemporaries is that they all sound the same. Perhaps I should come up with a template and then just plug in the new names and faces for each book. The naive, ditz is Kylie Rogers, and a more annoying ditz will be hard to find. She’s the daughter of a Hollywood power couple, grew up in Tinseltown, and yet still manage to make every naive – okay let’s just call them simpleminded – mistake in the book (and trust me, they’re all in this book). After a particularly disastrous, trusting mistake has forced her out of a job, Kylie relocates to Seattle and attempts to start over. Since her last mistake led to her being fired, she’s having a hard time getting a new job. Luckily she manages to fall out of the window of David Gamble’s home and is soon happily screwing up in a new job working for him.

Athough he has no plans to marry – no sir, not him – David is one of Seattle’s most eligible bachelors. He started his Gamble Records from scratch and has managed, with a little help from the Internet, to turn it into a multi-billion dollar company. Of course his multi-billion dollar company only employs one person who can run the new royalty software program and that employee has just left on maternity leave. Enter Kylie. She’s familiar with the software program and is instantly hired.

David is immensely attracted to Kylie and initially finds her mistakes adorable. His lust is reciprocated by sweet Kylie. When she forgets to put a coffee pot under the coffee maker and gallons of it run all over the break room floor, he orders his secretary to buy all new coffee makers for the company so Kylie is never so mortified again. Isn’t he sweet? Isn’t she adorable? Well she’s not so adorable when she unethically (and naively, in case you didn’t get the point before this) prints out a list of all of Gamble Records’ artists so that she can hit them up for money. Her reasoning goes like this:

And all she had to do was run one little report. Just two lines of data for each musician. Name and phone number. That’s it. What would it hurt? After all she wasn’t going to sell the information to spammers or anything. She’d just use it to make one innocent call to each artist at a time when they happened to have a bit of cash on hand. Nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact, it was almost her duty to do it.

And David isn’t so sweet when he discovers Kylies innocent little print-out, jumps to the conclusion that she’s trying to purloin ten million dollars from his company, believes she’s trying to destroy him, but proceeds to have sex with her on the desk before making his accusations. Gotta love this guy.

Kylie’s dumb as a post and David’s an idiotic jerk. The villains of the piece are evident from the moment they appear and their machinations to steal the ten million dollars make it pretty clear they wouldn’t give Kylie much competition in the IQ stakes. So why isn’t this a flat out F? One reason. Bradley Nelson. Bradley was the man boring Kylie so much she was driven to try to escape out the window of David’s house in the opening scenes of the book. But a funny thing happened (finally) on the way to end of the book. Bradley emerges as the man to root for. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Kylie deserved him and he certainly didn’t deserve her. His budding relationship with Kylie’s sister Robyn, was a lot closer to interesting than Kylie and David’s ever could be.

Though Bradley is a bright point in this otherwise unfunny and unbelievable novel, not even he could have saved it from Kylie’s ridiculous behavior. Maybe he’ll get his own book. Even if he does, I probably won’t bother to read it, but it might at least be better than Record Time.