Be My Valentine

‘Be My Valentine’ by Debbie Macomber is a clean contemporary romance. It has two stories in it. The first one is called 'My Funny Valentine' and the second is called 'My Hero'.

In 'My Funny Valentine', Dianne Williams is a divorced mother of two kids, her son Jason and her daughter Jill. He husband left her three years ago, divorced her and remarried a younger woman. Her kids and her own mother seem to think that she needs to move on and find herself a new man. The community center is throwing a Valentine’s Day Dinner which is coming up at the end of the week on Saturday, and her family expects her to find someone to go with her. Every day they ask if she has a date yet. Well one night she locks her keys in her car while she’s at the gym and so she calls the auto club for help. Steve responds to the call and treats her nicely. She’s just desperate enough to pay him to be her date for the dinner.

When she returns home, she tells her family that she has a date. Instead of rejoicing, they interrogate her about this man, and then insist that they meet him before Saturday. So she has to call up Steve and ask him to meet her somewhere so they can get their story straight as to how they met and so forth. She’s certainly not about to tell her family that she’s paying him to take her to dinner! But then she insists on paying for the dinner tickets and to pay him more to meet her family and for any other expenses he incurs. So this simple dinner date starts costing her more by the day! But what will happen if she starts to really care for Steve? Will she push him away or will she let him continue to date her?

In ‘My Hero’, Bailey York is an aspiring writer. She has written her first romance book and sent it to a publisher. It wasn’t until after that that she met fellow romance author Jo Ann and learned that her book needed work. She needs to rewrite her main male character, ‘Michael’. The problem is that she doesn’t have a love life and so has no one to be her real-life model for her story man. While on the BART train she’s talking to her friend Jo Ann about her problems with Michael, when she sees a man that looks and acts how she wants Michael to be. She convinces Jo Ann to help her follow the stranger until she finds out his name.

Parker Davidson doesn’t know what to make of this woman who followed him off the train and then followed him again to lunch. Is she crazy or just strange? She says that she’s an author but he’s not sure whether to believe her. Only the next day she comes to his office and leaves her manuscript for him to read to show that she’s not crazy and she really is an author. He returns her manuscript and agrees to be her ‘model’ for Michael in order to help her fix her book.

Parker has been making her feel things that have been helping her to write more believable scenes between Michael and her female character Janice. Only Parker supposed to be helping with her book, not helping her to start falling in love for real! She’s already been through two men that she thought she loved. She can’t take falling in love again only to be thrown aside for another woman again! She can’t and won’t let Parker in her heart! But can she really control her heart?

‘Be My Valentine’can be bought in book form. 'My Hero' can be bought separately in e-book format if you wish.