The back cover blurb for The Black Sheep and the Princess advertised a wonderful tale of two old flames reconnecting and engaging in some nice hot sex to boot. Some may consider the sex to be hot, but other than that, Kauffman’s newest was a major clinker. I found the whole plot and characters so dull that no amount of well written sex scenes could make this book interesting.

It has been 18 years since Donovan Macleod returned to Winnimocca, New York. His father was a drunken handyman at a summer camp for rich teenagers owned by Mrs. Louisa Graham. Donovan, along with his two other friends, Rafe and Finn, were nicknamed The Unholy Trinity because they were outcasts and pranksters. Donovan, or “Mac” as his friends call him, had a huge crush on Kate Sutherland, the owner’s daughter. Mac always thought Kate was a spoiled rich girl and whenever she visited the camp, he would pretend she didn’t exist, but Mac has never forgotten her. After his father’s death, he moved to Manhattan, worked for the police force for a few years and then with his two buddies from the camp, opened their own security business called Trinity Inc. Mac reads a newspaper article about Louisa’s death which includes the information that Kate has given up her mother’s fortune to her stepbrother in exchange for the camp. Someone doesn’t want Kate around and begins vandalizing the property, causing Mac to drop everything, visit Kate and offer his protection and investigative skills.

Kate gave up everything to become the new owner of the camp, which will no longer be for the privileged, but rather for children with disabilities. With only her dog Bagel as company, she works to open the camp, despite her stepbrother’s interference, the constant vandalism and the townspeople’s disapproval. The arrival of her blast from the past, in the form of Donovan, on whom she also coincidentally had a crush as a teen, surprises her, but Mac won’t take no for an answer and decides to stay on the campgrounds to figure out why someone is dead set against the camp opening.

Kate and Mac’s sexual tension for each other soon explodes and they no longer can keep their hands off each other. They mainly spend their days making love in the shower. Both open up to each other about their pasts, which include Mac’s issues with his alcoholic father and Kate trying to succeed in a world without the comfort of her name and money. They also decide to live in the moment because Kate knows that as soon as Mac catches the person responsible for the damages, he will go back to his own life. Kate can’t help but fall in love with Mac but doesn’t know how to keep him in her arms. She still believes he thinks of her as that rich girl who was always too good for him.

Other than Kate and Mac enjoying non-stop sex, walking her dog Bagel, and putting up with an annoying intruder who likes to cause fires and paint obscene words on empty cabins, there is not much else to this book. There is no nail biting action and even when the mystery is solved, it is all so very sudden that I had to reread it to make sure who the culprit was. I wish I could at least recommend some nice secondary characters, but they too were underwritten and simply took up space.

If there had been more chemistry between Mac and Kate, rather than them simply looking into each other’s eyes and then attacking each other out of the blue, maybe there would be something more to recommend. I quickly lost interest in the two lovers, and if these two hadn’t stuck together, it wouldn’t have bothered me. I didn’t find it believable that these two had crushes for each other as teens and continued to harbor those feelings for nearly two decades.

The Black Sheep and the Princess is the first book in Donna Kauffman’s new series featuring the bad boys of Trinity Inc., with Rafe and Finn’s books to follow. Unfortunately, other than the catchy title, there was nothing else that would make me want to consider reading the upcoming books.