Mills & Boon, £3.49, ISBN 978-0-263-90873-2
Contemporary Romance, 2014

Now, sheikh romances are in the bottom barrel tier when it comes to the presence of intelligent lifeforms within the pages, but Lynn Raye Harris’s Carrying the Sheikh’s Heir is remarkable in how devoid it is of any resemblance to reality.

We have our heroine, Sheridan Sloane. In this story, she has no personality aside from an almost pathological need to enable her whiny, useless, and selfish sister and to make the people around her happy, happy, happy. She is pregnant, because her sister can’t carry a baby to full term and thus Sheridan offers to be the surrogate mom to Annie and her equally useless and selfish husband.

I’m not sure which clinic they use but the clinic used the wrong ejaculate. That’s right, our heroine is now carrying some Arab man’s baby.

Here’s a shocker: the ejaculate belongs to a king of an Arabic kingdom, and he shows up to kidnap her and bring her back to his kingdom, the imaginatively titled Kyr, until the baby is born. He’d keep the baby and then kick that woman home.

The hero is King Rashid bin Zaid-al-Hassan:

… the Great Protector of my people, the Lion of Kyr and Defender of the Throne.

Okay, you may be wondering why Simba’s baby juice is in that clinic. You see, the kingdom has a law that every king needs to deposit his baby juice in advance to secure an heir in case something happens later like their scrotum gets caught in a paper shredder.

Why don’t they set up a sperm bank in their own kingdom? Well, don’t ask me, I have no idea.

Why does Simba need to kidnap the heroine? Why not just sue for paternity and sue the clinic to tatters for their negligence? Again, I have no idea.

Why does Simba kidnap the heroine and risk the security of his kingdom? After all, we all know that some countries are looking for any excuse to invade an oil-rich Middle-Eastern country. Some Great Protector he is, hmmph!

Is Simba a Muslim? If yes, then the sperm bank thing gets dumber as certain interpretations of the Quran deem the use of artificial insemination and other methods of conception outside of pee-pee spews in hoo-hoo as haram. Then again, this is the same king that uses the wrong terminology to describe his title, parentage, et cetera and he also gives the heroine a puppy because apparently dogs are all the rage in this kingdom, so I don’t even want to try to decipher the clues as to whether these people are Muslims or whatever. 

Perhaps I can’t blame the author entirely for this mess. She likely had to write a story based on bullet points handed to her by her editor, and the same editor must have clobbered the bullet points together by throwing chewed gum on a wall full of the most romantic buzzwords in the English language: pregnant, sheikh, kidnapped, sperm, psycho male.

Anyway, Sheridan soon charms the people around her as she is American and blonde and hence, she dazzles these dark-skinned cave people with marvelous white people inventions such as napkin sculptures. She’s also a puppy whisperer, it turns out, and introduces to these uncivilized morons enlightened concepts such as keeping dogs as pets and what not.

Along the way, she decides that she’s going to stay on in Kyr after the baby pops out because it’s hot to be a wealthy member of the royalty she wants to be a mother to her baby.

Alas, they realize that she’s actually having twins instead of just a single baby—again, don’t ask me how this isn’t detected much earlier—and this causes Simba to recall that he hadn’t been a toxic POS aside from the kidnapping thing, so he decides that while one baby is fine, two babies trigger his PTSD about his previous wife dying along with his brat so, no, he’s going to run off into the desert and then marry another woman.

Hey, don’t look at me. I didn’t write this story, alright?

On the bright side, once the hero decides to do a last minute “Me, asshole!” stunt, the heroine finally snaps out of her perpetual Pollyanna the Enabler of Douchebags mode to stand up to the hero. That’s something that is not always present in a Modern story.

Also, the hero for the most part isn’t a complete toxic radioactive waste of a human being until the plot forces him to be one in a most stupid manner.

Hence, the story could have been one of the more readable entries in the Modern line… provided one can overlook the ghastly stupid premise that really makes no sense whatsoever.

The best person to enjoy this thing is one that isn’t too picky about the particulars of the story as long as there is a virgin paired up with a toxic POS man… oh wait, the heroine isn’t a virgin even before she gets turkey-baster’ed, and the hero isn’t that toxic. Hmm, now I’m not sure whether I should even recommend this thing to anyone!