the highlander's touch by karen marie moning

With a mischievous dark elf around, how can he expect her to find the garderobe, much less use it?

Before there was the Fever series, there was the Highlander’s. A fun, light read, The Highlander’s Touch is part of a time travel romance series by Karen Marie Moning. In this book, fiercely independent but down-on-her-luck Lisa got caught up by a curse placed on a magical flask. Having fallen into 14th-century Scotland, in the castle of a forbidding warrior, she must learn to trust her captor as well as navigate a highly feudal and tumultuous time, while trying to figure out the finer points of using a chamber pot.

In tone, and, definitely, in emphasis, this one is very different from the darkness and violence of the urban fantasy that was my introduction to Moning. Though it does contain the same Celtic, Irish, and British mythological references that I encountered in Fever, minus much of the peril.

Because I had really liked Fever, I figured that her Highlander books wouldn’t be bad. Well, this book doesn’t have the tight pacing of Fever, but it’s got humor, and a bed scene that didn’t offend my sensibilities that much, not because it wasn’t explicit (It was! It was! ), but because the events leading up to that moment were carefully orchestrated so that when it did happen I didn’t feel that the heroine gave in out of the publisher’s demand for smut but as a natural choice influenced by events and emotions in the book.