Bluebird Winter, by Linda Howard

Bluebird Winter, by Linda Howard is a short story that was originally published in 1987 in the Silhouette Christmas Stories anthology. It was then published on its own, but the version I got was a still later reissue, in the Delivered by Christmas anthology. This one also contains stories by Joan Hohl and Sandra Steffen. They really don't sound all that interesting (Texas Rangers, ranchers, children wanting a daddy for Christmas... blah!), so I don't think I'll be reading them.

Kathleen Fields, pregnant and alone during a blizzard on Christmas Day, finds her life changed after Derek Taliferro rescues her and helps deliver her baby.

Bluebird Winter is total rescue fantasy, and is so unsubtle about it, that it becomes boring. A C.

The story is simple. Kathleen is pregnant and alone, and she goes into labor during a huge Christmas Day snowstorm. She tries to get to the hospital, but in the storm, she accidentally drives her truck into a ditch.

She's lucky enough that she's seen by Dr. Derek Taliferro, who's on his way home from visiting his mother. He rescues her, takes her to her house and delivers her daughter. And he falls madly in love with her.

Yep, the guy's extremely attracted to this woman who he's only seen while in labor, and decides there and then to marry her. He adores his daughter, too, but this is not a case of his initially wanting the mother because he wants the daughter. Oh, no, it's Kathleen he's immediately crazy about. So when it's necessary for Risa to spend a couple of weeks in an incubator, Derek uses the fact that Kathleen has no health insurance to pay for it to get her to marry him, in order to provide for her daughter.

Nice fantasy? To me, not so much nice, as creepy. Heros who immediately fall for the heroine and will do anything, even manipulate like crazy, to have her are a bit of a guilty pleasure for me, but Derek was too much. I guess I should have loved that Derek was so fascinated with Kathleen's inner strength, etc., etc., that he fell for her so immediately, even though he met her while she was giving birth, but I totally didn't buy it.

I mean, the guy was practically salivating after her while she was in labour... are you kidding me? This reminds me of a recent review at AAR. Let me see if I can find it.. ah, here. It's a review of Phoebe Conn's Midnight Blue:

Compounding these problems are a series of head-scratching moments. The worst is probably when Chris thinks the postpartum Sarah is a raging hottie. When I read this, I actually checked the back of the book to see whether the author had children. Surprisingly, she did. While I can believe that Angelina Jolie could probably look hot mere hours after childbirth, with the help of able and expensive make-up artists, I simply can’t believe that anyone else would look sexy. (If you disagree, and in fact looked like a ravishing temptress five hours after you had your child, please post about your experiences at www.youarelying.com.)

Even worse here.

The rest of the book is basically... nothing. Derek showering Kathleen with gifts and introducing her to his friends, all couples from previous books, come to parade around and show us they're deliriously happy. I hadn't met these people (they're from Sarah's Child and Almost Forever, books I don't think I'll ever read), so they bored me.

In fact, most everything about this book bored me. Linda Howard has some very nice short stories, but this is not one of them.