I’m confused, is this a romance novel, or some kind of Jane the Virgin reboot? (My thoughts on The CEO's Unexpected Child by Andrea Laurence from Harlequin Desire's Billionaires and Babies miniseries; Book #2431)

I’d like to start out this review by saying that something I’ve been interested in doing ever since I decided to start reviewing books for my blog on a regular basis is to review Harlequin romance novels. If you’ve visited my blog before, and you’ve read my other book reviews, then there’s a pretty good chance that you’re aware of the fact that despite me being a guy and subsequently not being the target demographic for the romance genre, I’m a huge fan of the genre. When I was in high school, Harlequin romance novels were definitely a major guilty pleasure for me. Admittedly, Andrea Laurence’s The CEO's Unexpected Child is the first Harlequin romance novel that I’ve read in years. However, I’ve continued to think about them quite a bit over the years since I was in high school, and I’m 29 years old now.

As I’ve thought about Harlequin romance novels over the years, I’ve definitely realized more and more just how silly and ridiculous they can be at times. One of the things that I thought about a lot when I was reading Emma Chase’s Tangled series and her Legal Briefs series, as well as Sylvia Day’s Crossfire series, and Lauren Blakely’s book, Big Rock is how cliché and unoriginal Harlequin romance novels can be. In a lot of ways the plot of Harlequin romance novels are a dime a dozen, so I went into reading The CEO's Unexpected Child with pretty low expectations. Honestly, I has half expecting to feel compelled to write an incredibly snarky review for The CEO's Unexpected Child about how ridiculous and I thought the book was once I was finished reading it.

Originally, I was planning to pretty much judge The CEO's Unexpected Child solely in comparison to all of the other Harlequin romance novels that I’ve read in the past; rather than have the same expectations for this book that I would have for pretty much every other book that I read when it comes to judging how character and plot development is handled in a book, as well as various other aspects of a book. That being said, I ended up being pleasantly surprised by how much I ended up liking this book. While I originally wasn’t going to hold The CEO's Unexpected Child to the same standards and expectations that I’ve had for the other books I’ve read and reviewed, I found myself thinking a lot about my thoughts on Sylvia Day’s Crossfire series, particularly my complaints regarding that series.

If I’m being honest, I ended up liking this book more than I like every book in the Crossfire series, with exception of the first book in the series, Bared to You. Personally, I think that Andrea Laurence did a much better job of not only providing good character development for the two main characters in The CEO's Unexpected Child, Claire Douglas and Luca Moretti, she also did a very good job of convincing me that there’s actually something special between Claire and Luca when it comes to their relationship in just this book alone; compared to how Sylvia Day has handled character and story development for the two main characters in the Crossfire series, Eva Tramell and Gideon Cross, as well as her ability to write their relationship in such a way that I can actually believe that there’s a genuine connection between them, and the reader is able to understand why they should root for their relationship to work out throughout the series. Personally, I think it’s quite an accomplishment that Andrea Laurence was able to do that considering the fact that not only is The CEO's Unexpected Child a standalone novel, it’s also significantly shorter than the books in the Crossfire series. Don’t get me wrong, The CEO's Unexpected Child is by no means perfect, but it’s still a pretty good book that exceeded the expectations that I had before I started reading it.

When it comes to my thoughts on Claire and Luca as characters, while I ultimately ended up really liking them as characters, there were times when I was annoyed and frustrated by the both of them throughout the book. For starters, I didn’t like Claire very much at the beginning of the book. Laurence pretty much drops the readers right into the middle of the action at the start of the book, but she thankfully did a great job of quickly and effectively giving the reader the necessary backstory and information about what was going on with the whole situation involving Claire, Luca and baby Eva.

However, despite knowing quite a few of the details regarding Claire’s backstory and what the situation was, she still came across as being rather annoying and unlikable at first. Sure, Claire was definitely in a very unusual and difficult situation, with her having found out that she hadn’t been inseminated with her husband’s sperm, she had been inseminated with Luca’s sperm by accident, and that her husband, Jeff, had been killed in a car accident with his mistress that she hadn’t even known about until after they were both killed in the car accident when she was five months pregnant with her daughter, Eva. She still came across as the one who was being difficult when it came to how they both were dealing with the situation, though, whereas Luca was acting pretty reasonable, as far as I’m concerned.

