≡ PDF Free For the Baby Sake Silhouette Special Edition Christine Rimmer 9780373596690 Books

For the Baby Sake Silhouette Special Edition Christine Rimmer 9780373596690 Books

Download As PDF : For the Baby Sake Silhouette Special Edition Christine Rimmer 9780373596690 Books

For the Baby Sake Silhouette Special Edition Christine Rimmer 9780373596690 Books

I started out really liking this book. The first 1/4 was interesting enough that I was happily turning the pages and I liked both our hero and heroine. Unfortunately in the second 1/4 of the book the quality started slipping and then at the 1/2 mark it took a complete nosedive and never really recovered.

And by God does this author need someone to edit her dialogue! In every conversation she has every single person saying the name of who their speaking to in every single line of spoken dialogue.

"Are you sure, Bob?"
"Yes, Phil."
"But Bob, how can you be so sure?"
"Well Phil, you'll just have to take my word for it, okay?"
"Okay, Bob."
"Thank you, Phil."

People don't really talk like that! There's one scene in particular where the heroine, Andie, says "Oh Clay" like four times in two pages. It was super annoying, and yanked me right out of the narrative.

<Spoiler Alert>
The story opens with Andie and Clay having lunch together. Clay was adopted by Andie's aunt and uncle when he was 10 years old so he and Andie were raised as cousins but aren't related by blood. Clay was always a very controlled, super driven high achiever while Andie was more of a devil-may-care free spirit who did whatever struck her fancy. Andie's family always treated her like an idiotic screw up and held up Clay as the example of who she should strive to be. So they argued a lot when they were kids and then Clay went off to college and eventually to a high flying accounting firm in L.A.

Andie eventually settled down and realized that she needed to build a career so she went to work for her uncle's accounting firm as the office manager. She was great at the job and the families both breathed a sigh of relief that she was finally behaving appropriately. Then the uncle had a heart attack and while he didn't die, he did need to step back from the firm so he handed it over to Clay. Andie then had to spend months proving herself all over again, this time to Clay, who had to be strong-armed by the families into keeping Andie on in the first place because he just assumed she was a screw up at this job too and had only been given the position because the families felt sorry for her.

Andie was, naturally, very irritated by Clay's condescension but after a few months of her kicking @ss in the office, he had to admit that she was not only great at her job, but that she'd be very hard to replace. When the book opens, they have a coolly professional relationship and that's about it.

At this lunch, Andie reveals that she's pregnant. She considers it a possibility that Clay will fire her because of it, which would be illegal, but she thinks him capable of it because there's so little trust between them. Clay is reasonably supportive, however, and assures her that she'll always have a job working for him. He asks who the father is but Andie refuses to tell him and just says the father is completely out of the picture.

It doesn't take Clay long to do the math and realize that the father is most likely his best friend, Jeff, who had temporarily broken up with his fiance and come to crash at Clay's house during the period of conception. But for some reason he doesn't ask Andie if his suspicions are true. This didn't really make sense to me and ended up being the beginning of a very contrived plot line where Clay goes on knowing the truth for ages but lying to Andie in order to make her think that he doesn't. It was really bizarre.

Andie tells her family about the bun in her oven and they roll their eyes and talk about how, once again, Andie has screwed up her life and why can't she be more like Clay. Then they corner Clay and first ask if he's the father, and then hint that he should marry Andie so that she'll be "taken care of," because clearly a woman with tons of friends, a good job, and strong familial support has no business raising a baby alone. In case you can't tell, I found Andie's family's treatment of her to be really irritating. Although in the book they were portrayed as being loving, to me it was very clear how their systematic emotional warfare had eroded her self-esteem to the point where she truly thought of herself as a screw up.

All of a sudden, Clay starts seeing Andie as a woman, rather than his bratty younger cousin and there were some nice scenes of Clay pining after her, which were good. Then he flies down to see Jeff, who has since gotten back together with the fiance and they're now married. When Jeff and Clay are alone together, Jeff admits that he slept with Andie "because she was there" at a time when he wasn't feeling too great about himself. And he says that it's a lot easier for him to pretend the baby doesn't exist than to come clean to his wife in order to be a supportive father. Clay says Jeff is dead to him and they beat each other up for a while.

