The Marchese's Love-Child

Polly Fairfax left Alessandro Valessi three years ago, believing that he didn't love her. Unbeknownst to either of them, she was pregnant at the time. When he finds out, he coerces her into marriage with him or risk losing custody of their son Charlie.

Books like this are enough to turn me completely off category romances. In fact they often do stop me reading them for a while, but then I'll pick up one of the few really great ones that manage to keep me hooked. It's not so much that the book is bad, but there are just so many little things that really irritate me.

1. When a complete stranger shows up claiming to have been sent by Sandro to threaten/bribe her into leaving him, Polly believes him without question. Even though they are supposedly in love and planning on getting married, she's too proud to confront him and find out the truth.
2. When Sandro, whom Polly believes to be involved with the Mafia, shows up unexpectedly and threatens to take Charlie away from her, Polly basically does nothing. She does not run to protect her son. She allows Julie, a complete stranger in Sandro's employ, take her son out of the room. I guarantee that under the same circumstances I would not be letting my child out of arm's reach, let alone out of my sight in the care of someone I didn't trust implicitly.
3. Polly's mother is a cow, and never really brought to account for her behaviour. She has no adequate reason for keeping Sandro's letters from Polly three years ago, especially in light of Polly's pregnancy. Her excuse that she feared Charlie would be taken away from her simply does not gel, considering the letters began before he was born when she herself wanted Polly to have an abortion. Not only that, she even read the letters. And let's not even get into how she has been trying to steal Charlie away from Polly to make him her own son.
4. Sandro knows that his father bribed and intimidated Polly into leaving. He knows that her mother kept his letters from her. In fact, Sandro holds all the cards, but for some obscure reason of his own never tells Polly the truth of what happened. This doesn't even begin to make sense. Furthermore, how can it have taken him 3 years to find her, when he knew her name and place of employment, and was even able to write letters to her (and obviously expected her to have received them)?
5. Finally my last complaint is what completely ruined the book for me: Sandro's mistresses of which he admits there have been several. Maybe that's why it took him so long to track Polly down? I absolutely hate this fairly prevalent concept in romance novels that whilst the heroine is expected to remain faithfully celibate to a man who doesn't want her, it's perfectly normal, acceptable, and even healthy, for the hero to sleep around with a plethora of sexual partners. I'm not talking about encounters prior to meeting the heroine, but rather during their "estrangement". (Those of you who remember "Friends" might recall Ross excusing cheating on Rachel because they were "on a break".) Of course these sexual encounters are purely physical and unsatisfactory, which makes it all right (rolls eyes). Ugh. There was no need to include this in this story at all, and it if had been excluded I may have been able to overlook the other things I have mentioned. As it is, this was simply the last straw.

Overall this book left a bad taste in my mouth and I wish I could remove it completely from my memory. Ugh, ugh, ugh.