What bugged me the most about Claire at first was how quick she was to assume the worst about Luca. While I can understand her reluctance to let Luca gain any amount of custody of Eva without running a background check on him, or without getting to know him first, I thought it was pretty rude of her to automatically think that he could be a child molester, or some other kind of creep. Plus, I think it was pretty unfair of her to assume that just because Luca is rich, that automatically means that he doesn’t know anything about taking care of babies; and that he would just hand Eva off to nannies as soon as he gained access to her.

Honestly, I love that at one point in the book when Claire, Luca and Eva were leaving for the trip that they went on so they could all get to know each other better, Luca said in his internal narrative that he was looking forward to basically systematically proving that all of the assumptions that Claire had been making about him were wrong. Personally, I absolutely loved seeing Luca repeatedly prove that Claire was wrong about him. It definitely helped that he wasn’t being blatantly rude about it whenever he showed her that she was wrong about him, otherwise he could have quite possibly just have ended up coming across as not being any better than Claire.

If I’m coming across as hating Claire, I definitely don’t mean to, because I ultimately ended up really liking her as a character. It’s just that as I said earlier, all of the backstory regarding the whole situation and the discovery that Luca was actually Eva’s biological father prior to the beginning of the book, really painted Claire as being the person who was being difficult and unwilling to work out any kind of custody agreement that would be in everybody’s best interest. Luca, on the other hand, had apparently been acting pretty civil and reasonable in terms of how he had been handling the situation up that point. If I understood correctly, it sounds like Claire had really been dragging her heels when it came to simply arranging to meet with Luca for the very first time. That’s why I couldn’t entirely blame Luca for being driven to a point where he was threatening to take aggressive legal action against Claire.

When they first met, Luca threatened to have Claire sent to prison if she left him no choice but to get a court order allowing him to spend time with Eva, and she refused to cooperate with that court order. After all, it’s one thing for her to simply not let Luca spend time with Eva without any court orders being filed; it would be a whole other thing for her to still refuse to let Luca see Eva after any court orders had been granted. Claire would have been breaking the law if she violated any court orders that Luca could have filed, which would mean that Luca would have had every right to have her arrested.  Luckily, it didn’t come to that. That being said, the further I got into the book, the more I liked her as a character. I really liked how Claire came across as being a very strong woman who wasn’t a major doormat, and she wasn’t afraid to call Luca out on his crap when he really needed to be. At the same time, however, Claire also had a vulnerable side that I felt Laurence handled very well when it came to the writing for Claire.

One thing that I really liked about The CEO's Unexpected Child is that both Luca and Claire’s backstories were pretty much the complete opposite of the other’s backstory. For example, Claire was an only child, so she never had much of a family. When she married Jeff, his family pretty much became her family. However, the circumstances of Jeff’s death, and the discovery of his affair with another woman made things between Claire and Jeff’s family really awkward, and they subsequently drifted apart. Luca on the other hand came from a big, close nit, Italian family, and he was very family-oriented; which is how he had apparently learned a lot about how to take care of a baby. Personally, I really enjoyed the scenes featuring Luca’s family, and Claire’s interactions with them. Maybe this will sound weird to some people, but the scenes featuring members of Luca’s family honestly reminded me a lot of the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Given the circumstances of how Claire was accidently inseminated with Luca’s sperm, and the reason why Luca had sperm that was being stored at a sperm bank being that he had had cancer at one point in the past; the premise of The CEO's Unexpected Child also reminded me a lot of the show Jane the Virgin, which I’m a big fan of.

