This review was written by Phyllis L. This story was nominated in the Best Romance Novella category.

The summary:      

The shattered soul of an angry spirit imprisoned in a Scottish manor house could be a young widow's only salvation.

And here is Phyllis' review:

All that's left at Brianna's husband's death are massive debts and his ancestral home in Scotland, full of china, artwork, the trappings of wealth and privilege,

and a ghost.

A mean, angry ghost of her late husband's ancestor who wants her OUT of the cabin she hopes to stay in while she has the mansion fixed up and turned into an inn.

Brianna was capable and stubborn and hiding the pain she still felt over her husband's betrayals (besides never really settling down and running up huge debts, he had a pregnant girlfriend). Jamie, the ghost, was mostly irrational. I mean, his anger at his wife was rational back in the 1600's, but 600 years later after making everyone miserable, he was finally getting over it. I guess ghosts don't change? Though the whole point of the story is that he does. They cuddle, they make out, they do the Horizontal Highland Fling. Not bad for a spirit dude who was just terrorizing the staff and breaking stuff a couple of days before.

I could have used more information throughout the story about the H&H's pasts and the betrayals that happened. When they got to working it out, it came down to infodump, then they were both healed by their personal talk therapy and love (and lovemaking).

Spoiler: I thought the heroine should have reacted more strongly that Jamie was fading away and leaving her, but liked the resolution where he came back in the person of the guy who was going to remodel the mansion.

I'm a sucker for a ghost story (and a Christmas story, so someone needs to get busy on that particular mashup), so I might have liked this more than a truly objective reader would have. But really, who's totally objective? In my mind, it's tied for first in the Rita race with Linda Winstead Jones' story (I've read all but one of the novella nominees. Waiting for the last one from the library…). I give it an A-.

P.S. Just my opinion here – I do have a lot of opinions – instead of the JD Robb story in this anthology that was nominated for the Rita, I would have picked the Patricia Gaffney one about the young woman with the psychic hotline.

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