HaBO: Heroine Asked to Be a Surrogate

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This HaBO is from Amanda, who is looking for this Mills & Boon romance:

There was a Mills & Boon romance in a bundle of old library books I bought when I was 12 or 13 – I was a 90s kid-turned-teenager, so as they were older books we’ll probably be going back to the 80s today.

I can still remember a few points from the plot today and they’ve been niggling me for years – so now I want to reread the story to see how the author tried to pass the idea one of the character’s cooks up as being doable to the other ones.

Long ago in a modern day romance; a friend of the heroine wants a baby with her husband, but she can’t carry a child (I think that it’s the hubby that is more interested in parenthood than the friend). The friend decides that her barrister husband and the heroine should get busy so that the friend can have the resulting baby, rather than having to having to deal with fertility treatment or having to go through the process of adoption – and heroine can live with them during the pregnancy and nursing stage.

Our sweet & virginal heroine has lost her job and has a sick mother to support (cancer, I think) and needs the room and money offered and is desperate, she gets down to business with the hubby. Naturally she quickly becomes pregnant and moves into a spare room.

I don’t recall most of the rest of the story, just random bits; hubby doesn’t like that heroine is staying with them and thinks that she is a gold digger, the friend is exposed as a cheat so heroine gets all holier than thou and decides that she won’t be handing over the baby (but won’t tell the hubby why she doesn’t want to hand over baby), friend is then wrote out of the story to avoid including any realistic fallout that would result from the mess of a plot (car crash?), and hubby admits that he was forced into marrying the friend in the first place, so never mind (fake pregnancy?).

I want to read how the successful barrister (who I think has to be careful about keeping a squeaky clean image – reporter digging around?) is forced into marriage and then talked into going along with a DIY surrogacy. I don’t remember the cover or anything about the title, just that it was a M&B (the ‘naughty’ book publisher), with a hardback cover.

Wowee!