Her Temporary Hero

by Jennifer Apodaca

July 14, 2014 · Entangled: Indulgence

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This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by Catherine Heloise. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Mid-Length Contemporary category.

Here is Catherine Heloise's review:

The novel opens with Becky being confronted by her violent and abusive ex-boyfriend, fresh out of jail and determined to get custody of her 3 month old baby.  He is, in fact, the father, though this is a matter of biology only – he definitely did not want it, and the implication is that he is out for custody simply to get revenge on Becky.  Since his family is extremely wealthy and influential, and Becky is alone in the world and working as a cleaner, he is likely to succeed in this bid.  Becky turns to her boss for help, and her boss installs her in her cousin’s house – after all, Logan is away, he won’t mind.

Yeah, like he was really going to be away.  Logan comes home, is initially angry to find his home invaded, but once he hears Becky’s story, he becomes very protective and wants her to stay.  Also, thanks to a manipulative and emotionally abusive father, he needs a temporary wife in order to keep the land and his house.  (Of course he does.)  Logan is a returned veteran with PTSD, and he wants to use his property to set up a sort of therapeutic ranch where other veterans can come to deal with their PTSD, away from the stresses of the world.  And, of course, his family must not know that the marriage is a fake one!

So far so good.  We have the set up, we see why the hero and heroine belong together, and we know, approximately, what will happen from here.  We know that at some point, the abusive ex must reappear.  We know that at some point Logan’s family must find out that the marriage is a fake.  And we know that the marriage isn’t going to be temporary.  Everyone is clear on the rules.

And indeed, so is the author.  This is quite a comforting sort of book to read, one where the pleasure of reading comes less from being surprised by the turns in the plot and more from enjoying the ride and how the book gets there.  I notice it was being marketed as romantic suspense at one point, which I’m less sure about – there is a little suspense, but it comes mainly from knowing that the aforementioned plot turns must happen at some point.

There is a lot to like about the characters and their relationship.  Both Becky and Logan are grown-ups, and while they have more than their fair share of trauma in their past, they are both pretty well-adjusted and kind people.  They have a pleasing tendency to listen to each other and themselves, and I only wanted to throw a shoe at Logan once in the entire book, which is quite a good effort.  And he grovelled appropriately afterward (to Becky, not me, but I accepted his apology). I enjoyed spending time with them in this book, and I thought their relationship made sense.  I also enjoyed Logan’s family, in particular his stepmother, Pricilla.  They were well-drawn and not just there to move the plot along, and I liked the history of Logan’s relationship with his stepmother.

Altogether, a gentle, enjoyable read, and far less dark than I was expecting.

However, I did have one or two problems with the book, and they mostly centre around Becky and her baby.

First, Sophie at three months old is the most convenient, well-behaved baby I have ever encountered.   Now, I am not a mother myself, but I’ve never encountered a baby who sleeps so conveniently, who lets parents have long and useful conversations, who can be taken to work every evening without being disruptive, and who only ever cries when the plot requires her to. I loved Becky’s protectiveness of and love for her baby, and that relationship rang very true.  But Sophie was supernaturally well-behaved, or possibly on Phenergen.

Second, Sophie is three months old, which means that Becky is three months post-partum.  Becky also lost her mother to cancer only six weeks ago.  Since they were living together and did not have health insurance, I’m guessing Becky did most of the nursing. Becky is also breastfeeding, working full-time as a cleaner in the evenings, and living on peanut butter sandwiches.  And hiding from an abusive ex-boyfriend.  And, while she has one friend who sems to be pretty involved, and a supportive boss, she is essentially doing all of this alone.

Now, Becky is also only 22, so she has reserves of energy that I only remember wistfully, but how on earth did she not collapse in an exhausted heap once she reached a place of safety, where there was enough food and enough money that she didn’t need to worry about working so hard?  Instead, she starts planning to go back to university, resurrects her mother’s dressmaking  business as a sideline, starts relearning to ride horses, continues fighting that custody battle, and, of course, fools around with the hero.  Resilience doesn’t even begin to cover it!

To be fair, the book bounced along well enough to this point that it was only when I stopped reading and started adding up Becky’s story that my eyebrows went up.  Alas, this was not the case for the sex scenes.

In another book, I’d have liked them a lot.  Even in this one, I quite like them.  They are sweet and sensual and written with a minimum of turgid shafts and swollen buds, and I like the relationship between Becky and Logan.  But the mechanics bothered me.  I mean, Becky is breastfeeding, and Logan is a bit of a breasts man, and I’m wondering how her breasts know that he isn’t a baby, if you get my drift.  Also, Logan does that hero thing about needing to go slowly when he enters her because he knows it’s been a long time since her last lover, and I’m sitting there thinking, well, yes, but she just had a baby three months ago.  So the implication that she is going to be super-tight seems a little unlikely to me.  Unless she has been fitting in truly heroic pelvic floor exercises in between everything else?  Or maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.

The frustrating thing was, if the author wanted to show Logan being super considerate, he could easily have been thinking about things like the fact that her previous lover was an abusive jerk who probably treated her badly.  Or about the fact that she really is only three months post-partum, and might be self-conscious about this, or finding that her body is working a bit differently, or whatever.  But no.  I found myself concluding Becky had two bodies – one was the functional one, that gives birth and breastfeeds, that works, that does all the things one needs to do to get through the day, and then sleeps at night, and the other was the fun one, which gets to ride horses and have sex and has the energy to start planning for the future.

It’s entirely possible that I’m being unfair.  As I said, I’m not a mother, so I’ve really only got an outside perspective on what giving birth to and then looking after an infant is like, but it certainly looks exhausting from here.  And once I started thinking along these lines, I found I spent a lot of time wondering ‘wait, how is she doing this?’ when I would have liked to be floating along in the happy feeling of watching two rather nice people fall in love with each other and actually communicate and talk like adults and support each other and understand and care about each other’s priorities.

Which is a rare and pleasing combination in a romance novel, and deserves not to be spoiled by my ponderings about realism.