Then Clay comes back home and lies to Andie about where he got all the bruises. He continues to pretend that he doesn't know the baby daddy's identity for several more weeks and I just can't understand WHY. Then he starts trying to woo Andie and there's good chemistry between them. Then Clay proposes, in a completely non-romantic way. Basically he says it's to give the baby a father and that he thinks they'll make a good, supportive couple. He, of course, does not believe in love because his biological mother was a bohemian borderline nutcase and he never knew who his father was.

Andie rejects his proposal and he backs off, sure that their newfound desire for each other will make her reconsider if he gives her time to stew. Andie frequently talks about how she could never marry someone without being 100% honest with him first. And since she can't tell him the baby daddy's name, this will never work out. She holds back on telling him because she thinks it'll break Clay's heart to find out his best friend is a douchebag. Clay knows this is her thought process and yet STILL doesn't tell her that he already knows the truth. Instead, he just keeps telling her that it doesn't matter because the guy is out of her life. Again, this just didn't make sense to me and felt very contrived.

I think the author was trying to hint at some vague hangup Clay had about thinking that Andie might be in love with Jeff and secretly pining away for him but it just didn't seem warranted. Clay knew they only spent one night together and had only known each other for a few days prior to that, so it's pretty unlikely that Andie fell in love in such a short space of time. And she's not ACTING like someone who is pining away. She's acting like a woman who has her life as a single mom planned out and is getting sh*t done.

Eventually Andie gives in enough to go to bed with Clay and the next morning he badgers her about accepting his proposal. She mentally prepares to tell Clay the truth about Jeff but just before she does, she realizes he already knows. She's upset that he didn't tell her but eventually lets it go. They marry the next day and things are great for several months. Andie eventually tells Clay that she loves him and he of course won't say it back because there's no such thing as love.

4 weeks before the baby is due, Clay gets a call that Jeff has died in a car accident. Clay immediately shuts Andie out when she tries to comfort him. She's very sure that Clay regrets the distance between him and Jeff and feels like he either does or SHOULD blame her for it. So when Clay asks her to book his flight to L.A. for the funeral, she gets one for herself too.

Clay is NOT happy that Andie is forcing her company on him. He says it's inappropriate for Andie to be there basically waving her scarlet A in front of the cuckqueaned widow's face. Andie is convinced Clay will need her for emotional support and refuses to be left behind.....And then basically the worst happens. At the reception after the funeral, the widow realizes that Andie is carrying Jeff's child and passes out. Then Andie goes into labor a month early. And for the rest of the book, Andie says that she realizes that it had been a bad call to go to L.A.. That it was all her fault that the widow figured things out, and that the baby was premature, and Clay agrees.

If this had been any other romance novel then Clay would have actually had a breakdown at the funeral and really needed Andie to lean on. Instead, we get another example of how Andie screws up all the time. I wasn't a fan. Once they get home with the baby, Clay refuses to have sex with Andie, even after the doctor's sanction on sex is lifted. Andie continually tries to get Clay to open up to her about what's bothering him but he refuses to tell her.

This whole period on the book was a long, boring slog and made me dislike both characters. Clay's reason for not touching Andie is that he feels certain that Andie will want to "talk" again after the sex reestablishes their connection. And talking would force him to articulate why he's upset with her. The reason is that he still somehow worries that Andie is secretly in love with Jeff even though she's been professing her love for CLAY for months now and has never ONCE said that she had any feelings for Jeff whatsoever. She keeps trying to tell Clay how it is that she and Jeff ended up in bed together that night but Clay refuses to let her get the words out. Instead he just goes on being coolly polite to her and rebuffing her advances for months while allegedly his body is racked with desire for her.

I totally didn't get it. What was his plan here? To just go on ignoring her both physically and emotionally for the rest of their lives out of fear that she might say she once had romantic feelings for the her baby's dead father? Why even stay married to her if his plan was to never touch her again? This was all very weak. And I wasn't too happy with Andie in these scenes either because it's not like she needed Clay's permission to speak about what happened between her and Jeff. All she had to do was shout it out anyway and this all would have been cleared up in five minutes. Instead she just kept pining away like some kind of martyr waiting for Clay to decide when she was allowed back in his inner circle. And after months of this Andie finally feels she can't go on and starts considering divorce but STILL doesn't just lock Clay in a room and force him to listen to her.

