Love with a Scandalous Lord? Not so much…
Turns out I had already read this book. I just didn’t realize it until I picked it up and read it a second time, and it all started looking very familiar, and not in a good way. Love with a Scandalous Lord by Lorraine Heath was a torturous journey from beginning to end, so it surprised me that the novel was stretched out for an amazing 374 pages. It did not improve upon reading it a second time.
The story has potential– a handsome, tortured man falls for a fresh young thing from the New World. They careen towards each other despite the differences in their backgrounds to encounter love in an impossible scenario. Unfortunately, even in Heath’s skilled hands, the story is more soap than opera.
We first encounter Lydia as a young girl in the book “A Rogue in Texas“, in which her mother fell in love with Grayson, our hero’s brother. Fast forward more than a decade, and now we find Lydia in England, under sad circumstances, as she has traveled with her stepfather to her dying step-grandfather’s side, brought there at the request of her step-uncle, whom she has never met.
Lydia has long desired to be in England and experience all the genteel society of the nobility had to offer. In fact, she had obsessed over it and now had a real opportunity to put all she had learned into practice.
Of course, from the get-go, it’s apparent that whatever she might have learned, she couldn’t use, seeing as how she lacked the mental capacity to behave like a rational being in the presence of real-life nobility, much less actual men. No one could behave as much of a ninny as she did upon first meeting Rhys. From the get-go, she seems so starry-eyed and awkward that I wondered if her parents kept her under lock and key, cloistered in a nunnery.
Now, Rhys, our hero, is her step-uncle. My first reaction was eww, gross. Though it’s not that big a deal as their age difference. Which wouldn’t have been so bad, romances tend to make the difference a really big deal, but it’s probably the reality that a mature man in his late thirties is as mentally mature as a good woman in her twenties. So it balances out.
Unfortunately, in this scenario, it reeks of cradle robbing because Lydia does not come across as being that “mature” for a girl of 20 that just arrived from the frontier of Texas. Hence, Rhys, appears almost elderly, and his attraction to her terribly inappropriate. Had Rhys struggled over their age/experience issue, that would have made sense to me, if that was what held Rhys conflicted and determined that he couldn’t/shouldn’t pursue Lydia despite his attraction. Instead its an inferiority complex that is holding him back.
Unfortunately, our tortured hero was left with a lack of self-worth because he had lusted after the wife of his other brother, and when they gave in to the desire, slept together once. So when she decided to commit suicide, she confessed all in the note using that incident as the reason. Rhys, torn up about the betrayal to his brother, turns himself into a gigolo, wooing women who were trapped in loveless marriages…how does he arrive as that lifestyle as his only available option?
In any case, he was a man haunted by his past and conflicted by his desires. Personally, I think he protests WAY too much about his sordid past. This other brother happened to be the Marquess, so when he dies (Spoiler alert: by drowning in the family lake), Rhys, formerly only the spare, is now the heir to the dukedom. Yet another thing Rhys tortured himself about. I was really disappointed with his woe-is-me attitude, like being handsome, desirable by women everywhere, and now a wealthy Marquess is really such a burden. Whatever.
Well, this wounded hero is now the project of the post-coitus Lydia, because I guess the side effect of sleeping with a broken man, is that now it is your womanly duty to fix him. By this point, I am wondering if I can have a dose of what she’s having, since she seems to have matured overnight into a determined seductress merely because she shared his bed. Of course, this comes with the simultaneous desire to have the story conclude already.
Yeah, their chemistry is palpable, and some of the scenes are pretty hot. But I was sorely disappointed that I had to dig those out from under the heap of mess that was packaged under the guise of being a racy good read. I don’t see what was so scandalous about this Lord, unless of course it was his complete lack of common sense.
Now that is scandalous!
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