The Rich Man's Baby

In the prologue, two strangers meet, spend barely five minutes in each other's company, and have a one-night-stand without even learning each other's last names. All they know of each other is that the other one is pretty darn hot. Two years later, the story begins anew. Juliet Jones knows herself to be in the words of her brother, "white trash." She lives with her 16-month-old son Nathan, her brother, and her mother in a dilapidated shack-cum-convenience-store down by the river. In contrast, Harrison Rivers, is a millionaire's son and corporate CEO who has commitment issues. He finally decides to come back to the place he met his Juliet two years ago and see if he can exorcize his demons. Instead he finds a toddler who looks a lot like him. Ooops.

Other than having unprotected sex with a stranger two years ago and never coming back to check on her before now, Harrison's a pretty responsible guy. He immediately offers Juliet financial help and wants to be a part of his son's life. In grand romance-novel fashion, Juliet spurns his offer. This device always makes me livid, so it was one of the few places in the book that my emotions were actually engaged. Pride has nothing to do with it, lady, there's a child involved who is living in near poverty. Furthermore, receiving child support from the boy's biological father is not only your child's right, it is the father's responsibility. Aargh. Not to worry, because Juliet must not be too serious in her convictions. Pretty quickly Harrison and his grandmother and his sister are convincing her to move in with them in their mansion. Yeah, right. This is just the first of many things that is hard to swallow. Old-money grandmother and hero's sister just love uneducated barefoot Juliet based on less acquaintance than Harrison and Juliet had before conceiving their love child. Falling in love at first sight must run in the family.

We're also supposed to believe that Juliet was a virgin when they first met and has never slept with anyone else since. This is because she's not "like that." Well, girls who aren't "like that" don't have one-night stands with strangers in the first place, dearie. Nathan is the kind of prototypical romance-novel toddler who never cries or acts sulky. He loves his "dada" immediately (that family trait again) and conveniently goes to sleep whenever mom and dad want to talk or get frisky.

What little conflict there is comes in the form of Harrison's dad. He's the one person who turns out not to love Juliet from the get-go. The senior Mr. Harrison, in fact, says some pretty abominable things about her within Juliet's hearing. Yet, just a few pages later they seem to have declared a truce. And, really, there's not that much more conflict than that in the entire story. Harrison simply has to work up the courage to accept the fact that he's fallen in love and then propose to Juliet. Juliet just has to have her hair re-done and a new wardrobe and voila, she's charming the executives at Harrison Sr's retirement party. All this takes less than two weeks total.

We know next to nothing about these characters and neither do they. We never see Harrison or Juliet discuss anything interesting other than the occasional debate over child-rearing and child-support. At one point, Juliet confesses that she'd planned to go to community college before the baby came, but that's about as deep as she gets. Harrison may have actually gone to college, but he's equally shallow. These are just two beautiful people who have never heard of condoms and are being rewarded for that fact. Luckily for me, even though I just finished this book about two hours ago, I'm already starting to forget what happened. Lack of plot and character development will do that every time.

-- Teresa Galloway

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