Keeping Kate

TEST

Captain Alexander (Alec) Fraser, officer and lawyer for his Highland Regiment, has been summoned to London to demonstrate Highland broadsword fighting for the Queen’s birthday. There he sees, and becomes entranced with (though he doesn’t speak to) Kate MacCarran, a fellow Highlander in London ostensibly to lobby for relief for Scots war widows. She is also there to gather any information which may be useful for her Jacobite kinsmen.

Legend has it that there is fairy blood in the family and Kate has the gift of glamourie, the ability to cast a spell, to captivate a man with a glance, which she finds very useful in information gathering. She throws a glance or two at Alec, but it doesn’t seem to work – or rather, it works in reverse, for she is quite taken with the tall, quiet, and solemn man.

Seven months later back in the Highlands, broadsheets are being circulated about “Katie Hell, Notorious Highland Wench.” A thief and a spy, Katie lures soldiers with “magic,” steals documents and leaves behind a white ribbon rose, the cockade of the Jacobites. She is in Alec’s tent, disguised as a laundress, and looking for a list with the names and location of Jacobite prisoners. She manages to drug his tea, and though woozy from it, Alec recognizes her as the woman from London whom he has been dreaming of for months. Kate gives in to temptation and they have a very passionate close encounter before he succumbs to the drug. He awakes to find her going through his papers and, realizing she is “Katie Hell,” he calls for the guards and she is arrested.

Several days later, he travels to Fort William to check on her and finds that she is being forced to stand, chained to the wall without food, drink, or rest until she talks. The English, and indeed the Jacobites as well, are looking for a hidden cache of Spanish weapons leftover from the uprising of 1719. Alex manages to get her released into his custody and to escort her to Edinburgh for further questioning. The attraction each feels for the other is heightened by their experiences on the road, which encompasses the bulk of the book.

Alec is your basic Good Guy. He is the strong, silent type, seemingly humorless, but feels things deeply. He is also secretly working for the Jacobite cause as well and walks a precarious line in the English sanctioned Highland regiment. His obsession with Kate surprises him with its strength, and his need to keep her safe is tinged with an air of quiet desperation.

Kate was raised as a lady, but has a long, stubborn streak. She plays a dangerous game using her “fairy gift” on men and has been in more than one tight spot as a result. However, she will contribute to the cause, and her brother and cousins are powerless to stop her.

The attraction between the two is very well done, and Ms. Gabriel convinced me of its power and their almost mystical connection. The love scenes, while firmly in the “warm” category as to acts and frequency, read as “hot” because of this connection and the intensity of emotion.

Keeping Kate was not without its problems however, the foremost being communication of the non-physical sort. Both held on to their secrets for far too long and expected the other to tell their own secrets when there was seemingly plenty of reason to not trust the other. Alec only wants to help Kate and her cause, but cannot do so because she won’t talk to him about her work – she doesn’t even tell him her last name until more than halfway through the book. But then, Kate has no way of knowing that Alec is on her side politically, as he doesn’t tell her. As far as she knows, he is working with the English, so why should she tell him anything? And Kate does indeed know something of the hidden cache of weapons.

And overshadowing all of this is my knowledge of the hopelessness of the Jacobite cause. I know darned well, that even though this is a romance and has the requisite HEA, that Culloden is on the horizon and that Alec and Kate, their families – perhaps even their children – will die or be exiled after the Rebellion of 1745. While I enjoyed this story, I could not divorce it completely from future events, and that colored my belief in Alec and Kate’s happy ending. Is this fair? I don’t know, but do I know it’s true.

Buy it at Amazon/Apple Books/Barnes and Noble/Kobo

Reviewed by Cheryl Sneed

Grade: B

Sensuality: Warm

Review Date: 21/10/05

Publication Date: 2005/11

Recent Comments …

  1. excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.

guest

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments