WHAT I DID FOR LOVE

Two Hollywood actors who hate each other but accidentally get married discover they love each other after all.

To call this connect-the-dots, love/hate contemporary romance by Phillips (Natural Born Charmer, 2007, etc.) formulaic would be to state the obvious. Its heroine is Georgie York, who found teenage fame co-starring in the hit TV show Skip and Scooter until her gorgeous-but-loathsome bad-boy co-star Bram Shepard caused the show to fall apart. Now 31, Georgie, aka “America’s Sweetheart,” is still licking her wounds after her action-adventure-superstar husband Lance left her for Jade Gentry, the beautiful actress who also devotes herself to humanitarian causes (Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie anyone?). On a trip to Las Vegas intended to cheer her up, Georgie gets drunk and wakes up with Bram and a marriage license (coincidentally, a similar thing happened on Friends to Aniston’s character Rachel, who woke up in Las Vegas married to Ross). For the sake of her image and career, she can’t afford to be seen divorcing again so soon, so the couple decides to stay married for a year. In fact, Bram has cleaned up his act but is using the marriage to boost his image in order to get a film project off the ground. Despite ex-husbands, controlling fathers and mutinous staff, the couple’s proximity leads to attraction, which leads to great sex, which leads to the revelations that scurrilous Bram is really a multitalented gentleman; that pathetic Georgie is independent and irresistible; and that all their professional and personal dreams will come true.

Stretched to more than 400 pages, this chilly fairy tale is for devotees of the genre only.