”What’s love got to do with it?” Tina Turner asked the world, and she might have been asking about Southwick’s book. Fundraiser Ryleigh Evans returns to Mercy Medical Center after her amicable divorce from Dr. Nick Damian and presents a proposition to him: Be the other half in her conceiving a child and he would get sex without responsibility.

Ryleigh went into her marriage to Nick thinking they would get closer, shutting away the world and cocooning themselves from reality, eventually having children. What she got was a busy pediatric physician making a career for himself. This meant she spent countless hours alone, finding herself abandoned in the middle of dinner and in the middle of the night. Not being able to reconcile this with her fairytale image of marriage, she eventually walked out.

Nick, who’s no stranger to a woman walking out and leaving her husband and children, obviously has abandonment issues. While he finds Ryleigh good company and intelligent, he mostly married her for her sex appeal. He doesn’t do entanglements.

When she proposes that they have sex at her optimum time each month so that she can get pregnant, he agrees for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, other than he’s still attracted to her and realizes he might not be blameless in their breakup, so thinks he owes her.

At this point, I pitied their son or daughter. Neither Ryleigh nor Nick seems particular interested in raising a child, just in having a baby. Ryleigh has a new job and is just resettling into a single lifestyle in Las Vegas. Her itch to produce a child seems very self-serving and oblivious to the realities of motherhood.

In addition, hot, hunky Nick is probably the most spineless hero I’ve come across in a while. He doesn’t particularly want Ryleigh except for sex, but he sure doesn’t want anyone else to have her either. And while he’s happy to donate sperm to the project, he refuses to submit to any lingering responsibility, particularly not to fatherhood.

Given all the above, it would take a master plotter to convince readers that a child begotten by them would be a good idea. But Southwick has nothing up her sleeve except that they get together and superficially find love this time around, mostly because Ryleigh has a job she loves, so is concerned about work instead of how much Nick neglects her.

Nick’s gut reaction when Ryleigh finally becomes pregnant pretty much sums up his parental involvement and their maturity level—“My boys are badass,” he says proudly about his sperm.

While Ryleigh and Nick plan on getting remarried after they find out she’s pregnant, readers don’t need a crystal ball to predict they’ll be getting another divorce in the future because they haven’t resolved any of the troubling issues that plagued them in the first place.