Good grief, there was a lot of sex in this book. I usually note when something’s not a clean romance, but there was a lot of flipping past pages to skip their acts of the horizontal tango. I think it was to the story’s detriment. I get that Mac and Isabella are passionate people and passionately in love, but so many sex moments really detracted from the emotional weight of the story. What they were dealing with was heavy, and normally I would be crying empathetically with their pain. It just didn’t happen in this book. Unlike the first book, I never had a chance to connect with that emotional core because of the sex. Sex, in the romance context, is all about emotions like love, intimacy, trust and passion whereas what happened with their split involved grief and loss and fear. Because it kept flipping from one to the other without a bridge between them (other than one implied), it kept the story from being as good as the plot could have been.
We met Lady Isabella and Mac Mackenzie in the first book, estranged but still very much in love. (No, dear readers, his parents weren’t super lame. Mac’s a nickname he acquired when he was 2 and that was the only part of Roland Ferdinand Mackenzie that he could pronounce.) Mac wants reconciliation. Isabella resists because of all the times he’s said he’s sorry in the past. He’s a famous painter and it was his drunkenness and tendency to disappear for days or weeks at a time that was their undoing.
In this book, we get into the nuts and bolts of their relationship. They met because his friends bet him that he wouldn’t sneak in to her debut ball and steal a kiss. They ran off together, leading to her being ostracized from her family. The Mackenzies quickly took to her (Ian showed her his porcelain!) and the pair were quite happy until they weren’t.
Throughout the book, there’s lots of descriptions of their lustful feelings and yearnings and quite a lot of reconciliation sex. I’m rolling my eyes because this book was thick with it (so if that’s your thing, enjoy. It’s not mine). We find out that she left him after a miscarriage, which is something that can happen in marriages. She’d had enough of his drunken stupors - Ian had to travel to bring him home - and his disappearing whenever they started fighting too much.
The legacy of the Mackenzies’ abusive father plays out in this book, too. Not wanting to be his father, having to prove himself, is what drives him and it’s those things that drove her away. As the pair work to rebuild the bond they shared - attraction was *never* their problem - we read a lot about the painful wreckage that they are wading through. But unlike other similar stories, this one wasn’t gut wrenching for me because of what I discussed above. Normally, their pain would have me crying, but this book didn’t. I think it was *because* of all the sex. Even at the end, when Mac is ‘bearing himself’ to her (Ian’s phrase, and it’s referring to emotional baring/vulnerability), it didn’t really move me. Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy that they’ve resolved things. They needed to because they love each other deeply. I just don’t think I’ll reread this one.
The book includes the rest of the clan, Ian and Beth the most (since of the 3, Mac is closest to him). Their marriage is going well - we knew it would - and Beth is pregnant. Marriage hasn’t cured Ian of his awkwardness (he’s autistic, after all), but he’s now able to look his brothers directly in the eye rather than a quick flash of eye contact. (That gets me a little emotional.) There’s also a subplot of an artist who closely resembles Mac who is passing himself off as the man. (Is he a con man? Crazy? You’ll just have to read the book to find out.) The Yard is portrayed as competent (law enforcement usually isn’t) and I’m hoping Inspector Fellows appears in the future.
Like all romances, all’s well at the end. There’s a moment where we glimpse the next couple: Cam and Ainsley. Ainsley is helping Isabella see her sister and they meet as he’s entering and she’s leaving. It will be interesting to find out more about this second son and his relationship with his son, Daniel. We haven’t really found out much about him, except that he’s a horseman and his relationship with Daniel is difficult. There’s a nice closing scene, with Mac painting, Ian fishing and the ladies talking as best friends do.
My rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars.
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