Avon, $5.99, ISBN 0-380-80497-2
Historical Romance, 2000

Now, if the heroine is going to be a gold digger for the “right” reasons (so that she won’t starve, etc etc), she better pucker up and do it. Give me a heroine who bombards me with close to 380 pages of emotional guilt, indecision, hesitation, and hand-wringing, and I want to bare my fangs and gnaw on The Most Wanted Bachelor.

Kathryn Jordan is beautiful and she knows it, yay. And she knows she can make Daniel Sellington a good wife, which is a fair bargain in return of her getting his forty million dollars, yes? And Daniel, that silly man, is trying his best to get rid of his money (Daddy got the money from ruining others, see, such as Kathryn’s daddy). Unfortunately, everything he does only makes him richer, his guilt heavier, and women clamoring more and more for his hand.

He meets Kathryn and decides that it is so wonderful to meet a woman who doesn’t care about his money (oh boy). And Kathryn, of course, plays along. They got married, and start their rocky courtship amidst deception.

Thing is, if Kathryn feels that losing her brother to the mines and herself in poverty excuse enough to dig her claws into the son of the man who ruined her family, I say good for her. But when this adventure turns into pages after pages of painful psychoanalyzing, when the words such as guilt and conscience pop up every other page… ugh. Why can’t Kathryn just join the nunnery and spare me the misery?

And Daniel, oh for god’s sake, just throw away the money if it pains him so. He is also so closed, so secretive, so guarded that he is little antidote to the mess that is Kathryn. One is an ice block, the other a hand-wringing mess.

Two clueless people with way too much conscience for their own good, stuck in a plot that demands the disposal of forty million dollars in the most “heehee” (read: silly) ways possible – urgh. And I’m actually quite mad because I can think of so much more fun things one can do with forty million dollars, much better plans than those by these two clueless virgins (yep, he’s a V boy). Some people don’t deserve their luck. Or a story.