Not the Marrying Kind

Not the Marrying Kind is a 2007 romance novel by Nancy Wagner, writing under the name Hailey North, and the third book in her series Finding Love in Doolittle, Arkansas. Wagner is a Mississippi native who worked as a game show lawyer in California before taking up writing and later moving to Louisiana.

The book opens in the West Village in Manhattan with thirty-three-year-old avantgarde artist Harriet P. Smith having received a dossier on Jake Porter, a Los Angeles music executive with whom she went to high school back in Doolittle, Arkansas. During her senior year, Harriet (then Rogers) went to prom with the popular Jake, not knowing that he had asked her out on a bet, she being the somewhat shunned artistic girl in school. They had sex afterward by the lake. Jake had been raised in a military family before his aspiring musician mother, Ariel, separated from his father, Ted, and left Jake with some relatives in Doolittle before absconding to pursue her own career. Ted Porter eventually tracked down his son and took him away, and so when Harriet discovered that she was pregnant, she could not find Jake. However, her best friend, Donnie Smith, offered to marry her, in part to cover up the fact that he was gay, and Harriet gave birth to a son, Zach. Donnie’s own father, a local real estate mogul, bought them a warehouse on the edge of the West Village in New York City as a wedding present. She and Donnie raised Zach, planning to explain things to him when he was old enough, when they would finally separate, but Donnie died alongside his own father in a car accident on a hunting trip.

Years later, near Christmas, Harriet returns to Doolittle with the fifteen-year-old Zach, as Donnie’s widowed mother, Olivia, is having surgery. Jake is also coming into town, as his father has been dating Martha Wilson, co-owner with sister Abbie of the Schoolhouse Inn in Doolittle, and intends to marry her, and Jake is tagging along at his request to meet her. Both Harriet and Jake get rooms at the Schoolhouse Inn.

Harriet sees Jake at a local restaurant, the Verandah. He approaches her, not recognizing her, and invites her to a local music venue, the Barn, where he intends to scout for talent. They go to a picnic area later, flirting and teasing along the way, as he tries to discover her identity, clearly enamored of her, and she plays along. They go to a highway motel, but he insists upon going to the convenience store next door for a condom first, recalling his sexual experience as a teenager with the words: “I was just a kid and so was she and I moved away and never heard from her.” While he is checking in, she drives away, leaving him at the hotel. She ends up staying the night with her parents.

The next morning, Jake hitches a ride into town with Mike Halliday (introduced in Tangled Up in Love) and goes by the arts and crafts store run by Harriet’s parents. Her mother, Charlene, shows Jake a scrapbook of Harriet’s work and articles about her, and he realizes that she is the same woman from the previous night. (Unbeknownst to Harriet, he had liked her back in school and had only used his friends’ bet as cover to ask her out as he wanted. Too, he had called her parents’ store from Berlin a few months after he left, only to be told that she was married.) He finds her later at the hospital following Olivia’s surgery and asks her out to dinner, and they end up having sex in her rented vehicle in the local park. The next day, they have dinner at the home of Jennifer Janey and Eric Hamilton, the former having been Harriet’s friend in school—and the only one to know that Donnie was not the father of Harriet’s son.

Harriet is determined to tell Jake the truth, but Eric gets called away for a fire, and Jake volunteers to help. The next day, he goes back to the Barn to listen one more time to the group he heard earlier, the J. R.’s, but Zach is playing guitar with them, their usual guy having broken his hand. Looking at him, and having heard hints in the local gossip, Jake realizes that Zach is his biological son. Back at the inn, he confronts Harriet, and she tells him everything. The next day, she goes to the hospital to tell Olivia, who accepts the news gracefully but asks that she be there when they all tell Zach, which Harriet arranges, after which they tell both Jake’s father and Harriet’s parents, who have everyone over for Christmas dinner.

After dinner, Jake proposes to Harriet, saying, “Zach needs the stability two parents could give him,” but she tells him, “I married once for the sake of my son.” After Ted and Martha’s wedding, Harriet drives off quickly to the lake, but Jake follows her, confesses his love for her, proposes again, and she agrees to marry him.

For additional information:
Hailey North. https://haileynorth.com/ (accessed July 10, 2025).

North, Hailey. Not the Marrying Kind. New York: Avon Books, 2007.

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas