Her very presence vexes Liam, and when his caddish brother Thorne shows an interest in her, the brothers’ long-simmering rivalry threatens to reemerge and boil over as they compete for her hand.
Philomena defies his expectations and manages to relate to and tame both his children – the incongruously-named sourpuss Rihanna and the formal Andrew – and forms a bond with his kinsmen and his servants. Philomena is frightened by the size and might of Liam’s men, and Liam is perplexed by the sense of lust he feels on seeing Philomena, who irritates him with her lack of compliance. The new Laird MacKenzie needs a governess for his unruly children, so Christopher arranges for Liam to hire Philomena under an assumed identity. Christopher Argent, fiancé of her friend Millie (hero and heroine of book two, The Hunter), is the one to suggest Mena leave the country before her husband discovers she’s been sprung from the snake pit. She is saved from being raped by her doctor by the intervention of the police, alerted by a friend of hers, Countess Blackwell (the heroine of books one of this series, The Highwayman), and is taken in by the Blackwells while she recuperates. Locked away in an asylum by her libertine husband who claims that she has debauched tastes when in fact he’s the abusive one and has run through her inheritance, she is abused sexually and spiritually day and night by the staff. Vincent, Viscountess Benchley, is a woman of great determination. He’s returned to Scotland to assume the mantle of laird and try to return justice and order to his clan after years of his father’s misrule. He has, in response to his father’s cruel teachings, become a soldier for the crown and a killer supreme so legendary that people whisper he made a deal with a demon to gain his fearsome skills. When we first meet him, he’s pulling the rotting skeleton of a bawdy woman he once knew out of a bog, a woman the local gossip accuses him of murdering. Liam MacKenzie, Lord Ravencroft, is a man of action.
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