Eventually Jeff's widow comes to discuss the truth and SHE asks Andie what happened between her and Jeff. Andie explains that they were both just feeling blue and had too much to drink and it happened. Afterward she pushed Jeff to go back and make up with his fiance because she knew that he really did love her. The widow is thankful because Jeff was a changed man when he returned and completely committed to their marriage. She's grateful that she had these few glorious months with him before he died and it was all thanks to Andie. This truth finally breaks through Clay's layer of BS and he realizes he wants to keep Andie around. Andie pokes at him until he says he loves her too and that's the end.

<End spoiler>

All in all, I was very disappointed at the end. I didn't believe Clay's hangups. There was no basis for him to think Andie was in love with Jeff, so that was a nonstarter. And even his "there's no such thing as love" didn't ring true when he'd had decades of love from his adoptive parents. Not to mention that the two hangups contradict themselves. How can he believe Andie is in love when he doesn't believe in love as a concept??

I also didn't like how much Andie let Clay bully her and dictate their interactions in the second half. Nor that the author chose to make Andie seem reckless and stupid for wanting to be there for her husband after his best friend's funeral, when in any other romance novel, that would be the correct thing to do. The baby's birth was very anticlimactic considering how much focus there was on it in the beginning and afterward she became a Benadryl baby.

Really just not a satisfying read.


Tags : For the Baby's Sake (Silhouette Special Edition) [Christine Rimmer] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Book by Rimmer, Christine,Christine Rimmer,For the Baby's Sake (Silhouette Special Edition),Thorndike Pr,0373596693,Large Print,Non-Fiction

For the Baby Sake Silhouette Special Edition Christine Rimmer 9780373596690 Books Reviews

SYNOPSIS
Heroine works for a family business. She gets tipsy, and a guy beds her and leaves a 9 month time bomb in her womb. Her heroic cousin by adoption steps in, gives her his name, and they proceed to build a good life together, marred only by the young wife's craving for her new husband to tell her of his love. It's a romance, so there's no particular action or suspense, dang it.

CONS
One editing error, the hero Clay was introduced to his best friend's in-laws, but he should have already known them since he was the best man at their daughter's wedding.

The young wife kept insisting `Let's Talk About It'. Ladies, if you want the house to yourself, or to get your guy to leave you alone, the quickest easiest way is to tell your husband, "We have to talk." He'll disappear so fast it will make your head spin. Ugg. Too much emoting.

PROS
It was well written, the characters were interesting, and I love a heroic man like Clay, who knows the right thing and does it, and understands that family is vitally important and acts responsibly.

The heroine seemed to be pretty much a strong person, who faced her mistake (although it bordered on rape since she was drunk), and was determined to protect her child and be the best mom single or otherwise she could be to her precious child.
I started out really liking this book. The first 1/4 was interesting enough that I was happily turning the pages and I liked both our hero and heroine. Unfortunately in the second 1/4 of the book the quality started slipping and then at the 1/2 mark it took a complete nosedive and never really recovered.

And by God does this author need someone to edit her dialogue! In every conversation she has every single person saying the name of who their speaking to in every single line of spoken dialogue.

"Are you sure, Bob?"
"Yes, Phil."
"But Bob, how can you be so sure?"
"Well Phil, you'll just have to take my word for it, okay?"
"Okay, Bob."
"Thank you, Phil."

People don't really talk like that! There's one scene in particular where the heroine, Andie, says "Oh Clay" like four times in two pages. It was super annoying, and yanked me right out of the narrative.

<Spoiler Alert>
The story opens with Andie and Clay having lunch together. Clay was adopted by Andie's aunt and uncle when he was 10 years old so he and Andie were raised as cousins but aren't related by blood. Clay was always a very controlled, super driven high achiever while Andie was more of a devil-may-care free spirit who did whatever struck her fancy. Andie's family always treated her like an idiotic screw up and held up Clay as the example of who she should strive to be. So they argued a lot when they were kids and then Clay went off to college and eventually to a high flying accounting firm in L.A.

