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Khanh the Killjoy

How to Marry a Highlander - Katharine Ashe "She wanted to be the spring ewe to his ram. She wanted to be the nectar in the bud to his hummingbird’s probe. She wanted him to make her a woman in this hothouse."...um. Say what? Ok, let's backtrack here."When the Earl of Eads had stared at her across that ballroom in London...he hadn’t even glanced at her bosom...the earl had not given her bosom even a flicker of interest. He had stared at her face.She liked that about him."Oh, Teresa, honey, if that's a reason for you to fall in love with this man, you really need to sort out your priorities. And by love, I mean insta-love.Hum. let's backtrack some more.How to Marry a Highlander, also known as Seven Grooms for Seven Sisters. You might be thinking, aghast, you can't fucking fit all that AND the love story into a decent novella! You would be correct. This would be an ambitious premise for a full-length book. It fails spectacularly as a novella, but it has its many moments of utter hilarity. For example, the tiny bit of zen as Duncan struggles fitfully (and ultimately unsuccessfully) to maintain his inner calm and not completely lose it in the wee hours of the morning as the household explodes into the chaos of a mess of loud, noisy young women, all talking at once. Epic, just epic.Heroine: Teresa Finch-Freeworth. Right off the bat, she admits that she's got a pretty good life, but still, she lives in...*sigh* "unenviable circumstances." Why? Well, um...ok, she's not poor, she's nowhere near poor, having a respectable dowry, she has distant, but caring parents (with an income of two thousand pounds per annum), she takes yearly trips to London, she has wonderful siblings, she's got brains and an imagination. But still, she's got prooooooooblems, maaaaaaaaan.#richregencygirlproblemsUm, so what's the problem? Oh, it's so sad! So utterly distressing! However shall one live with one's self?!"[It] had left her remarkably frustrated and not a little despondent. For good reason: Lord Eads had once seen her, stared at her across a ballroom with great intensity and admiration and perhaps even longing that left her breathless, then promptly left London without seeking her acquaintance; he now resided on his estate in Scotland; a lady could not kiss a man from 300 miles away; and she was beginning to forget what he looked like."Oh nooooooo. Oh, please.I understand insta-love and its reason for existence in romance novels. I understand the need to communicate to the reader of that spark, that crucial moment in time that sends a shiver down your spine, that beginning of a series of events that lead into and ultimately becomes a grand love story. This novella is not an example of such. It is insta-love. It's not even insta-love. It is insta-lust. It is Teresa losing her mind, falling in love unreasonably with a man she has never seen before, never talked to. With one single glance across a room, in one single moment, she supposedly feels this connection so deeply as to obsess over it. Just the memory of that one moment has her throwing away every sense of decorum and thought to her future. She is willing to risk her ruination in society, the scandal that could attach itself to her family, for a ghost of a chance at the man she sees across a room. She has clung to this moment and dreamt about it over for well over a year. I find it implausible, and I find the heroine foolish.Lust. The thought of the virile, masculine, chiseled Earl of Eads makes Teresa tingle, makes her feel warm in places she never knew existed, makes her want to do unspeakable things..."she peeked at him...and saw precisely what she wished to chew: his jaw. Then she would nibble his chin." OM NOM NOM. Scotsmen: it's what's for dinner.Teresa hears that the Earl of Eads is back in Ton, and runs away to London to meet him. Privately. Against all sense of propriety, and against all sense, really. The Scottish Earl of Eads has a shady, bad reputation. He's also penniless, with seven unmarried half sisters to marry off. Such a prize! Teresa shows up, uninvited, unchaperoned at his house, and begs to marry him. On the one hand, I admire her initiative, I admire her acknowledgment of her sexuality. On the other hand, she is such a fucking idiot. She literally begs him to marry her. My dear, have some fucking pride in yourself. I suffered tremendously from secondhand embarrassment as she wheedles, plots, begs Duncan to marry her, all that cultivating in some nonsensical, idiotic, scatterbrained plot to find husbands for ALL OF HIS SISTERS, if he will just marry her. Ok, she'll take less than that. For example, if she is incompetent and only finds him only 3 husbands, could he please finger-fuck her? And if she only manages to find five, he can do her the favor of taking her virginity. Please? Pretty please? And while she's at it, she'll kiss the fucking hems of his kilt, too. And probably lick his boots, bending over backwards, begging for more.This girl is just beyond thirsty. Where's your goddamn pride, woman?! It was utterly cringeworthy for me to read the first part of this novella.The plot of finding seven husbands is a far, far stretch, and honestly, it didn't work for me. Teresa didn't do anything. Deus ex machina. She just happened to be there with the bet in place while all these things and these "meet cutes" were happening. Duncan's reason for falling in love with her is beyond a stretch of the imagination; their interaction left me cold. There is physical lust, certainly, but there is nothing that sets us up for the inevitability of the two falling in love. It's a thinly contrived plot that falls through utterly.Read this for a laugh; don't expect anything beyond that.