Erin Wright, $4.99, ISBN 978-1370205295
Contemporary Romance, 2018
According to the copyright notice, this edition of Erin Wright’s Accounting for Love is revised and expanded from a 2016 edition. I haven’t read the original version, so I have no idea just how long and thick the expansion is, or how deep the revision goes into. I do wonder about the guy on the cover, though. The head doesn’t seem to fit the body; it’s as if someone had stuck some bloke’s head onto another bloke’s body. Still, we can’t always have drop dead gorgeous men, especially when the hero here is supposed to be a cowboy, and cowboys should be rugged, not pretty.
Yes, he’s a cowboy. With a name like Stetson Miller, what else would he be? Don’t say porn actor, we are all polite people here.
Stetson’s father recently passed on, so our hero is now the new owner of the imaginatively named Miller Farm. Ha ha, more like Goner Farm, because Stetson realizes that his father had run the whole thing to the ground.
This was ridiculous. The whole thing was ridiculous. Since when was a farmer supposed to like paperwork? Everyone knew that real work was done out in the fields, not in an office. Bucking hay, building fences, castrating cows – now that was a job well done.
Pushing papers around was for pansies. People who couldn’t hack it out with the real men.
Well, good thing his father did all the bankruptcy-hello thing for him, because something tells me Stetson will have happily run aground whatever left that hadn’t been wrecked by daddy dearest, what with that attitude of his.
Our heroine is Jennifer Kendall. She’s sent to this land of the intellectually and financially bankrupt by the bank to audit whatever is left that the bank can grab in the event of a foreclosure.
“That low-down snake!” Stetson erupted, staring at the female banker. “That piece-of-shit bank president sent in a woman to do his dirty work? Is he hiding behind your skirts? Huh? Why doesn’t he come in here like a real man and face me?”
You know, normally heroines start out being the idiots, the better for their man to come down and romantically save them from ever having to think for themselves again. Here, it’s the hero that starts out the imbecile. Still, I’m keeping an open mind, because who knows, maybe the author would take this hero down a lovely route to give me a lovely grovel at the end. We don’t get enough of groveling heroes in the genre, we should have more of those.
Unfortunately, this one gets a big ugh from me, not because the hero is an ass, but because the hero is what he is: someone that is horribly unqualified to manage any for-profit endeavor. Couple that to his stubbornness and refusal to seek help because he doesn’t want to be perceived as weak, and I have this sinking feeling that the hero is going to be terrible in bringing home the bread. Sure, this is the current year, and there is no shame in the wife being the main breadwinner, but I don’t see Stetson happily accepting that either, what with that chip on his shoulder. This is one fellow that wants to be a man’s man, if you know what I mean, but with that lack of brainpower, I can’t see a happy ending for him and Jennifer.
This issue completely overshadows my ability to buy the “I’m in love with the asshole” romance in this one. I’m already having a hard time believing that Jennifer can go on about how sexy Stetson is after his initial outburst against her sex, but then again, what’s the point of trying to believe the romance when the hero is obviously going to torpedo the whole thing a few weeks after the honeymoon?
Accounting for Love ends up making a strong case for not getting involved for the long haul with men that have no brain and no money. Sure, that big pee-pee may be great, but honey, one can buy a big (or bigger) one off the Internet these days, and those things can be switched off and shoved into the drawer once they outlast their welcome. Who needs a no-brain, no-cash dude that comes attached with a big pee-pee these days? Too much drama, and not enough payoff.