Andie eventually settled down and realized that she needed to build a career so she went to work for her uncle's accounting firm as the office manager. She was great at the job and the families both breathed a sigh of relief that she was finally behaving appropriately. Then the uncle had a heart attack and while he didn't die, he did need to step back from the firm so he handed it over to Clay. Andie then had to spend months proving herself all over again, this time to Clay, who had to be strong-armed by the families into keeping Andie on in the first place because he just assumed she was a screw up at this job too and had only been given the position because the families felt sorry for her.

Andie was, naturally, very irritated by Clay's condescension but after a few months of her kicking @ss in the office, he had to admit that she was not only great at her job, but that she'd be very hard to replace. When the book opens, they have a coolly professional relationship and that's about it.

At this lunch, Andie reveals that she's pregnant. She considers it a possibility that Clay will fire her because of it, which would be illegal, but she thinks him capable of it because there's so little trust between them. Clay is reasonably supportive, however, and assures her that she'll always have a job working for him. He asks who the father is but Andie refuses to tell him and just says the father is completely out of the picture.

It doesn't take Clay long to do the math and realize that the father is most likely his best friend, Jeff, who had temporarily broken up with his fiance and come to crash at Clay's house during the period of conception. But for some reason he doesn't ask Andie if his suspicions are true. This didn't really make sense to me and ended up being the beginning of a very contrived plot line where Clay goes on knowing the truth for ages but lying to Andie in order to make her think that he doesn't. It was really bizarre.

Andie tells her family about the bun in her oven and they roll their eyes and talk about how, once again, Andie has screwed up her life and why can't she be more like Clay. Then they corner Clay and first ask if he's the father, and then hint that he should marry Andie so that she'll be "taken care of," because clearly a woman with tons of friends, a good job, and strong familial support has no business raising a baby alone. In case you can't tell, I found Andie's family's treatment of her to be really irritating. Although in the book they were portrayed as being loving, to me it was very clear how their systematic emotional warfare had eroded her self-esteem to the point where she truly thought of herself as a screw up.

All of a sudden, Clay starts seeing Andie as a woman, rather than his bratty younger cousin and there were some nice scenes of Clay pining after her, which were good. Then he flies down to see Jeff, who has since gotten back together with the fiance and they're now married. When Jeff and Clay are alone together, Jeff admits that he slept with Andie "because she was there" at a time when he wasn't feeling too great about himself. And he says that it's a lot easier for him to pretend the baby doesn't exist than to come clean to his wife in order to be a supportive father. Clay says Jeff is dead to him and they beat each other up for a while.

Then Clay comes back home and lies to Andie about where he got all the bruises. He continues to pretend that he doesn't know the baby daddy's identity for several more weeks and I just can't understand WHY. Then he starts trying to woo Andie and there's good chemistry between them. Then Clay proposes, in a completely non-romantic way. Basically he says it's to give the baby a father and that he thinks they'll make a good, supportive couple. He, of course, does not believe in love because his biological mother was a bohemian borderline nutcase and he never knew who his father was.

Andie rejects his proposal and he backs off, sure that their newfound desire for each other will make her reconsider if he gives her time to stew. Andie frequently talks about how she could never marry someone without being 100% honest with him first. And since she can't tell him the baby daddy's name, this will never work out. She holds back on telling him because she thinks it'll break Clay's heart to find out his best friend is a douchebag. Clay knows this is her thought process and yet STILL doesn't tell her that he already knows the truth. Instead, he just keeps telling her that it doesn't matter because the guy is out of her life. Again, this just didn't make sense to me and felt very contrived.

I think the author was trying to hint at some vague hangup Clay had about thinking that Andie might be in love with Jeff and secretly pining away for him but it just didn't seem warranted. Clay knew they only spent one night together and had only known each other for a few days prior to that, so it's pretty unlikely that Andie fell in love in such a short space of time. And she's not ACTING like someone who is pining away. She's acting like a woman who has her life as a single mom planned out and is getting sh*t done.

