RECKLESS HEARTS

An ex-Marine raising his daughter with the help of his two best friends meets the perfect nanny for his daughter, but when their mutual attraction creates tension in their business relationship, he’s not sure how to handle it.

Collin Montgomery didn’t expect to leave the Marine Corps to raise his infant daughter, Chloe, but after his girlfriend dies in an accident, he’s left with little choice and is grateful when his two Marine buddies Max and Gavin come with him to help. Their odd work schedules make it hard to have someone on call all the time, especially after Collin’s sister, Lia, gets a new job that leaves her unable to fill the gaps. Lia introduces him to Addison, a currently unemployed preschool teacher who’d make a perfect nanny. Unfortunately Addison and Collin have already met at a bar, a meeting that was out of character for both of them and left them with really bad first impressions, so their ability to form a positive working relationship is in question and is hindered further by a smoldering yet unwelcome attraction. But when her desperation for a job matches his desperation for child care, they meet in the middle, learn to respect each other, and then become a couple—but they are continually burdened by their insecurities and personal wounds. Debut author Van Fleet starts with an interesting concept, “Three Marines and a Baby,” and creates a set of characters who should be sexy and just flawed enough to make readers root for them but instead makes them immature, annoying, and so incapable of communicating in even the simplest ways that one wonders why they care about each other, much less why the reader should care about them. There's way too much fighting, jealousy, and misunderstandings that could be easily untangled if the characters would simply talk to each other; in other words, too much of the wrong kind of conflict to sustain a novel.

A disappointing effort.