Jessica Hart
Business Arrangement Bride (2006)
Author: Jessica Hart
Genre: Romance (Contemporary)
Plot Summary:
Businessman Tyler Watts has everything: a successful property company, money and fast cars. The only things his perfect life is missing are a wife and children and he’s determined to get those next. Mary Thomas is a single mother who’s recently single, broke, without a place to live and struggling to get a recruitment company off the ground. When Mary approaches Tyler about having her company do some work for his, he counters with a tempting offer. If she’ll coach him in relationships so he can find a woman to marry, he’ll give her a contract with his company and ten thousand pounds. Down-on-her-luck Mary can’t afford to turn down the deal, so she agrees on the condition that she and her infant daughter Bea can move into his house for the time they will be working together. Over the course of the month, Mary falls for Tyler and he becomes taken by her and Bea, but Mary is nothing like the type of woman he’s looking for. He imagines himself with someone beautiful, intelligent and sophisticated, but Mary is a bit chunky and likes to spend at home, doing such trivial tasks as cooking dinner—and she already has a child. When the month is up they go their separate ways, each determined to ignore their feelings for the other. SPOILER: Tyler tries dating another woman who seems to have everything he wants in a wife, but he realizes she’s missing one key thing: she’s not Mary. He goes back to Mary, proposes, and she accepts.
Geographical Setting: York, England
Time Period: Present day (2006)
Series: Nine to Five (an un-numbered series)
Appeal Characteristics:
The storyline is focused on the characters and the development of Mary and Tyler’s relationship, with very little action or plot. Despite the emphasis on character, however, the characterization is not detailed or very well developed. A little of Mary’s back-story is provided, but otherwise the reader does not get to know very much about the characters or their motivations. The story's frame isn't very developed, but it does have a contemporary feel: it includes some of the spelling, dialect and other information about present-day England, where it is set. Additionally, the tone is at times serious and at other times slightly humorous as the characters miscommunicate and misinterpret each other’s actions and intentions. The novel has an unhurried yet steady pace, with the plot slowly unfolding and taking place over the course of a month or two and characters reacting to things as they come up. Hart’s writing style is simple and unadorned; it is not very descriptive, the structure is not complex and the vocabulary level is not very high.
Read-alikes: Readers who enjoyed this title will want to explore Hart’s other books, including Assignment: Baby and Contracted: Corporate Wife, both also from the Nine to Five series. The first features a businessman and his assistant who suddenly become the caretaker of a baby, and the second follows a businessman who tries to convince his assistant to marry him. Both titles share the character-focused storylines focusing on developing romantic relationships and leisurely pacing of Business Arrangement Bride. Readers who enjoyed the plot of Business Arrangement Bride will be particularly interested in Accepting the Boss’s Proposal by Natasha Oakley. In addition to sharing a similar theme of a single mother who falls for the man she’s working for, it has a humorous tone and an emphasis on character. Inherited: Baby by Nicola Marsh also has the theme of a single mother struggling to make it, as well as strong characters and an emphasis on the developing relationship over action. Married Under the Italian Sun by Lucy Gordon has a similar tone to Business Arrangement Bride, being both serious and humorous in turn, as well as having character-focused storyline. It features recently divorced Angel trying to get away from her chaotic life by moving to a villa in Italy. Rachel Gibson’s Daisy’s Back in Town is about a woman who returns to her hometown to try to repair her relationship with a former love. Despite its small-town frame and more sensual tone, this book has a slow pacing (assisted by flashbacks) and strong characterization that will likely appeal to fans of Hart’s book.
Red Flags: None
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