Maybe other people who’ve read this book will disagree with me, but while I often found Harlequin romance novels to be rather predictable when I’ve read them in the past, I honestly didn’t think that The CEO's Unexpected Child was entirely predictable. As I was reading the book, there were a lot of times where I found myself guessing what was going to happen, only to eventually be proven wrong. For example, Luca seemed to be really afraid of Claire finding out that he had had testicular cancer when he was in high school, so a part of me was really expecting there to be some drama when she did find out that he had had cancer when he was younger. Ultimately, there wasn’t any drama when she found out about that, and he simply told her himself. I’m honestly really glad that there ended up not being any drama when Claire found out about that, because it probably would have come across as being forced drama; and quite possibly could have made Claire look bad if she had gotten mad at Luca when she learned the truth.

Personally, I ultimately loved the relationship between Claire and Luca. Despite the fact that their relationship definitely got off to a bit of a rocky start, it wasn’t long before you could tell that there was definitely chemistry between the two of them. I thought that their relationship ended up being really sweet and romantic as it developed throughout the book. I also thought it was especially cute how Luca affectionately called Claire, “tesorina”, which apparently means “Little Treasure” or “My Darling” in Italian.

When it comes to what I liked about The CEO's Unexpected Child, one last thing that I’d like to talk about before I start discussing the complaints that I have about the book is the fact that I’m really glad that this book didn’t have a love triangle in it. As I’ve said in other reviews, I’m not completely against the idea of a romance novel having a love triangle in it as long as it’s well written, and it actually serves a purpose when it comes to the overall plot of the book. However, I don’t think that every romance novel necessarily needs to include a love triangle, and depending on the plot of the book, I think a love triangle can feel out of place, and not organically fit in with the rest of the story in some cases. In this case, I don’t think that it would have felt the slightest bit organic for the plot of The CEO's Unexpected Child to include a love triangle, which is why I’m really glad that this book didn’t have one.

One of my biggest complaints about The CEO's Unexpected Child is that there were times throughout the book where the writing came across as if Laurence was skimming through the story when she wrote it. There were often scenes that began in such a way that it felt like the reader had missed a crucial part of the scene or conversation; because Laurence had either deleted a part of the scene from her final draft of the book, or she simply didn’t write the full conversation between Claire and Luca. There were also scenes that seemed to end too abruptly. I have no idea if some of the conversations between Claire and Luca were originally longer in Laurence’s earlier drafts of the book than they ended up being in the final published version of the book. That’s simply how some of the scenes came across to me.

I kind of hate to give away spoilers regarding the ending of the book, so if you haven’t already read The CEO's Unexpected Child, and you don’t want to know how the book ends; I suggest bookmarking this review and coming back to read the rest of it once you’ve read the book.

That being said, the most jarring example of Laurence’s writing for the book coming across as if she was skimming through the story is definitely the closing sentences of the last official chapter of the book (Chapter twelve), and the beginning of the epilogue of the book. The closing sentences of chapter twelve gave me the impression that Claire and Luca were planning to leave the lawyer’s office, and immediately go off and elope somewhere. However, the epilogue establishes that they were getting married on the fourth of July, and they were having what seemed like a relatively elaborate wedding.

Perhaps Claire didn’t mean that they were literally going to immediately go to a wedding chapel and elope when she said that. Maybe that was simply her way of telling both her lawyer and Luca’s lawyer that they didn’t need to work out a custody agreement any more, because they were going to get married. Regardless, that line still confused me given the way the epilogue played out. It also bugged me that the book ended with Claire walking down the aisle as the wedding was beginning. The fact that Laurence did that made me feel like she intended for The CEO's Unexpected Child to ultimately be all about Claire and her character development, instead of having the book be about both Claire and Luca, and their relationship with each other. I never got the impression that The CEO's Unexpected Child was ultimately supposed to be Claire’s story, and her story alone. I felt like the book was supposed to be about both Claire and Luca, and the two of them falling in love with each other the entire time I was reading it. Personally, I really wish that the whole wedding had been featured in the book, with the book ending with Claire and Luca kissing each other at the end of the wedding.

