A refreshing reading experience. Medievals have gone out of fashion, and it's hard to find good ones anymore, but the HQN Historical line is a good place to start.

This is exactly what it says on the tin: Gui agrees to retrieve his friend (and lord) Gilbert's bride-to-be from the priory where she has sheltered during the conquest in exchange for a parcel of land and a place to build a home. He assumes Gilbert's identity for the journey, because the prioress will be expecting Gilbert to show up and won't hand Lady Emma's valuable daughter off to just anyone.

Before he arrives, he decides to take a dip in a local river, and he runs into Aelfhild there. She's escaped from the priory to visit the sick in the local village, and has decided to fish for her dinner, something to supplement the meager meal she'll receive at the priory. Gui doesn't mean to startle her, but he does, and she lashes out with her fishing hook, leaving him with a nasty scratch. Their encounter is brief and awkward but piques their collective curiosity. Aelfhild returns to the priory before she's missed, and she's shocked when Gui shows up there, looking for his 'bride' - her mistress, Sigrun.

Aelfhild assumes Sigrun's identity because she's curious about the foreigner and because Sigrun is terrified of marrying anyone, much less a hulking man with a disfigured face. They decide to escape, but they don't get far before Gui finds them, and they all decide that rather than return to the priory, they will head back to Yorkshire as originally planned.

Along the way, Aelfhild and Gui fight their mutual attraction valiantly, each under the erroneous belief that the other is out of their reach. They are attacked by a band of vagrants and have to work together to escape with their lives, which tips the balance of their feelings for each other.

The characters' UST is off the charts, and it is good. There are a couple of packed emotional scenes that are absolutely exquisite in their detail, and the final battle was riveting. The road trip was otherwise a bit on the 'meh' side, and considering it only lasted a couple of days, it was a little hard to believe that the main characters' lust for each other had deepened into love (especially since they did not consummate their lustful urgings at any point, though they came close). There were also just a few too many tropes competing for attention on the page: beauty and the beast, double mistaken identity, forbidden fruit, forced proximity, road trip, big misunderstanding...I think if the author had chosen one or two and really honed in on those, it would have deepened the conflict and characterization.

This author can definitely write, and I'm willing to try her other work. Though I respect her for taking the fade-to-black route, it did make the story feel a bit unbalanced, as did the fact that the Big Reveal of Identities didn't happen until the last chapter. It would've been nice to see something at stake on the table, and maybe even a bit of fallout. Instead we have a happy marriage proposal after buckets of angst and self-denial. A bit too pat of an ending, especially given the setting of desolation and destruction. As for Gilbert and Sigrun, they of course made a happy pairing, too, which made the whole double-deception business completely worthless. ( )