Scottish Dreams Books in Order

The Scottish Dreams trilogy begins the longer Pennington family saga. Set across Scotland, England, and pre-Revolutionary America, the books follow three brothers whose lives are still shadowed by Emma, a mysterious woman whose death at Baronsford Castle threatens to divide the family.

Each novel gives one Pennington brother a romance of his own, but the old mystery and the family's difficult history keep the trilogy connected. The result is historical romance with a strong through line of grief, loyalty, and secrets that have stayed buried for too long.

The past has not finished with the Penningtons.

Borrowed Dreams starts with Millicent Wentworth, a woman determined to repair the harm caused by her dead husband. She needs to save her estate and free the people he enslaved, and her best option is a marriage of convenience with Lyon Pennington, the widowed Earl of Aytoun. Lyon is known for his reserve and carries wounds of his own. What begins as a practical bargain slowly becomes a relationship neither expected to want.

In Captured Dreams, Lyon's younger brother Pierce Pennington becomes involved with Portia Edwards. Portia is searching for the family she has never known, while Pierce is a merchant with a secret role in the Sons of Liberty. The action moves through Boston and Scotland, placing their personal search for belonging against the wider tensions building before the American Revolution.

Dreams of Destiny brings the trilogy's central mystery into clearer view. David Pennington, the youngest brother, and Gwyneth Douglas are drawn into solving the truth behind Emma's murder. Their romance has to survive the consequences of revelations that touch the whole family, not just the two of them.

The series has plenty of classic historical-romance elements: wounded heroes, marriages made for practical reasons, families with long memories, and characters forced to choose between what is safe and what is right. It also gives the heroines real agency. Millicent takes on an unjust system, Portia searches for her own roots, and Gwyneth refuses to leave the hardest questions unanswered.

Start with Borrowed Dreams. It introduces Lyon and Millicent, Baronsford, and the emotional history that carries through the remaining books. Reading in order matters more here than in some of the McGoldrick series because the mystery of Emma's death develops across all three novels.

Readers who want more Penningtons can continue into the later Regency-set Pennington Family books. Those novels follow the next generation, but the foundations, and many of the old family stories, begin here in Scottish Dreams.