The Millionaire Meets His Match is fairly pedestrian. It doesn’t have a big misunderstanding so much as it has a willful misunderstanding – one that is not redeemed by a nice love scene. The hero’s bizarre rationale for leaping to a ridiculous conclusion casts a pall over the entire book.

Trish James takes a job at Duke Development for one reason: She wants to take Adam Duke down. She believes that he is personally responsible for a tragedy in her life; his company bought the small area where her grandmother and beloved neighbors lived and worked, just as it was about to become an historic landmark. Instead, the whole area was flattened to make room for a parking garage. Her grandmother died of a heart attack shortly thereafter. When Trish lands a job as Adam’s new assistant she can hardly believe her luck. In the new position she will surely find some dirty info on Adam that will ruin his reputation and take the whole company down.

Adam is annoyed to lose his assistant right as his company is set to open a new ski resort. Trish seems like an ideal replacement, though. She’s competent, has great ideas, and is pretty attractive to boot. Then Adam’s brother warns him that Trish is probably a plant. Their loving, busybody mom has a plan to marry off all three brothers, starting with Adam. Adam decides that Trish is probably a gold-digger who has been bribed by his mother to drag him kicking and screaming to the altar. He decides the last laugh will be on mom: He will seduce Trish, and then drop her before things go too far. Take that, mom and gold-digging Trish.

As Trish spends time with Adam, she discovers that she likes him. Though she feels like she is abandoning her neighbors and reneging on her deathbed promise to her grandmother, she isn’t sure that there really is any dirt on Adam. It’s possible that the deal that flattened her home was an aberration for the company. Besides, Adam is so attractive, and she just can’t stop thinking about him.

Adam is not so fast on the uptake. It takes him virtually the whole book to decide that Trish is not a gold digger, in spite of the overwhelming evidence he receives at every turn. And that, right there, colors the whole reading experience. It’s just not heroic behavior. It’s ironic that Trish should be the first to acknowledge that she might be wrong about Adam, because there is certainly more evidence in her case (Adam’s company did flatten her home). Adam’s erroneous conclusions never make any sense in the first place. The fact that his brothers agree with him just means they are all idiots. The scenario makes even less sense when we meet their mom, who appears to be about the nicest and least under-handed person in the universe (though she obviously raised a group of suspicious jerks).

Bottom line: If you can see yourself getting past the incredibly lame misunderstanding, then this might work for you. I had no objections about the writing style, or about the heroine (who is consistently likable). But since the misunderstanding is lame, that’s a pretty big “if.”