The Baby Bond

Linda Goodnight
Contemporary Inspirational Romance
Steeple Hill Books - May - 2009

The blurb in The Baby Bond indicates that Linda Goodnight has written 9 books for Steeple Hill. Three of these are a series, The Brothers’ Bond. She’s also published in Harlequin’s Silhouette series. According to her biography, she’s written some 19 books since 2000. That’s nearly 6 novels a year, an average of one every two plus months. Whew, but she’s not just an assembly line. In 2007 she won the RITA for the best inspirational novel. Quantity plus quality. It doesn’t get much better than that. She’s also a gut writer. Most of her characters arrive in her head complete with names. She tends not to know the ending of a book when she begins it. The characters know, and Linda trusts them.

The Baby Bond is a story with both tragedy and adventure. It also has love and lack of trust. Firefighter, Nic Carano, rescues baby Alex from a burning house. Baby Alex and Nic form an immediate bond. Alex’s parents were both lost in the fire.

Nic was thought of as a playboy who refused to grow up. He had that reputation when he and Cassidy Willis were in college together. Cassidy Willis is Alex’s aunt and becomes his guardian. Nic was attracted to Cassidy but she refused to get close to him. To her, every time Nic went to work he was in danger of dying in a fire. She wanted none of that! Cassidy’s parents died in a tornado in the Philippines where they were missionaries. She was trapped in a collapsing school building. She could smell smoke and feared being burned to death.

Psychologically, these are people with problems. Nic has done such a good job of looking like a playboy that no one has noticed that he is also a responsible person. True, he hasn’t wanted to get hooked by a woman and pressured into marriage. He put out love with the same skills he used putting out fires. He wasn’t anti-marriage just not ready yet. Cassidy had an irrational fear about fire. She was living a nightmare that had reached dysfunctional proportions. She spent her time being self protective. Actually, all this makes for a very good story.

Laugh, cry and enjoy this well-written story with a very satisfying ending.