Russ Randall is heading home in a snowstorm when he sees a car in a ditch on the side of the road. He pulls up, and before he can get out of the car, someone opens the door and shoves a car seat with an infant into the truck, then shuts the door. He gets out and finds a woman in a full length fur coat getting the bags out of a car with NY licence plates putting her stuff into the back of his truck. He can tell by looking at her she's running a very high fever.
The small town of Rawhide has no hotel, and with the blizzard coming in, he takes the woman and her baby to his home on Main Street, and first order of business he gets the baby in the house. After he puts the woman on the couch and covers her with her coat, he changes the baby's diaper, fixes a bottle for her, and then sets out calling his relatives because he has absolutely no baby experience.
Lucky for Russ, he has a family loaded with twins, and brothers and aunts and uncles. One of his relatives is the town doctor and he tells Russ to put the woman in bed and give her plenty of liquids. This stretches into three days of caring for the baby, named Angel, and the woman, Isabelle, and during this time he falls head over heels... for the baby.
In the past 18 months, since the death of his pregnant wife, Abby, he has stayed away from family, babies, social gatherings, etc. His mother is extremely interested in hearing his report on the baby, as is the rest of the family. They call him constantly, and they can tell he's gotten attached to the little girl. When Isabelle begins to recover, he hates the idea of her going on about her way and he never seeing the baby again.
When Isabelle is well enough, she explains that she was coming to live with a great aunt in Rawhide, a woman whom she'd never met, but had hoped to make a family with. The aunt died a week prior to her arrival, and she while she is upset, there is the woman's will to sort out. Her great aunt left her everything, including controlling share of Isabelle's father's business. Isabelle knows her father with cause trouble for her over this. Russ comes up with a plan to kill two birds with one stone - marry Isabelle so he can be close to the baby, and she will have protection from his huge family.
As a general rule, I'm not too crazy about cute baby stories. I love babies, but I don't think they are a fix for grief or any other problem. At the same time, this story was passable. I wanted to know more about Isabelle's father, and to find out if he was really the evil character she portrayed, or if they could come to some resolution at the end. I was also interested to see if Isabelle and Russ could actually work out some kind of real relationship aside from a marriage of convenience. I do think perhaps they are a happy-for-now couple, but the book is well written and has a satisfying enough ending that it works for me. This is a good, fast, read, and I'll be looking for more books by Judy Christenberry.
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