Missing Mother-To-Be - Elle Kennedy
I got this one on a Target clearance shelf for 96 cents! You have no idea how exciting that was. I was close to doing a jig right there in the aisle. Especially since I refuse to go to the book section anymore (oh God, I miss it so) due to a rage inducing fan fiction parading itself as a "book".I'm getting off track. Where was I?Oh, right. It was 96 cents!It's a typical Harlequin romantic suspense from beginning to end. The premise of the story is a good one. A young woman studying abroad is kidnapped due to the actions of her senator father. That would be bad enough but it turns out she's pregnant. The bigger problem is that the father of her baby is one of her kidnappers. I didn't really have problems with the way the plot in and of itself played out. While the major problems I had with the story (and some smaller issues) affected the plot I still didn't hate the story. My first and biggest problem was the case of the irredeemable hero. I can very much see where other people might find Deacon Holt redeemed by the end of the book, but it didn't completely work for me. He is a kidnapper. Like the heroine I was hoping that he was working undercover or something. That he wasn't truly a man who would kidnap a young woman for money. But he is. That right there is hard enough to redeem. But then it becomes clear that when he and Lana met at the Louvre he was tailing her – he knew he was going to be kidnapping her. Yet he still took her out that night and slept with her. It was just a really skeevy move that is damn near impossible for me to get over. Finally, no matter how much the heroine insisted I never got the impression that Deacon really was a completely "good guy". I thought his view of himself was more accurate. Because, really, if Lana had been unattractive to him, if he didn't want to sleep with her again, would he have cared about what she was going through like he did? Would he have risked everything to save her? All we got was his statements that he was never on board to kill anyone at any time. So the whole book was trying to redeem this guy and my mind was thinking of these things and working against it the entire time. That said I did sort of come to like him by the end. It's an odd (and irritating) situation.At first I really liked Lana Kelly. She was mostly smart and likable. She started off with the appropriate anger at Deacon and she really struggled between her anger at him for what he was helping put her through but also needing him to be a good man because he's her baby's father. But for some reason about halfway through the book she seemed to lose the intelligence she had. She jumped over into TSTL territory and got someone else killed instead of herself. It was so unnecessary. The only good thing I can say about that scene is that at least she was losing her mind over the risk to her and her baby and not Deacon (which would have made me throw the book across the room). After that she kind of flailed around like an idiot and became really exasperating.Sigh, the sexytimes. It wasn't terrible, but first and foremost FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY STOP CALLING IT "HER SEX". I just can't let that go, I hate it so damn much. My other issue was the timing. Let's maybe get further to safety before getting down, okay?Be warned: the epilogue is a bit of a cliffhanger. So if you're not interested in continuing (how it continues I'm not sure yet) then I would skip it altogether. You won't be missing much of anything with the main couple.I'd give this somewhere between 2.5 and 3 stars.