The Attraction Factor features a fun, intelligent, and strong heroine with a zany taste in jewelry and a difficult family situation on her hands. If the hero of this book hadn’t been such a nitwit, I would have enjoyed it.

Julie Gates once had a crush on Marc Johnson, when he was an English teacher and she was a high school student who took all his classes. Time has passed, and now he is a bookstore owner and she is a CPA who works for the firm he has hired to do his taxes. Julie is just as attracted to Marc as she ever was, and the feeling is more than reciprocated. Soon Marc and Julie are seeing each other, and they can’t keep their hands off each other.

I enjoyed the character of Julie, who has the tough job of raising her fourteen-year-old brother due to her father’s illness. This family problem is handled by the author in a very believable way, and I found her brother, Kenny, to be a fairly realistic teenager. Marc, an experienced teacher and a father, is fully supportive of Julie in her efforts to bring up her brother. If only he weren’t so intent on sabotaging his relationship with her in the most illogical and annoying ways possible.

To begin with, Marc is extremely upset that Julie is doing his taxes. For no reason that I could understand, he believes Julie to be an incompetent airhead, even calling her boss to make sure she isn’t lying about being a CPA. I found this to be extremely offensive. He dwells upon Julie’s assumed stupidity incessantly. On page 20, he thinks, “The idea of dingy Julie Gates doing his taxes was preposterous … What could she know about complicated money matters?” On page 24: “The thought of her pouring over his business accounts made his skin crawl.” Page 25: “As far as he was concerned, ‘Julie Gates’ and ‘competent, highly-regarded professional’ were diametrically opposed concepts not belonging in the same sentence.” On page 26, he thinks of her as “a silly female masquerading as a high-powered career woman.” Anyone else starting to get irritated with this guy?

Eventually, Marc grudgingly comes to believe that she may in fact be able to handle his complicated money matters. But he is extremely commitment-shy and has been hurt very badly in the past, so he demands that they keep their relationship casual – and that means no sex. Although they’re practically overwhelmed with lust for each other, they repeatedly draw back from actual consummation.

I can accept that – I quite like romances in which the protagonists spend all their time in a state of perpetual sexual frustration. The problem is this: Marc never tells Julie why he is unable to make a commitment to her, even though it is inevitable that she will learn about it. It just doesn’t make sense. Naturally she is upset when she learns about it, of course she loses her temper, and to nobody’s surprise he lashes back at her. I’m not a big fan of books that feature Big Secrets, and in this one Julie, who should have received some serious groveling, ends up doing half the apologizing.

The Attraction Factor also has a plot that sags rather boringly in the middle, and features some extremely improbable moments, like the way Marc becomes wildly aroused by Julie’s collection of costume jewelry and fingernail decorations. Too frequently I found myself thinking, “Okay, I suppose that could happen, but. . . .”

This could have been a much better book. McDavid is not a bad writer, and I thought she did a good job of portraying Julie’s vivid personality and the dynamics of her troubled family. But for a romance to work, the hero has to be likable, and the conflicts that keep the hero and heroine apart have to make sense. In her attempt to base the conflict between these two characters on Marc’s difficulties, she made him seem sexist, weak, insecure, immature and nasty-tempered – in a word, a villain. I’d have liked to see Julie hook up with almost anyone else.