Review: Could have been way better
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 29, 2012
I'm a big fan of Scottish historical romances and I did like the premise of this story. However the H really got my back up as I felt he really just lusted after the h and was quite happy to ruin her life at one point.***Spoiler Alert***After publicly stating he married her, he sleeps with her, recognises the fact that he may have made her pregnant but yet 2 days later he goes ahead and asks the king for an annulment. He treated her appallingly when they arrived at the castle where the king was. He annuls the marriage, doesn't acknowledge her at the castle in front of everyone, allows another woman (the antagonist) to fawn all over him. The h would have been treated like a common whore if he hadn't had pity on her at the last minute and then agreed to handfast with her. I won't even say how stupid I thought the h was, although we are led to believe that she's feisty etc. At this point she was TSTL in my opinion. She falls into bed with him and is suddenly madly in love with him, has rampant sex with him (went on for pages) and then the next day she is packed off to the priory for months. She discovers she is pregnant (of course) and is miserable as sin, this is now 70% into the book. The H meanwhile carries on at the castle for months, fighting his feelings (read lust) for her and then goes off to war. Why did the h have to go to the priory for all that time anyway? To keep her safe? It was a bit weak for me. Also I couldn't love the H because all the time he was saying she was better off without him and he preferred to forget her etc. Where's the love story or romance at this point? She is more than 5 months pregnant and hasn't heard a word from her betrothed(!).The drama then really gets underway with all sorts of things happening. The h is now heavily pregnant, captured by the English and the H comes after her to rescue her. They haven't seen each other for months but one glance between them (I'm not joking) and they both know they love each other. This after they had slept together twice and known each other for a few days in the beginning. Nothing but nothing led up to this wild leap in my opinion, nothing credible anyway.Our heavily pregnant lady then ends up in England facing a trial for witchcraft and murder. She firstly receives 20 lashes with a whip - honestly there's no way she could have survived that. Meanwhile our H had been stabbed with a sword and hit by an arrow previously and left for dead. In the few days that it takes for the h to get to England, he manages to get there and rescue her from a dungeon single handedly even though he has these serious injuries. He then carries her off to safety on his horse. If she'd survived the whipping in the first place, she wouldn't have had a shred of skin on her back and could not have been carried on the back of a horse.I'm the hugest romantic on the planet and a big sucker for highlander stories but this just went beyond the realms of credibility. I even went back to re-read the reviews. Did these people read the same book as me. Some of them compared this book to the Outlander books. Seriously??The author had a good foundation for a story and if she'd made more effort to get us to buy into the love story in the beginning a bit more, it would have laid the basis for what followed. She could also have toned down some of the unbelievable parts.The ending wasn't bad.