SK Publishing, $3.99
Historical Erotica, 2014
Lieutenant Conall Fletcher, of the 93rd Highland Infantry Brigade, has a thing for the widow Avril Scott, although out of respect for her, he’d never taken up on her invitation to join her in bed. He is going to miss her after this whole messy Crimean War business is over. However, a near-death experience has him realizing that the always-intense Captain Graeme Munro, another creepy sexy he-wants-bussy hero that is always staring after the bussy, may just have a thing for him, and he may actually like that thing we’re talking about here.
What, too crude?
The next day Conall left for Scutari, dazed, confused and happy to be alive. He was already missing Mrs. Scott. But it was Munro’s eyes, full of anguish and wild emotion that haunted him as he was carried away.
There, let Samantha Kane put the whole musical boinking chair game in a more elegant light.
When Conall returns to duty after having recovered, he decides that maybe he should know Avril better. After all, life is short, et cetera. She wants a man that can make her feel like a woman, however, and she doesn’t need men that will put her in the zone when she’s already been celibate long enough. However, while she’s happy to lie with him, she won’t marry him at all. Meanwhile, Munro is always hovering, staring and drooling (in a sexy romance hero-way, of course)…
Okay, Conall. Unlike Hamish, the previous entry in Samantha Kane’s The 93rd Highlanders series, this one is longer and hence has more plot to the meat, so to speak. However, the romance and character development are all fuzzy and even opaque at times, thanks to Avril.
Avril is a pretty common problem found in many historical romances: she will only accept a 21st-century solution to a 19th-century dilemma, nothing else will do, and this as a result makes her look unreasonable at best, and stupid at worst. Sleeping with Conall makes the previously “respectable widow” now an available camp follower in many of the soldiers’ eyes, so Conall reasonably deduces that marrying her is the best solution here. He likes her a lot, she likes him lots too (after all, she does take our sexually inexperienced hero to her bed), so what’s the problem?
Our heroine doesn’t want to marry. This would be fine if she also didn’t want to give up her sexy times with Conall, so basically, we have a heroine stomping one foot onto the ground and pouting, because she wants her cake and to eat it too. Our heroes and Conall’s brothers all, in the meantime, work overtime to defend Avril’s virtue.
What this means is that we have another case of lip service female empowerment here. Avril wants to be free to do whatever she wants, but this freedom is not something she earns. No, it’s actually an illusion of freedom given to her by the men that happen to care for her. This isn’t female empowerment, it’s basically the big strong men in that woman’s life quietly cleaning up after her and mitigating the damage she is doing to herself as she goes “Whee! Give me pee-pees!” all over the place.
In fact, Conall would have been so much better if it had been solely about Conall and Munro doing the conga. Whenever Avril is in the picture, both men are bending over backwards to accommodate her feelings and wants. When it’s just the two of them, it’s all about intense feels and horny man-love, culminating in some really naughty sex scenes that make my toes curl. Really, that scene in which Munro wants Conall to tell him just how and where Conall wants the do the Munro-pogo… hot. Then Avril shows up and I’m like, eh, please someone kick that irritating interloper off the page, thank you.
No, seriously, the author could have explored themes such as homosexuality in the 19th century and all the feels that come with such a relationship had it been just the two men in love. Instead, Avril contorts the story like the black hole she is into becoming another eye-rolling tale of a 19th century heroine, in a 19th century setting, demanding to be treated like a 21st century ho.
Sometimes three’s company, but in the case of this story, it’s an obnoxious kind of company that needs to be booted off the story with extreme prejudice.
