How to Abduct a Highland Lord by Karen Hawkins

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After the Mafia Romance Readathon, I immediately jumped into the Historical Romance Readathon! The first book I decided to pick up was How to Abduct a Highland Lord by Karen Hawkins. This is the first book in her MacLean Curse series. This covered the prompts second chance romance, in a series, marriage of convenience, rake, highlander and enemies to lovers. This also worked for the prompts one person on the cover and Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince ("heartbreaker" in the story) for Love Has Sprung board 2 and the Taylor Swift Quarterly Challenge respectively. I also finally found a book to cover the prompt Englandtimes Highlander Vegas for the Heaving Bosom's 2022 Reading Embrace.

After Fiona is struggling to keep her brothers from killing people in Clan Kincaid after their younger brother Callum is killed. There hasn't been that type of warring for a while and it's not time to start. To help keep everybody in line Fiona plans to marry her old flame Jack Kincaid. When she finds him on the side of the road she takes him to the pastor and convinces him to marry them. When Jack sobers up, he's surprised to see the one woman he wanted more than as a mistress suddenly his wife and bucks against the marriage.

This was a lot of fun and I loved how zany the plot was at times. Now, this wasn't quite a full 5-stars for me, but mostly because I felt like I was missing a little bit more of the emotional development. It did feel like a lot of that emotional development between Fiona and Jack happened when they were younger, but we didn't see any of that. I would've loved just a couple (not too many) flashbacks or even a prologue or the first couple chapters set in the past before a time jump. I just was left wanting more emotionally between them at the end.

I pretty much loved everything else. I really enjoyed the push and pull between Jack and Fiona; as well as the mutual pining. Fiona's brothers were hilarious and just as expected as angry older brothers. I also found the curse aspect really interesting. Before each chapter there were a couple lines or little blurbs of an older grandmother teaching three girls about the MacLean curse. I'm not sure if it's going to be resolved in this series, but I loved that they can effect the weather. What made it even better was that even though they could cause rain or hail, it couldn't be controlled. There were moments where local villages would be in threat of flooding and the brothers would have to really control their feelings to keep their tenants and locals safe from sudden thunderstorms. It was just a fun extra element added throughout!

I really loved this book and can't wait to read more in the series. I'm super intrigued to see who the brothers get paired with and have a new series to get into! I'm not sure when I'll be able to pick them up, but I can't wait. This was such a good book to start the readathon with and it gave me a bingo single-handedly!

Have you read How to Abduct a Highland Lord?

Bookishly Yours,

Stasi🍎

STATISTICS: How to Abduct a Highland Lord, Karen Hawkins, 4.5-stars, 2 days, Paperback, 313 pages, published in 2007, traditionally published