My Seduction by Connie Brockway

Connie Brockway sweeps readers back to the rough beauty of Regency-era Scotland and into the scintillating, passionate, and surprising love story of a mysterious Highlander and the woman he is pledged to protect.

Desperate to keep her two sisters and herself from the poorhouse, Kate Nash Blackburn embarks upon a journey to northern Scotland, where she hopes to gain the gratitude and patronage of a wealthy marquis. When fate maroons her at a tavern full of ruffians, a brawny Highland soldier comes to her rescue. It's Kit MacNeill, the man whose pledge to her family has haunted her for years. When he offers to escort Kate through the treacherous Highlands to Castle Parnell, she accepts even though her instincts warn her against trusting this rough and dangerous man. But soon Kate is startled by the Highlander's cultured speech and courtly manners. Who is this man of contradictions, shaped by a shadowy past, who fiercely wards off an attempt on her life, whose broad shoulders beckon her touch, and in whose arms she comes fully alive?

So what does it mean when you read a book, you enjoy it, you mark it quite high (in this case 4/5) and then when you come to post about it less than two weeks later and it has kind of blurred into all the other Scottish historicals that you have ever read before? Should be bad shouldn't it?

Yet I did enjoy this. I liked Kit, although I do have to say that it felt as though the author was trying too hard to make him have the tortured and tormented past that so often accompanies the Scottish historical hero. Now you know that I love a tortured hero - they are among my favourite heroes ever - but this time it didn't quite feel as organic as they usually do!

As for Kate, well, she was there. She was the widowed heroine who comes feels a strong attraction for our hero, and acts on it. She is also destined to be the martyred heroine, the one who must marry someone in order to save her sisters and inevitably that someone is not the hero, but during the time that he is escorting her to Scotland they feel a growing attraction to each other.

There is an underlying mystery about who killed Kate's cousin, and where the smuggler's gold is hidden, and also about who it was that betrayed Kit and his friends in Paris years before, in an incident that ended up costing Kate's father his life.

Connie Brockway is a new to me author, but she is one that I have been intending to read for a while, mainly because it felt to me as though she was one of the current authors that I had to read. Part of my reason for reading it now is that she was chosen as Author of the Month for January in one of my groups - yep...late again!

If it sounds as though I didn't like this book, it isn't that at all. I fully intend to continue to read this series. It is just that whereas I generally can remember the details of a book for a while this one faded really, really quickly! I have the next book in the series here and will get to it....eventually!

Rating 4/5