Portrait of a Scotsman (A League of Extraordinary Women #3)

Rating: 3 1/2 ♥’s
Published: September 7, 2021
Genre: Romance/Historical Fiction
Pages: 448

Book Description: London banking heiress Hattie Greenfield wanted “just” three things in life:
1. Acclaim as an artist.
2. A noble cause.
3. Marriage to a young lord who puts the gentle in gentleman.
Why then does this Oxford scholar find herself at the altar with the darkly attractive financier Lucian Blackstone, whose murky past and ruthless business practices strike fear in the hearts of Britain’s peerage? Trust Hattie to take an invigorating little adventure too far. Now she’s stuck with a churlish Scot who just might be the end of her ambitions….
When the daughter of his business rival all but falls into his lap, Lucian sees opportunity. As a self-made man, he has vast wealth but holds little power, and Hattie might be the key to finally setting long-harbored political plans in motion. Driven by an old revenge, he has no room for his new wife’s apprehensions or romantic notions, bewitching as he finds her.
But a sudden journey to Scotland paints everything in a different light. Hattie slowly sees the real Lucian and realizes she could win everything—as long as she is prepared to lose her heart.

This was my book of the month pick and I was super excited when it was an option. I have enjoyed the first two books in this series and wanted to read the next one. I really like the cover it is fun and gives you a slight hint of what is to come in the story.

Overall I enjoyed this book. I really liked that Hattie gets really involved in what Lucian is doing with the mine. She learns what is so important to him about it and she finds ways that she can help the miners as well in her own way. So much so that she learns to do photography and even goes on to teach others how to do it. Of course, there is a scandal about how they get together, but really who could blame her? It is nice we still see some of the girls from the other books, but they don’t play as big of a role and neither does the suffragist movement. Instead, it mainly focuses on Hattie and Lucian, and even more so on Hattie wanting to be her own woman and getting to do things how she wants.

I think the characters are well-written. Obviously, Hattie has the ideals of what women back then had, but she also has always had her own thoughts. She would even sneak away on her own and was going to Oxford and becoming a different woman than society usually expected them to be back then. Lucian was well written as a brooding Scotsman who has some troubles of his past, and of course, he doesn’t talk about them and keeps them bottled up so they end up boiling over in the end. I thought they had good chemistry and their banter was fairly good, they challenged each other. The supporting characters weren’t huge parts of the story, but they did play some into it and it worked well.

The plot was good. I am glad that some things weren’t dragged out like when she leaves him at the end and he comes to her right away. Also, when the bad guy writes the letter and has her sign it and she is worried Lucian will think she left him, I thought it was sweet that he had already learned enough about her to know that she wouldn’t have written the letter that way. The story flowed nicely. I do wish there had been some more closure of Hattie with the miners, we see it slightly but it felt abrupt of her to not talk with the people she had befriended before she left. I do wish that there was some resolution to where Hattie let her friends know that she actually liked Lucian instead of leaving them thinking she didn’t and he wasn’t a good guy. However, that said I enjoyed reading it and love the romance aspect thrown in with the historical aspect of what was going on during these times.

I can’t wait till the fourth one comes out so I can see who we will get a love story for next.

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