Review: The Playboy Peer (Unexpected Lords #2) by Scarlett Scott

Print Length:  344 pages

Publisher: Happily Ever After Books, LLC (March 17, 2022)

From Goodreads.com: Lady Isolde Collingwood’s future was happily secured until the man she intended to marry threw her over for another woman. Heartbroken and betrayed, she has every intention of running wild across London and setting polite society on its ear. But when she becomes embroiled in a scandal with a wicked earl, there’s only one way to solve her latest dilemma if she wants to protect her sisters: marriage.

As an unnecessary third son, Zachary Barlowe thoroughly enjoyed living his life on his own terms, amassing a fortune, traveling the world, and doing whatever he bloody well pleased. Although the untimely deaths of his brothers left him the new Earl of Anglesey, he is determined to allow the line to die with him. After he unintentionally ruins the innocent Lady Isolde, however, he has no choice but to make her his wife.

A dazzling rake like Anglesey is the last man Izzy would have chosen to wed. Still, as he offers her a bargain she can’t refuse, she finds herself torn between old desires and new. And the more time Zachary spends aiding his unexpected wife in her quest for revenge, the more he realizes he wants her for himself. Not just for one night, but for forever.

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My Rating: 1 star out of 5

If there is one thing that I have come to know about this author is that I can always count on her books to be full of entirely more sex scenes than are needed (I'll get to that more in a bit), parts that needed to be fleshed out way more than they were, and characters who are flat and think themselves in love when it is clearly just lust. But on the plus side, they are easy reads that I can typically finish in about a day and a half. 

Now let's talk specifically about this novel. 

Izzy and Zachary should have been an interesting couple, and perhaps could have been if there had actually been a plotline of him trying to aid her in getting revenge against her former betrothed (or even just working together to make the man jealous).  Instead they went from strangers who had been caught in a compromising position (made worse by the fact that Zachary took her back to HIS home after she had passed out instead of returning her to her sister's house) to strangers who lusted after one another in the blink of an eye. The fact that despite having been a confirmed "rakehell" for much of his adult life, Zachary immediately embraced the prospect of marriage especially to Izzy with a fervor that made absolutely no sense. I would have expected to see him be at least a little bitter that her actions had trapped him into a marriage he didn't want. 

Now there were a couple of side plots that had they been done correctly, would have made this story much more interesting than it was. The first being the Dowager Countess of Anglesey. We are told that she was originally involved with Zachary before throwing him over for his eldest brother. We can see that she is unhappy at the prospect of Izzy replacing her as the mistress of the estates. She does in fact, cause tension between the pair later on, but I would have loved to have seen little things happening here and there leading up to what Izzy later sees. Perhaps under the guise of "friendship" the Dowager could have spent time with Izzy, planting little seeds of doubt in her head over the truth of her former relationship with Zachary. 

The second plot point I would have liked to have seen fleshed out more is two-fold. To begin with, when Zachary returns home to his family's country estate for the first time in years and finds it in such a state of disrepair did he not immediately question his brother's widow? Or more importantly his steward? Why didn't he go over the estate books then knowing that there was more than enough money to have kept up with repairs? It isn't until Izzy is injured that it even seems to dawn on Zachary that something just doesn't add up, causing him to figure out the truth. 

And now we get to the third and final issue that I had not only with this book, but with all of this authors books. There is entirely too many scene of a sexual nature that do absolutely nothing to move the plot forward. Time when the characters could actually be getting to know one another, creating a bond that feels like it could be a romantic attachment, they are instead chasing carnal pleasures. All of those plot points I mentioned above that could have given this story the depth it was lacking? Lost to pages upon pages of explicit sexual details. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a prude by any means, in fact I have read some very well done books that contain a lot of smut, but those books are done right aka there is a balance between the sex, and the plot. Something that this book was extremely lacking.