Highlander's Hope by Collette Cameron

This is a rollicking adventure, set in the early 1800s, and we are immediately in the thick of the action; Yvette is an heiress, her father and stepmother recently dying in very suspicious circumstances, and her stepbrother Edgar has made an attack on her. She has fled from Boston, where her family had been living for the past few years, back to her hometown of London. There she is pursued at the docks and finds herself saved by Ewan, the very man she's been having some rather saucy dreams about.  Ewan is a spy, under orders to capture Edgar, and he agrees to safely deliver Yvette to her cousin's home, but his efforts are hampered by Edgar's hired assassins and a mole in the midst of the spies.

To save Yvette's reputation, Ewan pretends that they are betrothed, and Yvette agrees to go along with a fake engagement, but as the story deepens, and more danger abounds, Ewan takes Yvette back to his homeland of Scotland and there he is forced by circumstances to pretend that she is his wife, a decision that brings some consequences that Yvette hasn't foreseen. Yvette is only too used to people falling in love with her fortune rather than her and she is determined to marry for love or else say single, but can she hope that Ewan genuinely cares for more than just her possessions? And can Ewan keep her safe and still manage to capture Edgar and find the mole?

I enjoyed this book, but there were a few things which would have improved it for me. Firstly, there was behaviour which was accepted without any comment that I felt would have been a breach of etiquette for the time, such as sitting on the same side of a closed carriage with an unmarried man. I thought that some of the words used were too modern or generally misused, and I also was surprised to see Yvette's language, she uses some curse words that I was surprised to see a young lady using.

Yvette is a pretty likeable heroine, even though she is determined to mistrust the hero, and falls for a trick which all her sense should have told her to see right through. Ewan was a likeable hero too.  The romance was a bit too chemistry-based for me.  Although their time together getting to know each other off-page is referred to I'd have liked to have seen a bit more myself.

The action was pretty much nonstop in this book, we even get pregnant ladies throwing knives! There were a number of spies aside from Ewan. They were all introduced in the same section of the book and there were too many of them for me to remember who was who, so I had no hope of working out who the mole was! The Edgar part of the storyline wrapped up quite abruptly, which I thought was a shame, he'd been at large for so long that it almost seemed too easy, I was expecting a bit more of the part of the storyline.

We are introduced to lots of interesting characters in this story. I'd love to know more of what happens to Ewan's sisters and brother. Ms Cameron has written a book called 'The Viscount's Vow' which I understand sets out the turbulent history of Yvette's cousin Evangeline and her husband Ian, which is hinted at in Highlander's Hope.