To Love a Highlander

Excessively lush writing and an overabundance of one-sentence paragraphs mar the first in Welfonder’s Scandalous Scots medieval romance series. Lady Mirabelle MacLaren is desperate to avoid marriage to Sir John Sinclair, a two-faced suitor. She proposes that Sorley the Hawk, a bastard warrior known to dislike Sinclair, ruin her in order to scare him off. Neither Sorley nor Mirabelle realizes that the other remembers their attraction-filled first meeting more than a dozen years earlier, which ended badly. Their plan of public disgrace forms the main story line, which improves once the lewdness turns to love. A secondary plot involves Sorley’s antipathy toward his heretofore unknown natural father, and a plan to meet the man after Sorley completes a mission as part of the King’s mysterious Fenris Guards; the long-winded setup leads to a meager payoff. (May)