Ripple Effect

Family Secrets #13

by Vickie Taylor

IN THE NEWS: Seth Evans, dashing CEO of Evans Yachts
FAMILY HISTORY: Sought-after eldest son and heir to the Evans empire
DEEPEST SECRET: Working on a classified submarine prototype...and masking his desire for his lovely assistant

Seth Evans kept his feelings as tightly buttoned as his Armani suits. But when an act of sabotage destroyed his yacht and left him stranded on a deserted island with Emma Carpenter, the powerful executive wondered not if they'd survive but how long he could maintain his self-control around his shy secretary. Soon the steamy nights of watching over sweet Emma were getting too hot to handle, and he surrendered to the ultimate temptation. But once they returned to civilization, world-weary Seth vowed to keep his distance. Yet all actions had consequences--and theirs was due in nine months....

Genres: Romance

249 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published June 1, 2004

About the author

Vickie Taylor wrote her first novel in 1997. Upon completion, she was too chicken to give the manuscript to anyone she knew to read, so she sent her baby off to a few contests to get some anonymous feedback instead. Little did she know how her life was about to change: a few months later, she had won all four of the Romance Writers of America chapter contests she’d entered, was a Golden Heart finalist and had sold the book to Silhouette Intimate Moments!

Since then, Vickie has written numerous romantic suspense novels for Silhouette Books and Berkley Sensation, garnering such recognition as the Daphne du Maurier Award of Excellence in Romantic Suspense, a four-and-a-half star “Top Pick” review in Romantic Times, and a coveted RWA Rita nomination for her work.

In 2006, Vickie continued her acclaimed paranormal series featuring Les Gargouillen (the Gargoyles) with FLESH AND STONE, the sequel to the smashing debut CARVED IN STONE. The third book in the series, LEGACY OF STONE, is now on bookstore shelves everywhere.

Vickie lives in a small town in north Texas dubbed “The Heart of Horse Country” where she rounds out her writing days raising horses, volunteering with the local Humane Society, and serving on a K-9 search and rescue team

Reviews

[Maura · Rating 3 out of 5]

We’re out of the “extraordinary five” and “Coalition” drama, even though the characters are still present in this universe, and now it seems we’ve got Project Stingray. The Evans family, Marcus’s cousins, own a boat building business and have been contracted by the U.S. Gov’t to build a top-secret, hush-hush, stealth submarine. Gideon is helping with technology, but the design falls to Seth Evans, who runs the family business. Emma is Seth’s secretary, who is actually an undercover intelligence operative for the navy, who wants her to monitor the Project and make sure Seth is behaving himself (not selling plans to foreign gov’ts and whatnot). The two end up on a deserted island after their boat gets blown up and they both finally succumb to the attraction that has simmered between them. Seth is adamant that the night will be forgotten, but this is difficult because Emma ends up pregnant. Now Seth’s insecurities roar to the forefront as he demands that Emma marry him because he will not be anything less than a full-time father to his child...he’s been there, done that, forgot to buy the t-shirt. Emma of course VERY reluctantly agrees, but can’t dispute his point. But Seth doesn’t actually know who Emma is yet. And someone is willing to kill Seth and anyone close to him in order to get the Stingray plans, so Seth has a lot more on his plate than just a secretive woman and impending fatherhood.

This has plenty of excitement and mayhem and the suspense keeps the story going fairly well. For all that the blurb focuses on the main characters being stuck on a deserted island, they’re only on it for about 3 days and it hardly takes up 3 chapters of the book. Most of this is some mole within the navy or the family business attempting to steal the Stingray Plans for a nefarious purpose and the lengths that person will go to in order to accomplish it. The suspense plot here was the strength for me. The romance was a bit too tropey and back-n-forth with the feelings. But it had its ups and downs as well.

Now, despite this being a pretty decent suspense story, with bombs and explosions and a mystery about who is trying to put the stopper on the Stingray project, this fell short because I didn’t really like either of the characters. With Seth you’ve got a guy who lusts after his secretary, treats her like she’s a servant half the time and then he’s completely inflexible about the whole marriage thing. I didn’t really get the sense that he liked Emma, although he definitely wanted her. Emma, likewise, was a bit of a whackadoodle. She daydreams and fantasizes, is a bit too ditzy to be doing the spying job she’s doing (which is fair, since she sucks at it) and she has major insecurities about being a burden.

So, the whole marriage of convenience because of a pregnancy trope isn’t my favorite. I don’t hate it and there are a few that I really like, but it’s more often I dislike it than like it. Now the set up of this story was slightly different for me, with was both good and bad. Usually, in these situations, the hero steamrolls right over the heroine’s life and I sympathize with the heroine because it feels like she has no choice...that she’s the victim. It was a teensy bit difficult for me to feel sorry for the heroine. In the first place, SHE is the one who insisted they continue having sex without protection. Granted the hero went along with it and and he completely accepts his responsibility (or lack thereof in having unprotected sex despite his initial protestations). I give him props for not throwing that whole thing back in her face the way I just did. Secondly, she outright lied to him about who she was and the fact that she was spying on him, so his whole issue with trust is completely valid. It doesn’t really give him the right to demand marriage and more or less blackmail her into what would doubtless turn out to be an absolutely miserable MOC, but in the back of my mind I’m thinking, she kinda set herself up for this. So for once, I didn’t really sympathize with the heroine being strongly coerced into an unwanted marriage. He had every reason to be as pissed as he was with her. And so, as a result, even later, when the heroine was more sympathetic and the hero was no longer mad, I still had trouble connecting with her, or liking her, in light of the fact that she was largely to blame for her own problems and complaining about them.

What I liked that was different about this is that the heroine starts right away with an insecurity about being someone’s burden...stemming from her childhood and parents that didn’t really want her. So going into this whole MOC debacle, she has a real fear of this...not just the vague I-don’t-want-to reasons of most heroines. This actually made logical sense and gave the heroine a more concrete reason to rebel against the idea of an MOC. I really liked that. I didn’t really like the whole back and forth as the hero’s and heroine’s insecurities create their little Catch-22. It started to feel like too much by then.