TEST
Waiting for A Scot Like You is the third book in Eva Leigh’s Union of the Rakes series, which is based on Ms. Leigh’s favorite movies from the 1980s. This book is loosely based on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Footloose, but while I was a big fan of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off I just could not fall in love with this book. It is billed as a “madcap escapade” but the escapades were so ludicrous and so far out-of-character for Regency England that I just could not enjoy the story.
Beatrice Sloane, the Dowager Countess of Farris, is ready for more adventure in her life. Three years after the death of her spouse (and the end of a stifling marriage) Beatrice is “about to embark on the latest step in her journey for personal fulfillment” – a week-long bacchanal (read orgy) at the estate of Lord Gibb. The Duke of Rotherby (the hero of Would I Lie to the Duke) asks his friend Major Duncan McCameron to escort Lady Farris on her travels, but Duncan isn’t thrilled at the idea. Duncan has met Beatrice before and has found her to be a bit too unconventional for his taste. But Rotherby is a good friend and Duncan is in need of a change of pace, so he agrees to accompany Beatrice and her companion Jeanie.
Duncan has no idea that a bacchanal lies at the end of this journey, and finds himself inconveniently attracted to Beatrice – even though he doesn’t really enjoy her company. He returned from the war in Europe three years earlier and has been adrift ever since, but although is family motto – Dignity, Honor, Duty – served him well in military life, he has not yet found a purpose in peacetime. Duncan had hoped to be married and enjoying fatherhood by now but his first and only love jilted him for the sake of a title a few days before the battle of Waterloo. He’s not sure if he still believes in love.
Beatrice and Duncan set off on their travels north and it soon becomes apparent that they have different ideas of how the journey should proceed. Duncan has time schedules and plans of where each day will lead them. Beatrice is off on an adventure and on day one she insists they eat in the common inn dining room of the inn (instead of a private parlor) and then proceeds to the kitchen to learn how to make the Bedfordshire clanger she enjoyed at lunch. When it’s time to climb back in the carriage Beatrice is missing – Duncan and Jeanie eventually find her marching in a local festival parade. Duncan is dismayed but keeps quiet. Beatrice explains that she is going to take all the “wonderful chances to do things I’ve never done before.”
And then the first (really) crazy thing in the book happens. Jeanie looks out the coach window and sees a ewe struggling to birth a lamb. She calls to halt the carriage, jumps down and saves the day by reaching in and helping to pull out the lamb. It turns out the farmer’s wife is ill and there is a plethora of lambing ewes. The farmer is so grateful he offers Jeanie the chance to stay and help out on the farm until his wife is better. And Jeanie decides to stay – with Beatrice’s blessing. This is the oddest way to dispose of a chaperone that I’ve ever read! And now we have Beatrice and Duncan alone on the journey.
I won’t give away all of the adventures that happen along the way but here are a few – a carriage falling off a cliff, a night of sleeping in the woods, a dance party for a village that outlawed dancing, a ferry boat that snaps its line and sends the H/h adrift, a thwarted robbery attempt, and the obligatory one-bed-in-the-inn trick. Folks, it’s just a crazy mess. When Beatrice recommended to a young girl who loves to dance they met along the way that she should journey to London to become a dancer I almost threw the book across the room! What wonderful advice for a young country miss! There is ‘seize the day’ and there is ‘what reality are you living in?’
I don’t mind a book full of adventure even when it sometimes stretches the limits of believability (see my review of Hero Wanted) but this book takes it too far. The endless, unbelievable ordeals combined with the complete disregard for the realities of Regency England had me shaking my head and murmuring ‘What the….?’ I was especially unhappy with the ending where (spoiler alert) Duncan finally agrees to just live with Beatrice without being married. I kept thinking that if the situation were reversed and Duncan had convinced Beatrice to be his lifelong mistress, we would have been up in arms.
There is A LOT of sex in this book – maybe even too much. Once they start, it just goes on and on. Ms. Leigh writes good sex scenes but along the way they began to overwhelm the possible romance. I had a hard time believing that Beatrice was interested in the true Duncan and not just his nether regions. (“I shall miss that beautiful cock!”), and she never really seemed to understand his need to have a conventional marriage and family of his own. I liked that Beatrice was the older woman – (forty-six) to Duncan’s younger man (thirty-four), but the connection (outside of the physical) just wasn’t there.
I believe this will be the last book in the series as the remaining two rakes found love in this story as well. I’ve enjoyed Ms. Leigh’s work in the past so I’ll probably try again. I’m sure there are those readers who will enjoy the wild escapades of this book – but it just wasn’t for me.
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Grade: C-
Book Type: Historical Romance
Sensuality: Hot
Review Date: 27/02/21
Publication Date: 02/2021
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
Related Reviews
In my review of Eva Leigh’s Her Fake Rake, I suggested that instead of a historical, the book would have worked better as a teen movie. It sounds as if she read my review but got the message entirely backward.
You know the weird thing about this train wreck is that it could work as a parody of Regency romances if it didn’t take itself so seriously. Maybe even breaking the fourth wall would have helped. Think the Blazing Saddles of Regency HR or something. Then it wouldn’t be a crazy mess, but genius-level fun.
