Following Once a Mistress and Ever a Princess, Always a Lady is the final installment in a trilogy featuring the multitude of mistresses and illegitimate get of the Marquess of Templeston. These ladies will be recognized only by a locket they wear (a gift from the apparently randy old gent), and their striking resemblance to his dearly beloved late wife.

Now, you won’t have to have read the two previous installments to follow this one. Why not? Because the entire first third of this book, and much of the last half, retells the Marquess of Templeston’s story, the story of his son, his grandson, the heroine’s parents, her life in the convent, her mother’s murder, her mother’s friend, the lawyers who prepared the paperwork, Kit’s real mother and his other mother, the father who is really his half-brother, the pony he rode as a boy, and some other stuff I pretty much yawned through. I don’t think I have ever been so bored in my entire life. Not only that, the relationships and events and players were all so confusing, I was ready to pull out a sheet of paper and construct diagram boxes and relationship arrows just so I wouldn’t get lost. The 2002 Income Tax instructions aren’t this complicated.

Always a Lady begins with a brief prologue during which time orphaned 6 year-old Mariah Shaughnessy and 8 year-old Kit Ramsey meet one night in the abandoned tower of a castle in Ireland. During their ten minute conversation, Kit promises some day to return and marry Mariah. He means it; she believes him.

Fourteen years pass. Mariah has lived those years in a nearby convent, but now, on the eve of her majority, she must either take the vows, or leave the convent. Since Mariah has no wish to become a nun, she begins to get worried. A local squire has offered for her, sight unseen, and the Mother Superior has accepted his suit, but Mariah will have none of it. Fortunately for her, Kit Ramsey will soon ride the rescue. Through an improbable and complicated series of relationships and events too lengthy to even begin to describe here, Kit is returning to Inismorn as Lord, and, by bizarre coincidence, Mariah is his ward.

Neither Kit nor Mariah recognizes the other at first, not until somebody calls Kit by his nickname. So, she knows who he is, but he doesn’t know who she is. Mariah has become a master baker at the convent and now must become a lady worthy of presentation to the Queen. With a fortune of her own that simply awaits Mariah’s 21^st birthday, and instructions from her late mother that Mariah have a Season in London, Kit sets about to comply but quickly realizes she is the little girl in the tower, voids the squire’s offer, and vows to marry her himself.

Okay, I’m not going to try to explain any more than that. The rest of the story is taken up with a brief set of lessons to ready Mariah for her come out, information about how and why Mariah’s mother may have been murdered, information from the local priest as to Kit’s true birth and identity, letters and wills and confessions and on and on and on until I just couldn’t take it anymore. Everybody tells everybody everything about every character in detail, three times over. It’s boring . . . boring I tell you!

I did not buy the premise that a 6 year-old and an 8 year-old would meet, speak, separate for fourteen years, meet again and simply be in love. They know not a thing about each other, and the story does little to show the reader any kind of evolution in their relationship. Mariah was raised in a convent in a very strict manner. She is a devout Catholic who confesses basically every fifteen minutes. She has never seen a man other than the priest and a few of the local merchants, yet she straddles Kit on a swing after knowing him only a couple of days and allows him certain highly personal intimacies. Mariah is apparently a very bad Catholic for she is not wracked by guilt, nor does she even give this incident a second thought. Nor does she bring it up in confession (as she has with every other inane transgression she thinks she’s made).

The story shifts back and forth between Kit and his friends in Ireland, to Kit’s parents (Once a Mistress) in London, to lengthy conversations about birthright and true parentage and who did what to whom, over and over again. Mariah was supposed to be charming, but I didn’t find her so in the least. I don’t know what Kit was supposed to be; I didn’t get into him at all. One of Kit’s friends is in love with Kit’s sister, but that never goes anywhere. The villain pops out from behind the scenery (so to speak) with the dumbest idea for getting Mariah’s fortune you can think of. Considering the trail of bodies this guy left in his wake, the authorities were either slow-witted or totally blind. I don’t see at all how he got away with anything. The changes in POVs in the story are abrupt and confusing, occurring in alternate sentences and paragraphs until I didn’t know who was thinking what.

One of the biggest problems I had (besides all the epistolary and verbal exposition that went on forever) was Mariah’s terrible background. She finally remembers what happened, yet gives no more than a passing thought to it before shrugging it off and moving on. Considering what happened to her, this was totally unrealistic.

There’s some truly stereotypical dialogue and text as well. “He began to move his hips in a rhythm as old as time.” I’d say that particular line is as old as time, and pretty worn out after twenty-five years of constant use. Then, in reference to sex, Mariah thinks, “He was the teacher and she, the student. He was the baker and she was the pastry dough.” The pastry dough!? When Kit presses his lips to Mariah’s nipple, she thinks, “Fire, like the fire of a glass of brandy on an empty stomach, shot through her, only this fire was a thousand times better than anything alcohol induced.” It was the empty stomach part that jarred me out of this lengthy metaphor.

So, why didn’t I give this book an F? Because there might be something here for those of you who read the two previous books in the trilogy. I didn’t read them, so I simply don’t know, but after Always a Lady, I’m sure not inclined to find out.