HaBO: Heroine is Actually an Angel?

You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!

This HaBO request comes from Leah, who is on a quest to find this book during quarantine:

One of the earliest and most vivid romance novels I read, which I’m pretty sure I “borrowed” from my babysitter, has a truly outlandish plot, but my COVID-19 quest is to find it, and, if I am really lucky, track down the other books in what I’m pretty sure was a trilogy and I never read. We’ve all got the time, right?

The book is set on the colonial South Carolina frontier. The hero is a doctor and a widower, I think may have fled from Scotland after the Culloden massacre, and possibly is brother or half-brother with the local Native Americans (more on the brothers and Native Americans in a bit).

The heroine is the really crazy part. She’s an aristocratic young miss who, if I recall, witnesses some sort of crime by a high lord, is killed and then sort of plops into the doctor’s world, basically in his frontier cabin. She’s some sort of angel (her quest becomes to find this lord on his tour of the colonies and accuse him of whatever crime she witnessed) and everyone, including the hero, thinks she might just be someone who isn’t well.

Other things I remember: at some point they travel to a Native American encampment (where he may have some family or friendly ties) and have sex for the first time. Then they visit his other brothers/half-brothers; with one brother, they help deliver his wife’s baby (the heroine looks into the laboring woman’s eyes to help her through a difficult delivery, and afterwards the woman who gave birth believes the heroine when she says she’s basically some sort of angel). The other brother and his wife may live in Charleston? They have sex in a bathtub of some sort near the end of the book. The hero is a widower but while everyone adored his first wife, he didn’t and he feels guilty. The hero’s name may be Gabe or Gabriel?

There’s soooo much plot but I would LOVE to find this book and reread it…and figure out if it was indeed a part of a trilogy (featuring the other two brothers) and track those down and finally read them too. My guess is this was written in the 1980s or early 1990s, as I was probably in middle school/early high school when I read it, and that would have been between 1993–1996. The title may have had some version of the word “heaven” or “heavenly” in the title, but again, that is the most vague of memories.

All right, if anyone can help find this, you are my angel forever (even more so than the heroine of this truly bonkers book!)

Wow, okay.