LOVE ME FOREVER

After 30 enormously successful paperbacks, Lindsey debuts in hardcover with a typical historical romance: love in 19th-century England between a feisty, intelligent heroine and a devastatingly brawny Highlander. Heiress Kimberly Richards and Scotsman Lachlan MacGregor both have reasons for needing marriage. Kimberly's widowed father, a nasty man who never loved her, wants to remarry, but his intended won't tie the knot until Kimberly is a bride. Green-eyed Lachlan, six feet sevenand with ``legs like tree stumps''is laird of the MacGregor clan, a penniless bunch ever since Lachlan's stepmother ran off after the death of his father, stealing the family's gold and jewels. Though Lachlan is smitten with bonny Megan, an Englishwoman he met once and kidnapped (before her husband took her back and beat Lachlan soundly), he's forced to bite the bullet and travel south to England to the home of the Duke and Duchess of Wrothston, where an aunt has promised to get him a rich wife. Kimberly, too, has come to the Wrothstons to make a match. The duchess, coincidentally that self-same bonny Megan, gives the pair adjoining bedrooms, hoping to help nature along. But Kimberly, a good match for Lachlan because she's tall for a girl and has a talent for investing money profitably, fears that he will never stop loving Megan. In the usual rituals of historical romance, she fights him tooth and nail, but she can't fight the passion he awakens within.... Before the happy Highland endingreplete with baby and the discovery of Kimberly's real ``da''the lovers help each other fight some not particularly clever battles (someone frames Lachlan for horse stealing; Kimberly faces off against her abusive guardian), and there's a haggis-load of Scottish brogue to get through, as well as some sensual set-pieces that don't measure up to the author's best. Predictable Lindsey, though not as much fun as some of its Fabio-covered forebears. (First printing of 300,000; author tour)