I picked this book up out of pity. The title is terrible, and the cover – a chortling baby holding a giant horseshoe magnet, repelling the hero and heroine to opposite sides of the book – is flat out ridiculous. But the author had gotten some decent reviews in the past, so I thought perhaps the art department had just screwed her over. No such luck. While there is an occasional glimmer of something interesting, for the most part this book is every bit as bad as its silly premise and even sillier cover would suggest.

Holt Landen is a successful businessman, owner of a consulting company for firms in financial trouble. He’s rich and handsome, and considered one of New Orleans’ most successful bachelors, so he’d be a great catch for anyone – if he weren’t determined not to marry. Then one phone call changes his life: he discovers that a one night stand in Aspen led to a child. The baby’s mother just died in a car accident, and now he’s a father.

Holt knows almost nothing about babies, and to make matters worse, his new daughter, Isabelle, has attachment disorder. Her mom abandoned her to a string of indifferent nannies, and now she screams all day long – especially if someone touches her. Holt is driving home from the airport after going through a couple of nannies himself, when he hears a voice on the radio. Stevie Stedquest has a parenting advice show – and a caller is heckling her because she has no children of her own. Amazingly, the sound of Stevie’s voice quiets Isabelle’s screams. Holt drives straight to the studio and catches Stevie on her way out, offering her an outrageous proposal. He’ll marry her, and she can adopt Isabelle. After the adoption is final, they can quietly divorce and share joint custody of the baby. Naturally, Stevie refuses. But she takes pity on Holt and the baby and offers to watch Isabelle temporarily while he searches for a more permanent caregiver.

You can pretty much guess what happens. Stevie is charmed by the helpless and needy baby Isabelle and eventually agrees to Holt’s idea. And as you’d expect, the marriage of convenience becomes something more. While this is going on, there are two secondary romances featuring Stevie and Holt’s parents. Holt’s parents have been divorced for years, and both have had other unsuccessful marriages in the meantime. Holt’s anger and bitterness over his parents’ divorce drives him to insist on a quick divorce for himself; he doesn’t want to risk loving and losing someone, and he doesn’t want his child to deal with the consequences of that. But while he struggles with his feelings about this, his parents are realizing what went wrong in their marriage, and seeing each other with new eyes. Stevie’s parents have remained married for years, but are going through a difficult period as her father adjusts to forced retirement and her mother starts a new business.

The “plus” in the D grade is a nod to these secondary romances, both of which are more interesting and believable than the primary one. Both sets of parents face realistic problems and deal with them as normal people would. The same cannot be said for Stevie and Holt.

Believe it or not, I could buy the premise of this book up to a point. I’m not necessarily a fan of either secret baby or marriage of convenience plots, but I think the right author can sell them. The premise for this particular marriage is pretty far-fetched, but I could almost buy it. Isabelle’s constant screaming and her attachment problems seemed believable, and it made sense that Holt would be desperate for any solution to his problems. Similarly, I could see why Stevie (who has had a string of bad relationships) might long for a child, although I doubted anyone would have hired her to dispense parenting advice in the first place. I don’t know many parents who eagerly accept parenting advice from someone with no actual parenting experience.

Anyway, I could almost suspend my disbelief enough to buy the plot. The problem was Holt’s steadfast refusal to consider making the marriage permanent, which goes on past all reason. There are a lot of commitment-shy heroes out there right now, all steadfastly refusing to marry because their parents divorced, or they were cheated on by an ex-girlfriend, or their best friend died on the job and they feel responsible. I don’t know if these heroes are more numerous now, or if eleven years of romance reading has made me less tolerant of them. Perhaps it’s both. In any case, I had little patience with Holt’s whiny boy attitude, and wanted to smack some sense into him early on. As the book wore on and he still wouldn’t consider staying with Stevie even though he was in love with her, I could hardly stand to read about him. He was determined to avoid love for so long that in the end I was just turning pages to see when he would finally change his mind. The answer? Not until the bitter end, and only under extreme duress. This behavior is hardly heroic.

I wish I could recommend this book. The parents’ romances aren’t half bad, and it was sort of refreshing to see a baby who screamed her head off much of the time instead of cooing politely and dropping off to sleep the minute mommy and daddy wanted some privacy. But with Holt’s un-heroic behavior and hard-to-believe plot, this one is better left on the book store shelf.