Back to the highlands! — what Emily is up to

Just started this one! Here's the very beginning. Tentative title: Emily Tilton's New Highlander Book. Heh.

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The problem, thought Lady Alice Lourcy, daughter of the Earl of Mercester, betrothed to wed the Lord of Lormoran, is not that Lord Sperry is a loathsome man. 

Roderick Sperry, Lord of Lormoran certainly was a loathsome man. Alice had begun to understand, however, that His Lordship's loathsomeness did not in fact represent the most important impediment to her happiness. 

The problem, she thought, is that he is adept at concealing it. 

None of the stories Alice had heard — of seduction and even rape, of murder, of pillage on a grand scale — came with the slightest proof. Indeed, Alice herself might not have credited them had she not seen the charming Lord Sperry at his exercise late one night in the park of her father's castle at Mowton, her childhood home. 

Now, as she rode North to the Scottish borderlands, to be wed to him despite all her protestations, she shuddered as she remembered the sight of him crouched over a scullery maid, whom he had bent across a marble bench. She could only make out indistinctly what he did, but it seemed so violent, with his hips pounding into the girl's little bottom, that Alice had almost screamed, but something about the way the maid cried out, as if her seducer's motions were not entirely unwelcome, made Alice hold her tongue.