Julianna Reynolds and Tate McIntyre were once a “thing”. Friends and lovers through high school, they shared their personal hardships with each other and sustained each other through good times and bad. When graduation separated them each to go his or her own way, neither forgot the other — for several reasons.
Julianna left the small town of Blackwood, OK to become a model, while Tate pinned his hopes on getting a football scholarship to college where he hoped to make pro and join Julianna in LA to pick up their lives together.
Fate stepped in and saw Tate injured and the football career evaporating like the morning mist. Instead, he becomes the local bad boy, drinking and indulging his disappointment in fighting. He’s the kind of guy who would wear one of those TW steel watches you see advertised. But the local sherrif steps in and straightens Tate out and the sheriff’s daughter marries him despite the fact that she knows he still carries a torch for Julianna.
Julianna, meanwhile, has found out she’s pregnant with Tate’s child, but when she contacts friends to find out where Tate is, she discovers his marriage and elects to not tell him about the baby.
Fast forward ten years and we find Julianna fighting for her and Tate’s child’s life. Megan has leukemia which has so far been kept at bay by chemotherapy and drugs, but Megan is searching for a bone marrow donor so that Megan has a chance at a more normal life without these things.
She returns to Blackwood under the auspices of organizing a bone marrow donor drive from the local population of American Indians — a minority that is very underrepresented in the bone marrow match database. When the test comes back that Tate is not a match either, Julianna is devastated.
Now the only sure way to cure her daughter is for Julianna to have another baby — by the same father. She has no choice but to tell the now single Tate that she bore his daughter nine years ago and now needs him to impregnate her once again. She doesn’t know that Tate is still carrying a torch for her, but she knows she’s still carrying one for him.
Linda Goodnight has created real characters with real issues and shows that she knows how to deal with them through her character’s actions. Although “just” a pulp romance novel, this book has many elements that make it an enjoyable read even for a more sophisticated reader. The issues the characters deal with are timely and urgent. The only character that was dealt with awkwardly was Julianna’s mother who had been her reason for taking the modeling job in the first place and who had served as Megan’s child care provider and Julianna’s moral support for all these years. I felt that, when Julianna married Tate and moved back to Blackwood, her mother was just kind of dropped out of the book in an unsatisfying way for me. This made the book somewhat two dimensional. Including that third character in a supporting role and interacting with the two main characters would have produced a more three dimensional life for these characters.
Saved by the Baby by Linda Goodnight
Published by Silhouette Romance 2004
ISBN: 0-373-19709-8