Eventually Andie gives in enough to go to bed with Clay and the next morning he badgers her about accepting his proposal. She mentally prepares to tell Clay the truth about Jeff but just before she does, she realizes he already knows. She's upset that he didn't tell her but eventually lets it go. They marry the next day and things are great for several months. Andie eventually tells Clay that she loves him and he of course won't say it back because there's no such thing as love.

4 weeks before the baby is due, Clay gets a call that Jeff has died in a car accident. Clay immediately shuts Andie out when she tries to comfort him. She's very sure that Clay regrets the distance between him and Jeff and feels like he either does or SHOULD blame her for it. So when Clay asks her to book his flight to L.A. for the funeral, she gets one for herself too.

Clay is NOT happy that Andie is forcing her company on him. He says it's inappropriate for Andie to be there basically waving her scarlet A in front of the cuckqueaned widow's face. Andie is convinced Clay will need her for emotional support and refuses to be left behind.....And then basically the worst happens. At the reception after the funeral, the widow realizes that Andie is carrying Jeff's child and passes out. Then Andie goes into labor a month early. And for the rest of the book, Andie says that she realizes that it had been a bad call to go to L.A.. That it was all her fault that the widow figured things out, and that the baby was premature, and Clay agrees.

If this had been any other romance novel then Clay would have actually had a breakdown at the funeral and really needed Andie to lean on. Instead, we get another example of how Andie screws up all the time. I wasn't a fan. Once they get home with the baby, Clay refuses to have sex with Andie, even after the doctor's sanction on sex is lifted. Andie continually tries to get Clay to open up to her about what's bothering him but he refuses to tell her.

This whole period on the book was a long, boring slog and made me dislike both characters. Clay's reason for not touching Andie is that he feels certain that Andie will want to "talk" again after the sex reestablishes their connection. And talking would force him to articulate why he's upset with her. The reason is that he still somehow worries that Andie is secretly in love with Jeff even though she's been professing her love for CLAY for months now and has never ONCE said that she had any feelings for Jeff whatsoever. She keeps trying to tell Clay how it is that she and Jeff ended up in bed together that night but Clay refuses to let her get the words out. Instead he just goes on being coolly polite to her and rebuffing her advances for months while allegedly his body is racked with desire for her.

I totally didn't get it. What was his plan here? To just go on ignoring her both physically and emotionally for the rest of their lives out of fear that she might say she once had romantic feelings for the her baby's dead father? Why even stay married to her if his plan was to never touch her again? This was all very weak. And I wasn't too happy with Andie in these scenes either because it's not like she needed Clay's permission to speak about what happened between her and Jeff. All she had to do was shout it out anyway and this all would have been cleared up in five minutes. Instead she just kept pining away like some kind of martyr waiting for Clay to decide when she was allowed back in his inner circle. And after months of this Andie finally feels she can't go on and starts considering divorce but STILL doesn't just lock Clay in a room and force him to listen to her.

Eventually Jeff's widow comes to discuss the truth and SHE asks Andie what happened between her and Jeff. Andie explains that they were both just feeling blue and had too much to drink and it happened. Afterward she pushed Jeff to go back and make up with his fiance because she knew that he really did love her. The widow is thankful because Jeff was a changed man when he returned and completely committed to their marriage. She's grateful that she had these few glorious months with him before he died and it was all thanks to Andie. This truth finally breaks through Clay's layer of BS and he realizes he wants to keep Andie around. Andie pokes at him until he says he loves her too and that's the end.

<End spoiler>

All in all, I was very disappointed at the end. I didn't believe Clay's hangups. There was no basis for him to think Andie was in love with Jeff, so that was a nonstarter. And even his "there's no such thing as love" didn't ring true when he'd had decades of love from his adoptive parents. Not to mention that the two hangups contradict themselves. How can he believe Andie is in love when he doesn't believe in love as a concept??

I also didn't like how much Andie let Clay bully her and dictate their interactions in the second half. Nor that the author chose to make Andie seem reckless and stupid for wanting to be there for her husband after his best friend's funeral, when in any other romance novel, that would be the correct thing to do. The baby's birth was very anticlimactic considering how much focus there was on it in the beginning and afterward she became a Benadryl baby.

Really just not a satisfying read.