The Troublemaker Bride

After years of being in a relationship with her never there musician boyfriend/fiancé, Maddie Palmer finds herself single and pregnant. Stuck in a traffic jam while in labour, Maddie leaves her car to try and find some other way to the hospital. She spots a truck with a motorbike in the back, and her water breaks while she is asking the driver to take her to the hospital. The truck/motorbike owner happens to be studly single dad, Joshua Blackwell, who coincidentally owns a horse stud farm. Anyway, he gets her to hospital on time and is with her through the birth of her son David.

This is the second novel of the How to Catch a Princess series and is quite different from the previous one, The Five-Minute Bride. Joshua is a calm, stoic farmer, and his and Maddie's relationship progresses sweetly along with no major dramas until the fateful day when he comments to her how great it is that she doesn't want to get married. Huh? Where did that come from? I guess he assumes it since she was content to be in a long-term relationship with her previous guy without getting married and doesn't seem too bitter about being a single mother. Nevertheless, it's bizarre and totally out of the blue for Joshua to say something like that, and it gives the impression that it was solely done to provide conflict to the story line. Joshua hasn't been in a relationship since his wife, Gail, died 12 years ago; he's been concentrating on being a good single dad. There's never any indication that he never wants to marry again now that he's involved with Maddie. Maddie of course freaks out at Joshua saying he doesn't want to marry, because she doesn't want to settle for any thing less again. Naturally all is sorted out eventually and they get married to live happily ever after. This was a nice book (even with the stiff formulaic "conflict") but nothing special.