Carole Mortimer, $2.99 ISBN 978-1-910597-97-2
Historical Romance, 2021
I have mentioned before that Carole Mortimer’s Regency Scandal series has an old-school tinge to it. Well, when it comes to plot, things can’t get more old school than Wayward, which sees a 19-year old heroine waving her legs in the air to her guardian, who is also her late father’s friend.
Well, sort of a friend, actually. Gideon Rhodes, the Duke of Esher, and Lydia Montague’s father were once BFFs of Prince George, and the two men became good friends since their estates also happened to be next to one another. Alas, Gideon soon fell out of favor with Prinny, and consequently, he and Lydia’s father, the Earl of Chessington, also stop bumping into one another much since then.
Hence, it came as a shock to our hero when he learns that he’s now the guardian of Lydia. Oh, there is one relative, the new earl, but that earl comes with a large number of kids, and that particular family is not keen on taking on an unwanted family member to feed and clothe.
With great reluctance, our hero decides to bring Lydia to his place.
He reeled back on his heels, his senses assaulted, as a young woman stepped down onto the gravel driveway.
Light.
Bright, iridescent light.
It surrounded the young woman as warm as the orange glow of a sunset in early summer.
Everything about the young woman’s appearance seemed to engender and add to that warmth and light.
The light brown velvet bonnet she wore did not hide nor detract from the beauty and gleam of the russet-colored hair beneath.
Her face looked as if it had been bathed in gold, and her eyes, as she looked up toward the frontage of the house, were the warm green of new shoots upon the hedgerows and trees in springtime.
Her cheeks were round and red as a freshly ripened apple.
Her nose was small and slightly turned up at the end.
Her lips…
How wholesome.
Dear God, her lips were plump and red, and would no doubt look scandalously erotic sucking a man’s cock.
Wait, what?
The hero is not that old. He’s 37, which will either be a relief or a disappointment, depending on how much the reader is looking forward to the age gap, heh. He also has that scarred and angst-filled act down pat, as his wife died in a fire years ago, and people still say he started the fire.
He has scars all over, and he believes that he is so ugly that the only companionship he has had since then was paid ones, under the cover of darkness. I’m sure he also has the entire catalog of My Chemical Romance and Radiohead playing in the background while he’s doing that thing he does.
Unfortunately, he mistakes that hot woman he’s been lusting after for her guardian’s companion, and rebukes her rudely when “the companion” tries to correct him. Well, there goes the chance of making a good impression on the lady.
Fortunately for him, Lydia finds him super sexy even with those scars and all, so she doesn’t put up much of a fight when it comes to doing the beast with the ugly.
Wayward isn’t a bad read by any means, but it’s also very ordinary and on the half-baked side.
I personally find the hero way too self-pitying for too long for my liking, but for the most he’s okay. He’s far less of a jerk than I initially expected him to be, given the author having spent time in the trenches of the Modern line; he’s actually more of a lost and somewhat naïve fellow when it comes to the opposite sex, even with his checkered past and all. The heroine is a more straightforward archetype, the one that will give the hero lots of sexual healing to make him feel like a real man again.
Still, they are alright. The issue here is that the main characters fall into lust at first sight, and the author spends far more time having these characters engage in physical and mental lusting to the point that Lydia and Gideon never have the opportunity to develop properly. They are what they are: familiar props to go through the same old motions of a beauty and a beast story.
Outside of that, the main drama stems from the hero’s late wife melodramatically wailing and crying from the time they first had sex, to the point that poor Gideon believes that he is a monster that will only draw proper and well-bred ladies into hysterics with his monster wang and all.
Sure enough, this dead floozy was a ho that deliberately put him into this position to conceal her being a ho with someone else, et cetera. We can’t have our hero be officially crap in bed, after all, so it’s always the one complaining about the hero’s sexual prowess that is the evil meanie!
However, I wish the author had come up with a plausible reason, if only to affirm my faith in the hero’s powerful pee-pee prowess, because the dead ho’s motives and machinations are far more cartoon villainy than anything else. Why couldn’t she just be someone that was genuinely not into sex? Some people are like that, after all, and they don’t have to be evil for not worshiping the power of the peen.
The reasons to read Wayward would be, I suppose, the lusting and the boinking as well as the occasional lurid humor. However, there are also some cons in the form of underdeveloped characters and a suspense plot thread that hinges heavily on implausible motivations and lucky coincidences. The whole thing is readable and even entertaining, but I feel that it could have been so much more had the author took more risks with it.
