Unexpected launch news for Baby, Unexpected
More surprising than Alexa and Conrad's love child
With a series and social channels that are babies themselves, waking up this morning to the news that Baby, Unexpected was in high demand right out of the starting gate was surprising to say the least. If you’re one of the readers who preordered or read the book on KU today, thank you!
Last week, I told you about the way these books haunted my hard drive for eight years.
Sittin' on the .doc of the bay
That expression ‘watching paint dry’? Or what about its cousin ‘watching grass grow’? As a freelance journalist for the local paper, I wrote actual articles on both of those topics. After five years of doing these stories, my day job promoted me, and I got to drop ‘five tips from a local builder on how to choose fencing.’
But actually, Baby, Unexpected has had a longer journey. The characters have been around since 2003! At age 19, I wrote a campus novel called The University, which was as cringe as it sounds - an unhinged piece of work with roughly 15 plots. One of these involved professors Wes and Laure Ivy, who remain Alexa’s parents with their names and professions intact 23 years later. Wes and Laure had a daughter who married a Harvard economist after an accidental pregnancy.
I took this idea and ran with it during my post-freelance creative streak. The basic premise stayed intact, but of course, some heavy editing ensued. Alexa got a little older. Conrad got a little younger. I used to love the ‘age gap couple’ trope far more than I do now. Do you like reading age gap couples? It has to be an otherwise level playing field for me - similar sexual experience level, can’t have met when one of them was a minor, no massive financial disparity. I would never want a big age gap IRL, but uh, I’m not really down for an accidental pregnancy either, and that’s a trope I love.
The biggest change and the thing that took the hardest to work out was the fact that Alexa actually was some type of paid escort in the OG manuscript. Who knows why? I was nineteen when I came up with it. Even though she was doing this on a very limited basis to spite her parents, that wasn’t what I wanted for her. Frankly, I also didn’t think readers would love this for an FMC. The problem was that it created some delicious tension between Alexa and Conrad and their motives for meeting up at Mezzo that first evening. Finally, I hit upon the idea of it being a rumor and introduced the character of slimeball Landry. I was pumped to solve the problem this way and add a new layer to the campus scrutiny aspect of the story.
The fact that Alexa was a high achiever who wanted a quieter life than everyone else wanted for her was also accounted for in the 2003 manuscript. Maybe this was prophetic because I am feeling this right now in my own life with corporate burnout. If you’re struggling with burnout, too, I hope things work out for you and that reading the book helps!
This book also has, in my own opinion (and my husband’s haha), the hottest spicy scenes of any Degrees of Desire book. The scene that leads to the titular unexpected baby is a personal favorite love scene. Definitely easy to see how our main couple might forget to reach into the bedside drawer in the heat of passion.
Anyhow. I hope you enjoy the fully edited 2026 version of Baby, Unexpected. If you’d like to linger in this universe, check out Books 1-3: Strings Attached, Stop Your Memory, and The Business of Us. (Alexa and Conrad appear many times in each of these, so you will get to see them living out their happily ever after, and maybe meddling to ensure everyone else gets an HEA, too.)
If you are one of the early birds who read Baby, Unexpected today, please consider leaving an honest review or star rating on Amazon to help fellow readers find the book.
If you haven’t already, please take a quick second to subscribe to this Substack. I will never spam you, and you’ll get a free cozy small town HEA story (10k words!) immediately delivered to your inbox with my thanks.