Overall: 2.5 rounded to ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Plot/Storyline: 📖📖📖
Feels: 🦋
Emotional Depth: 💔💔💔  
Sexual Tension: ⚡
Romance: 💞💞
Sensuality: 💋
Sex Scene Length: 🍑🍑🍑 
Steam Scale (Number of Sex Scenes): 🔥 - 🔥🔥 
Humor: Not really

(These are all personal preference on a scale of 1-5 (yours ratings may vary depending what gives you feels and how you prefer you sex scenes written, etc) except the Steam Scale which follows our chart from The Ton and Tartans Book Club )

Basic plot:
Jennifer and Gordon had a beautiful blooming romance. Jennifer, the daughter of the earl, and Gordon, the gardener’s son, knew their love would survive their differences in class. Until suddenly they were separated without understanding what had happened. It’s 5 years later and they are reunited, trying to understand their feelings and work through their hurt.

Give this a try if you want:
- Victorian time period – 1870
- Majority of the book takes place at the heroine’s highland estate
- Class difference/forbidden love trope
- Childhood friends to lovers trope
- Slow burn/Lower steam – there’s 2 scenes but they are directly after each other so I just counted it was 1

My thoughts:
I loved the narrator for this book – Liam Gerrard. He had a fabulous accent and I actually enjoyed the way he did the women’s voices.

But the story itself I really struggled with. And I will admit I have a harder time with second chance romance. I feel like you walk in on a story already started and miss most of the parts of falling in love that I live for with romance. Here, you don’t get many flashbacks, you just know that the earl’s daughter and the gardener’s boy love each other. 

Forces are trying to keep them apart, and lies are told. Both sides believe them in some ways and leave each other, confused and hurt. Jennifer is abandoned in the highlands for 5 years while Gordon goes to London to make his own way in life. The story picks up when he returns to the highlands upon finding out his father is seriously ill. 

The big reason I struggled with this book was simply that I was bored. There was a lot of internal dialogue with both characters. A LOT. And I just ended up wanting them to talk to each other and interact. I didn’t feel any tension between them and though it was kind of an angsty book with all the longing and wanting on both sides, it just didn’t engage my heart in any way. 

I struggled with how once they are back together and they talk, they just love each other again. It was like, oh this was all a misunderstanding?? I love you! Then the second act of the book, the big destructive secret I won’t mention, well I just thought it was all a bit silly. Being a romance novel, we all know how it would end up, so it just made for a lot of yucky feelings and more of them not talking to each other while we waited for the big reveal that would make it okay.

I was extremely disappointed in Gordon as a hero. He just left Jennifer for 5 years upon hearing something he didn’t like, basically without question and I wasn’t too impressed with them then. But after the big secret happens towards the middle of the book, he just….ignores her??? Hoping she’ll go away and he won’t have to deal with it? Who does that? At this point they were engaged to married so it was just ridiculous for him to act like that and think it would all just ‘go away’, it made no sense.

Jennifer I liked and felt bad for. I think she deserved better than Gordon.

Content Warnings:

Possible incestuous kisses/love
Cancer
Loss of a parent
Toxic family members

Locations of kisses/intimate scenes – I had the audiobook so locations might be weird

3% - remembered kiss
9% - remembered kisses
26% - kisses
31% - kisses
92% - kisses, oral for her, first sex scene, followed by another
100% - kiss