Beatrice Halliday has been working hard at the Princess and The Pea Inn loved up with landlord Atholl and enjoying planning events for the locals. But at Christmas, there’s a kick – as she realizes she’s expecting.

Despite being fearful of the future, Beatrice is graced with a distraction: the prospects of helping a romance flourish when a married couple spends their first child-free holiday at the Inn – and it becomes clear they need some help rediscovering each other. In true Beatrice fashion, she can’t help meddling.

Featuring the story of first love, a new family, a marriage in crisis, and an octogenarian love affair, you’ll fall head over heels for this heart-warming rom-com.

 

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

Sometimes tourists stopped them in the street when they were on days out in Fort William or Inverness, wanting a selfie with a true redheaded Scotsman of the clan warrior type. She’d come to think of it as the Outlander effect.

 

Years ago, she would joke with her girlfriends – thank goodness for girlfriends – about the need for regular marriage maintenance sex. Maintenance sex was a bit like sending your car for a service to keep it roadworthy… If Ruth’s sex life was a car, its road tax had well and truly expired and it was up on bricks in the driveway.

 

My Review:

 

This was a fun and satisfying women’s fiction read with clever wry humor and interesting twists on several familiar tropes with something to appeal to just about everyone. The book started with a dumped broken-hearted traveler hoping to save her career in the back of beyond who wasn’t all that sympathetic on arrival as she was aloof, self-serving, and acted like a snob, but she grew on me. I also enjoyed the empty nest couple with the exasperated menopausal wife hoping she could reconnect with her workaholic husband on their holiday. However, the majority of the storylines belonged to the loved-up innkeepers – an anxious older mother-to-be and her ever attentive and lovable Scottish weaver, the perfect BBF with a delicious burr in his voice. Rounding out the cast was a small village full of gentle and unique characters and family members.   The storylines were engaging, the characters were endearing, and the writing was insightful, amusing, and easy to fall into. Sigh, I need more Scotsmen in my life.