Folly's Reward

[vintageromancereader]

Waylaid by Love...

Miss Prudence Drake sought to keep her young charge, six-year-old Lord Dunraven, from the clutches of his cruel guardian by fleeing with him to a Scottish seaside cottage. She had no time for a shipwrecked gentleman. But as he lay on the cold beach, the nearly drowned stranger turned his magnificent blue eyes on the straitlaced Prudence and asked for her aid. He had lost his way, his memory, and nearly his life. However, he had retained his courtly manners...and his ability to steal a kiss.

Prudence was thoroughly shocked and utterly intrigued. Was this mystery man a rake of the ton, a French spy, or a secret hero? She had no time to help him recover his identity; yet as danger closed in, she needed an ally to help transport Lord Dunraven to safety. But Prudence's desperate journey could sweep her toward a very different peril - as an intrepid governess and a nameless aristocrat forgot their class distinctions and lost their hearts...

Original Publisher: Zebra
Original Year of Publication: 1997
Page Count: 219

Prudence is certainly aptly named - she is a prude. She is straitlaced to the point of repression, dour, completely humorless, and lacks imagination. "Intrepid"? Ha! Dumb is more like it. Her brilliant idea of escaping her charge's pursuers is to travel on public transport! 🙄

The washed up man has no name, so he decides to name himself 'Hal' while he struggles to remember who he is. Hal is too good to be true: beautiful, cultured, charming, naturally athletic, blessed with a knowledge of literature and the silver tongue to show it off. He immediately bonds with six-year-old Bobby, the orphaned Earl of Dunraven, and when he hears Prudence and Bobby leaving in the middle of the night, he follows them. If he hadn't inserted himself into their mission to get away, they would've been caught in two seconds flat, as this man is apparently the only one with the brains to realize that, oh hey, maybe we better drop off the face of the earth for awhile.

Prudence lusts after Hal and then berates herself for it, not understanding that hormones are a thing. She feels guilty and shameful that her body reacts to an attractive man, because of course that's never happened before! She is stunned when Hal declares himself in love with her halfway through the book, and frankly, so am I. What does he see in her?! She is resistant to everything: his friendship with Bobby, his quick-thinking to get them out of tough spots, his urge to her to "seize the day" and "let her hair down". She literally cries the first time he kisses her. What a drip!

While I enjoyed the metaphor of Hal as a silkie (a seal who comes ashore and sheds his fur in the guise of a human man, who enchants a woman but then leaves her when the night is over; the only way the woman can keep him is if she finds and burns his sealskin in a certain way, which locks him into the form of a human man; otherwise, he is destined to belong to the sea), something Bobby - who does possess an imagination - immediately believes him to be because of his dark blue eyes; the pursuit of Bobby by his merciless cousin the Black Marquess; and the mystery of Hal's identity, I only made it halfway before DNFing, because I was no longer willing to put up with Prudence the Prude dragging everybody down every chance she got.

Life's too short to spend it with characters you abhor. This is a definite miss for me.