This book wins the award for the longest I have ever attempted to avoid having to read a review book. For roughly half a year I have been trying to put off forcing myself to finish reading To Marry a Scottish Laird. There was just nothing about it that called out to me to read it.

Campbell Sinclair is travelling home when he sees a young man being attacked on the road and decides to jump in and rescue him. Joan is trying to deliver a scroll to another clan and thinks travelling as a boy will keep her safe. Of course, it doesn’t take long for Campbell to realize she’s a lady and start trying to get in her pants (literally).

Firstly, I had to roll my eyes at the leads’ first encounter. Joan is wearing pants when Campbell comes upon her being beaten. So he, of course, thinks she’s a man. I actually like gender-bender stories and the misunderstandings that can occur, but I would like some justification for the gender assumption besides wearing pants. Come on, can we try slightly harder?

These two characters have as much chemistry as two loaves of bread. What passes for sexual tension in Marry is random thoughts of what a nice butt Campbell has or how tempted he is by Joan. They meet on the road in the midst of a fight that severely injures Campbell, but still all Joan can notice is that she likes the shape of his rear. This was the first time I rolled my eyes and put the book down, thinking life was too short to read drivel.

Sadly, when I (finally) went back to reading, I never really found anything that made me like the book. I didn’t care a whit for either character and couldn’t have cared less what happened to them. For a book with so much sex, it shouldn’t have been so dull.

Speaking of the sex, there’s very little build up or thought to the sex scenes. The pair barely knows each other before they’re going at it with zero regard to the consequences. Campbell has declared to never get another woman pregnant because his wife died in childbirth. Apparently, someone needs to have “the talk” with Campbell because he seems to not understand how babies are made. He sure doesn’t seem to understand how to avoid getting Joan pregnant.

I have to assume that Sands was trying to stretch an inadequate story idea into 300 plus pages, because there is a lot of filler. Passages start to get extremely repetitive and I found myself skimming whole paragraphs, hoping to just get a move on.

This was my first time reading anything by Sands and I think it might be my last. I know she has been in the game a long time but this was a really dismal example of her writing, and one that doesn’t remotely encourage me to try anything else by her. I like surprise babies, I like forced marriages, and I like gender-benders. So for a book to have all three of those and still make me practically fall asleep every time I started reading is a really horrible sign. Save yourself the time and just don’t bother with this one.