On that note, I think part of the problem is that Regency England with titled characters is a terribly oversaturated niche. Therefore, writers have to come up with as many wild and crazy plot points as they can to differentiate themselves from their competitors. If you have a bajillion titled characters inhabiting the same nine year period in the exact same time and place, how can you not resort to these kind of hijinks to stand out? And, at the same time, you have to be inordinately careful not to offend anyone or stray from 21st century attitudes lest you be accused of sexism, racism, wrongthink, or whatever else. In short, it’s not just this book that’s a hot mess; it’s an entire segment of a popular genre.
In short, it’s not just this book that’s a hot mess; it’s an entire segment of a popular genre.
Yep. We’ve spoken about this recently on another thread, but this is yet another example of the mad scramble to a) give well-to-do heroines something to do b) pretend that 21st century attitudes were widely prevalent in the 19th.
Hah, this one is more recognizable for its source material (Jeanie and Ferris being named characters, yet Beatrice is clearly the Ferris expy. Is Duncan Cameron? He should be more wishy washy if he is.).
I appreciate genre-bending and Beatrice sounds at the very least unique, but it’s important for characters to at least have bedrock sames between them. Yet I appreciate Beatrice’s yen for adventure. Yet an author can do unconventional stuff like this but if I don’t believe the h/hr have core matching wants, it’s hard to believe in the HEA. Also at forty-six I sense kids would not be a reality for Beatrice, but one never knows and I hope they’re making preparations for such things to occur.
I’ll give this a try myself since I enjoy Leigh’s work, but hmm.
Getting pregnant after 45 is almost impossible now without help. Back then, so so so unlikley.
And I guess because romance allows for a suspension of disbelief in many realms, one could do that here. But it seems unnecessarily unlikely.
And it’s not just getting pregnant at that age. I had my 2 when I was coming up on 36 and 39 – and the risks of foetal abnormality went up by a massive amount (something like x10) between one pregnancy and the other (once you’re over 30 the risks increase at very fast rates) – and of course, they were high to start with because of my age.
This seems like a complete role-reversal from older novels where the heroine was the one who dreamed of getting married and having children while the hero was a committment-phobe and only wanted her as his mistress. And it feels just as unsatisfying.
Good grief. I think you deserve a medal for getting through this claptrap. I’ve enjoyed a number of this author’s books in the past – as both Eva Leigh and Zoe Archer – but it seems she’s now among that group of authors who seem to think the only way for a heroine to be “strong” is for her to treat the hero like shit as some sort of payback for centuries of female oppression. I want to see equality in a romance, a meeting of minds and mutual understanding, not “my way or the highway”.
So, do they end up together and nothing happens about Duncan’s desire to have a family? I’m all for couples being able to choose or not choose children, but it feels fundamentally NOT happily ever after if one really wants to and isn’t able.
That bothered me, too. I remember a book by Joanna Shupe that ended similarly – the heroine was adamant she didn’t want kids, and the hero had to go along with it if he wanted to be with her. Anyone who has found themselves in that situation will tell you that is NOT a good basis for a relationship. And the issue of “living in sin” i.e, without marriage, came up in Evie Dunmore’s most recent book. I honestly wonder if these authors have any real sense of just how much of a stigma that was at the time, and how difficult their characters’ lives might have been as a consequence.
I agree with you that in romance, it’s not an HEA if one person’s dreams eclipse another’s. I’ve known several couples where infertility and/or a disagreement on having kids has caused bitter and very sad breakups. (It’s worth noting that men can have kids at almost any times in their lives–we personally know three couples that men married older women believing, at the time of nuptials, they (the men) didn’t want kids. They then hit 40, changed their minds, divorced the older women, remarried and now have kids. So I get that women need HEAs where they are loved for their happily childless selves. But that HEA can’t be at the cost of a partner’s.
Absolutely. My brother and his wife are childless by choice, and it’s a decision they took together. But I’ve known other couples where one partner (the man in both cases) didn’t want children and the other did or thought they might in the future – in one case, they stayed together but it was very hard for her, in the other they eventually split up. But in romances there seems to be a growing trend – I notice it in HR more than CR – for the heroine to get her way at the expense of what the hero wants. Maybe some writers see this as a way of redressing the balance of those years of rapey heroes and of the oppression of women IRL, but I was always taught that two wrongs don’t make a right. Treating your man like dirt isn’t a long-term relationship plan!
Exactly. Whenever I read a romance with a hero who manipulated, harmed or raped the heroine, I sure as hell wasn’t thinking, “Damn, this would be so good if only the abuse went in the opposite direction!”
YES – that’s exactly it. In the Dunmore book I mentioned the heroine smacks the hero in the face for absolutely no reason other than a misunderstanding on her part, and at the time, mine was the only review at a major site that mentioned it. But had it been the other way around, the SJWs would have been out in full force.
I HATED THAT. It felt so so so so wrong.
I think we all want characters who feel both wonderful and real to us. There’s nothing wonderful about treating someone who loves you like shit. Now I’m also not chuffed with perfect lovers–BORING–but I need to see someone understand their frailties and earn our forgiveness. No one receives carte blanche to be awful no matter what your sex, race, religion, etc….