The other major issue that I have with the book and the way it ended, is that while I do think that Claire and Luca’s relationship actually has some emotional depth to it, compared to Eva and Gideon’s relationship in Sylvia Day’s Crossfire series, I do have to wonder what the exact extent of Claire and Luca’s feelings for each other are. Have they genuinely fallen in love with each other by the end of the book? If they have, it was definitely very sudden and a case of what some people might refer to as “insta-love” when it comes to discussing relationships between two fictional characters that fall in love with each other very quickly. Perhaps Claire and Luca haven’t completely fallen in love with each other by the time Luca proposes to Claire, but they’re in the process of falling in love with each other. If that’s the case, it really makes me question their decision to get married.

While I liked Luca pretty much right away, there were a few times throughout the book where he did annoy or frustrate me. I definitely have a lot of questions about Luca’s feelings for Claire, and where exactly he stands in terms of his feelings for her at the end of the book. At one point in the book, Luca decides that the best way to deal with the whole custody agreement situation is to make Claire fall in love with him, and marry her since they already have a child together. In Luca’s internal narrative, he gives a whole spiel about how all he has to do in order to accomplish that is to treat Claire better than Jeff did and be more romantic than he was. However, the most ridiculous part of Luca deciding that this is the best way to resolve the whole custody agreement situation is the fact that Luca thought that he couldn’t let himself actually fall in love with Claire. That aspect of Luca’s thinking completely baffled me in so many ways that I’m not even sure where I should begin discussing my thoughts on this aspect of the book, but I’m going to try my best.

For starters, Luca is only human, and when it comes to falling in love with someone, I don’t think that’s something that a person can really control. He might be afraid to let himself fall in love with Claire, or any woman for that matter, but I don’t think he can truly stop himself from falling in love with her. The fact that Luca doesn’t think he should fall in love with a woman and have a committed relationship with someone, simply because he had testicular cancer when he was a teenager, and there’s always a chance that the cancer could return, really goes to show just how deeply wounded Luca is as a person. He clearly suffers from feelings of inadequacy since he has apparently always believed that the cancer treatments he underwent would have made him sterile, so he thinks that he wouldn’t be able to give Claire everything he thinks she would want and deserve.

That really makes me scratch my head since they already have a daughter together, which is actually part of his rationale when he decides that he wants to make Claire fall in love with him. He apparently also has one other sperm sample at the sperm bank that they could use to have another child. I honestly don’t know what else Luca thinks he can’t give Claire, especially since he’s rich. To me, it almost seems like he had commitment issues, and he was simply using the fact that he had had cancer when he was a teenager as an excuse to avoid being in a committed relationship as an adult. Sadly, that idea is something that Laurence never really explores in this book. That’s definitely something that I think should have been fleshed out more, and could have been handled a lot better in terms of the writing for the character Luca; and The CEO's Unexpected Child in general.

That being said, I think the only way Laurence could have had there be some drama involving Claire getting mad at Luca for keeping the fact that he had had testicular cancer a secret from her without having Claire come across as looking entirely bad would be if Laurence had tied it in with Claire finding out about Luca’s plan to make her fall in love with him, but not genuinely love her in return. Perhaps Claire could have overheard Luca telling a family member or somebody else about his plans, and the fact that he had had cancer when he was younger could have also come up during the conversation. I definitely wouldn’t have judged Claire too harshly for being mad at Luca in that scenario. As I said earlier, Luca’s entire plan was pretty messed up to begin with for numerous reasons.

Since I’ve never had cancer, I can’t really relate to the fact that Luca had testicular cancer when he was high school. I don’t know if Luca’s behavior is a perfectly natural reaction in real life for somebody who has had cancer at some point in his or her life, but thankfully goes into remission. Maybe there are a lot of cancer survivors in real life that think that they can’t let themselves fall in love with somebody and have a committed with them, out of fear that the cancer could return someday. After all, it would most likely be very difficult and emotionally painful for their significant other to deal with them having cancer, and I can understand somebody wanting to spare the people they love that kind of pain. That being said, there’s no denying that it has clearly affected Luca to the point where Luca feels like he needs to close himself off from falling in love with a woman and having a committed relationship with them. That aspect of the character Luca really made him a really interesting and compelling character, in my opinion; even if his behavior and thinking regarding all of that really frustrated me at times.

