Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86304-4
Contemporary Romance, 2013
Love Contract is Lisa Watson’s debut Kimani title, so perhaps I can’t be too hard on this baby, but yikes, the way the story kicks off is pretty cringe-inducing.
This is part of a series called The Match Broker. That’s Norma Jean Anderson, our hero Adrian’s mother. Perhaps as a result of having too much time and too few responsibilities, she makes it her life mission to pair off everyone around her. You know how it is: she ain’t flagging until they’re all shagging.
Adrian—flat abs, fat wallet, et cetera—is tired of his mother’s meddling in his love life, so when he learns that the latest person coming for the job interview is sent by his mother, he immediately assumes that this lady is his mother’s latest offering on a dish. He basically mocks her and, to cap things off, force a kiss onto her without his consent.
When the furious Milán Anderson shares her experience with that insufferable jerk with her BFF, her BFF naturally asks how hot that guy is. You know what they say: off the cops he will go, but only if he is an uggo.
I find it odd that no one is even worried that Milán may file a sexual harassment suit and the resulting bad PR. No, Norma is more like, oh, that’s so cute, bet she’s under his skin now. Even Milán, for all her fuming, thinks that he’s hot and the kiss is actually awesome.
It gets even more bizarre. Adrian now wants her to be a part of the staff now. I can only wonder what HR and legal will think about that, because I can see many landmines being detonated when Adrian hires someone he clearly has the hots for and whom he had committed sexual harassment against.
Having said all this, if I could overlook this premise, I’d find a pretty entertaining story with characters that have believable chemistry in their more natural interactions. There are many Kimani stories suffering from clunky exposition and wooden dialogues, but this is not one of them. Here, conversations flow nicely. Also, the pacing is fine, again a rarity in the line during its final few painful years of existence before Harlequin pulled the plug.
I use the word “natural” in the previous paragraph, because this brings me to my second issue with this story. It relies tad too heavily on secondary characters pushing our hero and heroine together for my liking. The biggest offender is of course the crazy mother, but Milán’s BFF is no slouch. I can only wonder what kind of emotional damage these characters must have had in the past to be this obsessed with other people’s sex lives. They aren’t even trying to live vicariously through the hero and the heroine. They are just walking, talking, annoying plot devices.
In the end, I’m giving this one three oogies because, on the whole, it is a story that is easy to read. When the hero and the heroine are allowed to be on their own and not fending off the creepy pushing and urging of the people around them, I can see some believable chemistry and these two become actually likable sorts. Alas, those moments are few here, and on the whole, this one never allows those characters to fall in love on their own.
Another time, perhaps.
