Nicholas Bonelli had bad-boy sex appeal written all over him. Not that in his battered condition - broken arm, shattered leg - he was looking for female company.
What right-minded woman would actually take this surly, ill-tempered man on? Only Rachel Stuart, it seemed, who had been hired by his exasperated family as a "baby-sitter" to look out for him.
It was all too easy for Rachel to feel sympathy for this obstinate though, at times, endearingly vulnerable man. Until, that was, she remembered who he was and just why she had taken the job to get close to him!
Barbara Blackman was under the pseudonym Jeanne Allan, the author of 25 romance novels for Harlequin. On the cover of her first novel, Peter's Sister, her surname was misspelled as "Allen".
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that any alpha male, be he severely incapacitated or mildly injured, must be in want of a prim, no-nonsense nurse. And this is what we get in a book. The hero, Nick, was a bear of patient so the ladies of his family off-loaded him to a schoolmarm trained with dealing with recalcitrant, obnoxious, bratty six-year old boys. Rachel, in return, got to ask Nick to do her a favor and solve a family mystery as Nick is a trained private investigator.
For the most part, the book was enjoyable: excellent pacing, smart repartees, and funny scenes (i.e., her falling off – twice – the dock when she doesn’t know how to swim). But it was lacking in the big romance scene. I didn’t feel that he love-love her. Yes, I understand that the hero believed in this superstition that all successful marriages in his family had the couple falling fast and hard in love at an early age AND he missed the deadline. Even this premise is a little contrived, considering that the hero deals with hard facts in his line of business.
I think I would have been more convinced of his feelings had it been him at the end, instead of the heroine, who did the “grand gesture” with the photographs, had it been him instead of the heroine who creatively looked for pictures of two babies in adjacent cribs, two children at their first day of school, playing softball, at high school and in college.
As the story stands, the girl did all the work for this physically-maimed and emotionally-stunted man.