I know that these Harlequin Desire romance novels are typically fairly short, with them being slightly under 200 pages long, but I really think that The CEO's Unexpected Child could have definitely benefitted from having just a few more paragraphs worth of material here and there throughout the book to help establish and clarify the evolution of Claire and Luca’s feelings for each other. The way I see it, the evolution of Claire and Luca’s feelings for each other could be established throughout the book in a variety of ways; such as conversations that Claire and Luca either have with each other or other characters in the book, or simply by including some comments about their feelings for each other in Claire and Luca’s internal narratives. Ultimately, I don’t think including a few moments like that here and there throughout the book would have made the book too long for Harlequin Desire’s standards. If it was done effectively, I think it would have only made the book approximately three to five pages longer than it actually is, which is 183 pages.

I say this because while I don’t entirely doubt that Luca is being genuine and sincere when it comes to his reasons for proposing to Claire and wanting to marry her at the end of the book, being because he actually loves her; I still feel like almost all of Luca’s thought process behind deciding to propose to Claire is something that Laurence completely skipped over. After all, Luca initially decided that he wanted to make Claire fall in love with him and marry her in order to resolve the whole issue with the custody agreement. It was also pretty clear that he didn’t intend to genuinely fall in love with her at that point in the book.

Claire telling Luca that she was pregnant as a result of the one time that they had sex, only to have the condom break due to it being an expired condom, definitely served as a major turning point for Luca’s character development. Luca started to realize that perhaps he had refused to really live his life, and that he had closed himself off emotionally and romantically for no reason as at all. He got tested to see if he wasn’t sterile like he had always assumed he was, and the doctor told him that while it might not necessarily be easy for him to get a woman pregnant, he wasn’t sterile. This prompted Luca to realize that he had been wrong to assume that Claire had had some other guy get her pregnant as a part of some elaborate scheme to get money from him, which he had accused her of doing when she told him that she was pregnant.

Luca clearly put a lot of thought into the engagement ring that he had bought for Claire. After all, the engagement ring included Eva’s birthstone, as well as what will most likely end up being the birthstone of the baby that Claire had found out that she was pregnant with earlier in the book. I got the impression that even though Luca went into the meeting about the custody agreement, having greatly reduced his own requests regarding the custody agreement, and having set up trust funds for both Eva and the baby that Claire was pregnant with; he was ultimately hoping that she would end up telling him that she still wanted to be with him, and take him back. If I had to guess, I’m assuming that Luca had also come to the realization that he had genuinely fallen in love with Claire, and that’s why he wanted to marry her at the end of the book. It just really frustrates me that most of Luca’s thought process regarding all of that happened “off screen”.

All things considered, while The CEO's Unexpected Child definitely isn’t perfect, it ultimately ended up exceeding the expectations that I usually have when it comes to Harlequin romance novels. The relationship between Claire and Luca was fairly well written and very sweet when it comes to their interactions with each other. While Claire and Luca both annoyed me at times throughout the book, I thought that they were well-written and likable characters for the most part. The overall plot of the book was pretty interesting and engaging, and it definitely wasn’t entirely predictable; which is something that I usually wouldn’t expect from a Harlequin romance novel.

As I said earlier, the biggest problem that I have with this book is the fact that there were a lot of times throughout the book where the writing came across as if Andrea Laurence was skimming through the story when she was writing it; especially when it comes to the evolution of Luca’s feelings for Claire, and the final resolution for Luca’s internal struggles. I really feel like those are both things that should have been fleshed out just a little bit more. Despite the issues that I had with the book, The CEO's Unexpected Child was ultimately a really fun book to read, and I’m definitely considering the possibility of reviewing more Harlequin romance novels for my blog in the future.

That being said, my final score for The CEO's Unexpected Child is 7 out of 10.