This was hard to rate or like three of the main characters which makes for a slow read. Supposedly a father and son who truly honor and love one another find themselves estranged because DAD takes the 19 year old fiancee from his son after seeing her within 3 days. Well that tells you what type of romance this will be with the son bringing a false fiancee home since being away for 4 years and falling in love with her in 6 days. Of course the now step mother makes a play for the son, the father is portrayed as guilt ridden but wants to mend fences with son and I can't understand why he would want to go home for a supposed house party in the first place. ( )

The Gold Scent Bottle by Dorothy Mack is a newer Regency romance, having been published in 2000. I don't know if I've read any other books by this author, though she has over a dozen listed in LT. I don't read too many romances anymore, just the ones I occasionally swipe from my mom. I tend to find most of the newer ones not to my taste.

The title refers to the prize that the hero uses to coerce the heroine into feigning a betrothal during a visit to his ancestral estate. Modern writers often rely on such plot devices to bring strangers together into otherwise impossible intimacy, given the social strictures of the era, which tends to give all of these stories an aura of artificiality that cannot quite provide charm to the historical setting. So these stories are less about courtship and more about crisis and damage control--very much hewing to modern romantic conventions.

Anyway, Max Waring, Viscount Edgeworth, is newly returned from the Napoleonic wars and must now confront Felicity, the love of his life who traded up from the heir to the Earl, marrying Max's father to become Lady Dalmore. Distracted by his emotional distress, he beats Roland Monroe at cards, and the youth pledges his sister's gold keepsake from their dead mother as security for his gambling debt. Abigail finds out and tries to get the bottle back--thus the two meet, move on to coercion, rags to riches makeover, and finally the visit home to face his father and "mother-in-law" during a summer house party.

The story is predictable without any real twists. All of the secondary characters exist for the purpose of the hero and heroine showing their virtues, although Felicity has the additional responsibility of driving the plot forward at key moments. And Max and Abigail are both wonderfully attractive, honest, smart, caring, kind, observant, reflective, yadda, yadda. No flaws beyond moments of smartassery for both of them, though Abigail is consistently described as wasp-tongued, asp-tongued, sharp-tongued when Max gets a rise out of her. You get the picture--a female who doesn't take guff from a man, apparently not quite an attractive trait, but he loves her anyway. The secondary characters are all nice too, in a superficial, one-dimensional sort of way. The only not-nice person is Felicity in that stereotypical drop-dead-gorgeous-beauty-only-skin-deep sort of poisonous personality dripping with charm that leaves an inexplicable burn if you're a woman and all-too-predictable burn if you're a (straight) man.

I thought that the author was going to give full rein to the villainess when she assigned Abigail to a lonely room in a remote wing from everyone else and later gave her directions to help her find her way. I thought for sure a male accomplice might try to compromise Abigail, or the directions were intended to lose her in that big old country home. Nope. Apparently just an excuse for Abigail to receive extra attention and care from the servants.

The story is somewhat unusual by including some of the servants as characters with dialogue detailing dynamics among the working members of the household, not just the family and guests. And this story has more attention to historical details and setting than many modern Regency romances. The dialogue and exposition were straightforward, neither sparkling nor dragging. The story is told in third person from both Max and Abigail's perspectives, though with one interlude from Felicity's perspective, which served no important purpose, as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, The Gold Scent Bottle was a middle-of-the-road story, eminently forgettable but at least without the melodramatic excess of the books by Amanda Quick that I've tried. Not bad, not disappointing, but not a keeper, either. ( )