The chick looks like what’s her name from the O.C.

Grade: B-

Man, I can’t stop reading these little HPs. They’re like crack to me. They’re dated, the dialogue is atrocious, and most of them are the most clichéd pieces of crap I’ve ever read, but I can’t stop reading them. They’re like Passions, General Hospital, and All My Children thrown in a blender, with a dash Skinnymax for flavoring. I think it’s because I’m an instant gratification kind of chick and these suckers are less than 200 pages. Before I can get sucked in, it’s already done! I can read them at work, before I go to bed, while I’m working out, or while I’m in the john. It’s awesome!

The heroine of Susan Napier’s Counterfeit Secretary (speaking of counterfeit, have any of you ever seen Counterfeit Contessa with Téa Leoni? Awful stuff, but it’s a guilty pleasure) is thirty-year-old single mother, Ria Duncan. Her husband René died in a drunk driving accident, leaving her with two twin boys and his father (who becomes Ria’s handyman, cook, babysitter, and father-figure), and to keep her family out of the poorhouse, Ria has to endure working for the Biggest. Bastard. In. The. Industry. In her current position as a secretary, she has lasted the longest because she knows just how to manipulate her boss. Though a wild, horny woman at heart just aching to break free (aren’t they all?), Ria overhears her boss telling an employee exactly what he wants in a secretary (efficient, sexless, impersonal, dead inside), so Ria makes-under herself to this paragon, and passes the interview with flying colors (don’t even get me started on the interview process. I’m still gritting my teeth). On the outside, Ria is a cool, staid, completely sterile woman with her hair scraped back painfully, her body in shapeless, drab suits, and fake librarian glasses perched on her imperious nose for good measure. She is virtually untouchable, emotionless, and serves her boss as particularly efficient office equipment. On the inside, rooowr, watch out now!

Her boss, twenty nine year old James Everett (who totally looks like Mr. Rogers on the front cover), is not really a giant dick. Compared to the other HP heroes circa 1985, he’s actually quite princely. At 14, he drops out of school, gets himself in some trouble, but with hard work, pulls himself out of the gutter, and becomes one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in town. That’s very commendable, of course, but he accomplishes this by expecting the best out of his employees, and in the process, he has not been very nice to them. He has come to expect nothing but the best from his current secretary, Ria Duncan, but to him, she doesn’t really exist. She comes in every day from nine to five, does her job efficiently, and goes home. He has never really spared her a second thought. One night, while he’s out to dinner with his nephew, he spots a beautiful redhead who gets the fires in his loins a-roarin’, and practically eats her alive in the balcony of the restaurant. The beautiful redhead, of course, turns out to be none other than his aloof, sexless secretary (duh!) who is out on a birthday date, and suddenly, he’s seeing her in a different light, and finds himself unable to keep her hands off of her.

Can these two ever get past the secrets and lies that keep them apart and find the path to true love? Oh, shut up.

When I picked up this book, I was hoping I would find a Secretary-type spanking, but alas! it was not to be. I always found these HP secretary-boss pairings kind of sleazy, but after seeing Secretary with James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, I found myself viewing them in a new light. They’re still sleazy, but kind of hot, too. It would have been awesome if James pulled Ria over his desk and spanked her for every typo on the report she prepared for him, but no, he doesn’t do that. He doesn’t even make her wear weird bondage suits and pick up things from the floor with her teeth. The least he could have done was ordered her to wear short skirts and dropped pencils on the floor all the time for her to pick up. Ugh.

Anyway, I don’t know how to review this book. On one hand, it wasn’t so horrible that it made me want to tear out its pages and stick them one by one down the shredder, but on the other, it was bad enough that I’m hard-pressed to remember what I liked and didn’t like about it. What I do remember is being pleasantly surprised that James doesn’t turn out to be one of those monsters who call women slut-bag-whores when they find out that the object of their desire is not as pure as they initially thought. When he finds out that Ria is a real person with her own personal problems and drama, he gets angry at first that she lied to him, but he doesn’t overreact. He does, however, get pissed that she won’t let him get to know her outside of work. He gets frustrated that she won’t tell him about her issues and won’t let him help.

When Ria finds out that James is not the prick she initially thought he was, she stubbornly refuses to “let him in”. She wants him, but she does the annoying tug-of-war deal that heroines usually do in these books, thinking shit like “Oh, I want him, but I’m a mother of twins and therefore not allowed to have my own needs.” or “Oh, he looks so good in his suit, so yummy… so virile… why I am thinking these things? Bad, Ria, bad!” Good lord, woman, heaven forbid that you should have a personal life outside of your children. The funny thing is, Ria gets pissed at her ex-boyfriend (and rightly so) for sleeping with another woman, not because he cheats on her, but because he doesn’t go to her for his sexual needs. When the ex-boyfriend calls her while she’s in James’ office, she yells at him in French, telling him that she won’t marry him, but would settle being his sex toy. Naturally, James speaks French, and is able to decipher what she is saying to her ex-boyfriend.

When disaster strikes and Ria finds herself needing James, she freely takes advantage of his willingness to help her out, even as she tells herself that she doesn’t really need him. James attentively takes care of her needs, her family, but the second she doesn’t need him anymore, she kind of rudely pushes him away, rationalizing to herself that he’s not ready for marriage, and she and her family would just be a burden to him. What an asshole! As if a guy would stick around, picking up your kid from school and shit, just so he could get some ass. Yeah… Ria kind of pisses me off in this book. I usually defend the heroine in this type of situation, but she’s really pretty stupid when it comes to matters de l’amour.

Another thing I dig about this book is Ria’s kids. They’re kids, dude! They’re not walking, talking plot contrivances, but actual kids. They talk like kids, they act like kids, and most importantly, they don’t do creepy things like match-make and shit. I know I always complain about kids in these books, but here, I don’t mind them so much. I’m feeling so magnanimous about children right now that I might just pick up a book where a tough-as-nails SOB type of boss finds himself stranded with a baby who is his nephew/ex-girlfriend’s kid/abandoned at his doorstep, so he commandeers the heroine/his secretary to help him out. Check me out!

Man, I can’t get enough of these little HP gems. I might even head on out to EBay to see if I could find a large lot of Blaze or whatever. Hooray for dated, outmoded HP plots that can’t possibly exist in real life! Woo!

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