Relay Publishing, $2.99, ISBN 978-1386425694
Contemporary Romance, 2019
In Leslie North’s The Billionaire’s Accidental Baby, Connie Bonner is having her boss Brian O’Leary’s baby after a night of “bonner” fide shagging.
Now, were this real life, we’d be calling this a huge windfall on the heroine’s part, but since this is a romance novel, she has never set out to entrap a billionaire like that, naturally.
In fact, our heroine is quirky and clumsy, hee-hee, because she’s so adorable like that, guffaw guffaw.
“Oh, I see. Well, welcome.” Connie went to sit back down, not realizing that her office chair had moved. With a stumble and an almost fall, she awkwardly landed back in her chair, her skirt flying up, giving the both of them a clear view of her Captain Marvel underwear. Letting out a loud breath of air, Connie blew on her bangs before she straightened out her skirt again, in what Brian was realizing was a nervous gesture. “Okay, so I should get back to work.”
Uh… how short is that skirt again?
She’s also a quintessential romance heroine working in the office, which is just a way of saying that she’s a walking clown school.
“It wasn’t an x-rated video!” Connie’s voice had shot up an octave and she spoke loud enough that others were looking her way. Lowering her voice, she hissed at him. “It was a little program I wrote. Cute. Harmless. But I’d had it set to autoplay, so when it finished, it went to the next video with the whole bom chicka wah wah and I couldn’t get the damn thing to stop.” She blew out a shaky breath and took a large sip of her margarita willing herself not to cough as she swallowed it down.
Don’t worry though, she’d be married and busy popping out babies by the end of this story, so offices all over America would be saved from accidentally hiring this freak show ever again.
Anyway, Brian starts out zero and the author expects me to believe that he’s now a billionaire while still having all his hair and abs without doing anything shady to earn all that money. Okay, I can roll with that. Anyway, now that his “bonner” has done its thing inside the heroine, it’s time to pay the piper, except…
His current fiancée, who’s totally supposed to be a ho because she’s the heroine’s competition, insists that the heroine signs a NDA and not publicly identify Brian as the baby-blasting “bonner” in this situation.
Okay, so here are my issues with this story.
One, what kind of weak-willed twunt is the hero, to go along with this plan? He’s stringing both the heroine and the fiancée along, and his wishy-washy attitude doesn’t make him an appealing character to root for.
Two, the author does the hypocritical “money isn’t everything” nonsense here while simultaneously ensuring that the heroine is marrying a billionaire and not some cash-strapped working class dude down at the local wet market. Felicia is supposed to a ho because she wants the hero to focus on his business, and Connie is supposed to be the one I root for because she is dumb and useless kooky and cute and she also teaches Brian that money isn’t everything when you are already a billionaire.
The whole thing is just nonsensical and two-faced that I can’t take the whole thing seriously.
Three, the heroine is honestly too stupid and incompetent to be anything more than a baby-popping thing, and even then, I’d hesitate to let her hold a baby on her own lest she trips over and accidentally sends the baby flying out the window. It’s a good thing that she’s marrying a billionaire, one that will ensure that she will get all the household staff and nannies from some third world country to keep her from doing anything on her own ever again.
So yes, money isn’t everything, huh? What bull. The whole story is about how imbecile romance heroines incapable of being a proper adult need to marry billionaires so that they can live past 30 without accidentally committing fatal harm on themselves or some poor passerby, and true to form, these heroines kind of become pregnant with said billionaire’s brat without actually actively seeking such a turkey baster experience because they really don’t know what they are doing.
In other words, here are all the annoying contemporary romance clichés clumsily thrown into the proverbial cooking pot by the author, without making sure that the final result makes sense. Unsurprisingly, the whole thing is just a bewildering jumble of words.