I think you’re right about this becoming a trend. I recently finished reading an m/f HR where the hero briefly considers having children and the heroine is like, “No way, uh uh, not happening,” and the hero just sort of goes along with it. Ugh… In case you’re wondering which book I’m talking about, it’s going under a spoiler tab.
Agreed. If the hero and heroine want to treat someone like dirt, it should be the villain that they defeat together. :-)
In the Evie Dunmore you mention, didn’t the h&h get engaged (and did mean to get married, just at a later date) and the ‘sinning’ done in great secrecy in a bid not to tarnish both their reputations?
I think there was an engagement, yes, but they still planned to live together without marriage, which at the time was a big no-no. I find it hard to believe they wouldn’t have been found out.
They did!? Im going to have to go back and re-read it then as I don’t remember understanding it that way. It was my favourite book of 2020 and I remember being very excited and stayed up all night to finish it. When I get my hands on a book I’m so excited to read, i read it so quickly I sometimes skip lines or words in a hurry.
I’m pretty sure, yes. I reviewed it here – and of course, had to avoid spoilers when I wrote it. I said:
For Tristan and Lucie to do what they do is pretty risky, especially given that discovery could pose a real threat to Lucie’s ability to continue her work.
They opt to live together without marriage. Which made sense for her character, but was an incredibly risky thing to do. Given Lucie’s reputation was already fairly precarious given her activism, being discovered living “in sin” would have made her persona non grata and would have completely scuppered her work, IMO. And if they’d had children, those kids would have had to live with the stigma of illegitimacy. Ridiculous, yes, but that’s how it was back then.
Today’s world poses its own unique challenges for women but I thank the good Lord that I was born in these times and not in the ‘days of old’.
That irritated the hell out of me. I felt it lessened the considerable power of the book.
Exactly. And why do these (supposedly) clever, marriage-opposed women never think that maybe they could do MORE if they were elevated to a higher social rank by marrying the man they love?
I think it’s also unlikely that very many women wanted to live without marriage. To do so, for a whole host of reasons, was to be consigned to a lesser life.
Absolutely. It was much more common among the “lower classes” for a couple to live together without marriage – because they couldn’t afford the license and other fees. But posh people had reputations to preserve – and of course, the woman and any children would have born the brunt of that censure.
This is a good reason why HR could use more working class rather than titled heroes and heroines. You could get away with a lot more when your station in life didn’t require heirs and stringent notions of propriety. That’s not to say you could do anything you wanted, but being regarded as lowly by the higher echelons of society did have some advantages when it came to marrying someone you actually liked, not getting married formally, or just carousing if you could get away with it. I remember reading that in colonial America, a lot of people outside of the upper classes had a “haystack wedding,” as in you just declared you were married in front of a haystack and POOF! you were married, not a lot of fuss. Oh, and that same article I read from Colonial Williamsburg mentioned that a third of colonial brides were visibly pregnant at their wedding. So, there you go…
My grandparents – on my father’s side – weren’t married, and I think my dad was in his fifties before he found out (in the mid-1980s) So it was happening until more recently than we might think.
Right. And very few American states today recognize common law marriages, which used to be more prevalent. Although if you’ve lived with someone for decades and raised children together, how much more married can you possibly be? Do you really need an official piece of paper saying so?
It’s interesting how attitudes toward what constitutes a marriage have changed so much across time and space. In a certain time frame for Ancient Egypt, for example, I read that there were divorce records but no marriage records. Why was this? Because if a man and a woman lay together, they were considered married, end of story. It’s really only recently in history that the institution of marriage- outside of certain circumstances- was considered a state function rather than a religious and/or community one. The very idea of state marriage licenses would have baffled anyone living throughout most of human history.
Beatrice did not want to lose her freedom with another marriage. And I totally get that. But, given the time period, it is unrealistic to think they can live together and share a life outside of marriage without a big scandal. Especially as Beatrice and her three grown children are a part of the ton. There was no concern on Beatrice’s part that this would be an issue for her children and I think that was just unrealistic.
Wait–Beatrice has kids but he now can’t? That seems sad.
ITA. I know people who don’t want children, but the Duncan/Beatrice situation seems unbalanced. If she is 46 and has 3 children, I can understand why she doesn’t want any more, but is Duncan content with this situation? Not having read the book I don’t know, but if nothing else he must understand that a woman of her age is unlikely to get pregnant and, if she does, is unlikely to carry to term and deliver a healthy baby. He could certainly decide that Beatrice is worth more to him than potential future offspring — does he do that?
Yes, the children would have been tainted by association, especially any daughters, even if they were married.
Seems like the practical Jeanie, assuming she was young enough to bear children, might have been a better match for Duncan, poor chap. I don’t see a HEA or HFN on the cards for this pairing. Beatrice sounds like an awful woman.
PS to myself: that cover is 110% crap. Yuck-o!!!!!!
It’s interesting that for such a modern book, it’s a throwback cover.
Eh, they’re trying to fool HR readers it’s an actual historical romance!