Samhain Publishing, $4.50, ISBN 978-1-61922-871-9
Contemporary Romance, 2015
What’s better than a rebound love story to help one get over that jerk who broke your heart? Well, what if the rebound bloke in question is loaded like King Midas? Okay, he has brats in tow, but we romance readers are supposed to go “Aww! I’ll take five, thank you!” when we are faced with brats looking for a new mommy, so let’s just show some enthusiasm even if we have to fake it. So yay for brats!
Claire Iverson, our heroine, is a nanny, but she isn’t feeling her inner Mary Poppins when the story begins because, you, that jerk. She doesn’t like to fly, but an adorable little girl manage to capture her attention. She doesn’t think much of the girl’s father, though, because he spends all his time on his phone and doesn’t notice that his daughter is playing with a stranger. Still, he’s hot, and don’t forget loaded, and we all know that men just don’t have it in them to be decent parent to their children, which is why we must all cheer when he finds a woman to step in and clean, mind the kids, and give him plenty of hot sex, so that he can spend all his time doing manly things while looking so hot. Drake Driscoll, our hero, also gets to let go of the full-time nanny – with all his money, he still can’t find a nanny that can travel with him and take care of his spawn? – so it is win-win all around for everyone and traditional gender roles in good old America!
Drake thinks that Claire is bitchy and judgmental when he’s doing his best to be a full time dad to his spawn, but at the same time, she looks hot and has a nice pair, so that makes her totally fine with him. These two end up together for a while for the rest of the trip, and his daughter takes to Claire a lot, so not only will he score with a hot chick with great breasts, this chick in question will care for the spawn, unlike his party-whoopee ex who is predictably enough a no-good shrieking harpy without any maternal bone in her body. The harpy even threatened to – gasp – get an abortion when she first learned that she was pregnant, so that puts her at the top of the hit list next to Hitler and Stalin. Oh, and the harpy tosses another girl into Claire’s care, and really, people, if you cannot stand cute-cute brats and their antics with poo and such, be very careful when approaching this one. At least those two brats aren’t the twins in The Shining… wait, them being those twins would have actually made things less sickeningly sweet, come to think of it.
He gets the hot babe and the nanny, and she gets a hot guy with lots of money. And I get a predictable story that, while well-written enough to be a serviceable read, turns painful quickly with the harpy ex acting like an over-the-top clown school reject. The heavy-handed “good woman/bad woman” anvils become tedious very quickly as well, and In From the Cold ends up appearing to be some kind of right-wing Christmas season propaganda brochure.
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