Romancing the Scot (The Pennington Family #1) by May McGoldrick

  Romancing the Scot by May McGoldrick

 
Blurb:

In this stunning series starter by USA Today bestselling author May McGoldrick, meet the new generation of Penningtons...five brothers and sisters of passion and privilege. Enter their aristocratic world…where each will fight injustice and find love.

Hugh Pennington—Viscount Greysteil, Lord Justice of the Scottish Courts, hero of the Napoleonic wars—is a grieving widower with a death wish. When he receives an expected crate from the continent, he is shocked to find a nearly dead woman inside. Her identity is unknown, and the handful of American coins and the precious diamond sown into her dress only deepen the mystery.

Grace Ware is an enemy to the English crown. Her father, an Irish military commander of Napoleon’s defeated army. Her mother, an exiled Scottish Jacobite. When Grace took shelter in a warehouse, running from her father’s murderers through the harbor alleyways of Antwerp, she never anticipated bad luck to deposit her at the home of an aristocrat in the Scottish Borders. Baronsford is the last place she could expect to find safety, and Grace feigns a loss of memory to buy herself time while she recovers.

Hugh is taken by her beauty, passion, and courage to challenge his beliefs and open his mind. Grace finds in him a wounded man of honor, proud but compassionate. When their duel of wits quickly turns to passion and romance, Grace’s fears begin to dissolve…until danger follows her to the very doors of Baronsford. For, unknown to either of them, Grace has in her possession a secret that will wreak havoc within the British government. Friend and foe are indistinguishable as lethal forces converge to tear the two lovers apart or destroy them both. 



I loved "Borrowed Dreams" by May McGoldrick, which is one of my All-time-favorites and I seriously can't tell you how often I've read and re-read that book. "Romancing the Scot" is the first book in the series about the Pennington Family, the book about the next generation.
Everything that I loved about "Borrowed Dreams" and its wonderful characters, can be found in this book again. You can feel Lyon and Millicent in their children and their children's actions and values. Their pursuit of justice and of what is right, their compassion and their love for those around them, are the perfect mixture of their parents' qualitites that I loved so much. And of course, we get to meet Lyon and Millicent as well.

If you read "Borrowed Dreams", you might remember Jo, sweet little Jo, whose birth we witnessed and well, there's also Hugh, Lyon's and Millicent's son. We meet those two in "Romancing the Scot" at a time, when Hugh slowly starts to open up to the possibility of loving again after having suffered a terrible loss during the war. Enters Grace, a young woman who is saved by Hugh and nursed back to health by Hugh and Jo. Grace has lost everything but she might just have found the one place where she finds a purpose and maybe even a place for her to stay. If she can avoid being killed or being convicted as a traitor, of course.

Right from the start this book felt so right that I already knew that this would become another favorite of mine. This is a book that I'll definitely read again and again and again and that I'll have to buy in print as well as soon as it is out (and I hope that there will be a print book as well!).
Somehow I need my favorite books in print as well even though I almost never read them because I always read the ebook. Nope, it's not logical, it's that nerd thing, you know? ;-)

★★★★★

 Oh, those if you who have read "Borrowed Dreams" will probably laugh as hard as I did, when Hugh and Grace start discussing certain books. Lyon and his refusal to read those volumes come to mind, somehow, don't ask me why, just - read yourself!