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romantic."
    "Yes it is. Very. And you'll know how lovely it is too, Master Skeptic, when you have a family of your own to come home to."
    "I was hoping you and my father would give up trying to get me shackled by now."
    "Certainly not," she replied smugly.
    No, he thought, that had been wishful thinking. His father's efforts to find him a wife had never been subtle, and now that he was in the throes of hapless love himself, there was no end to True Deverell's determined chipping away at his eldest son's peaceful, contented bachelor existence.
    "You have a rather somber expression on your face suddenly," said Olivia.
    "I was thinking of my mother. This time of year always brings the memory closer."
    "Of course." She plucked a dandelion seed off his sleeve and watched it float away in the wind. "The snowdrops were beautiful on her grave this year."
    "Yes. I'm glad I planted them there. She always loved the first signs of spring."
    Storm had spent much of his youth looking after his mother, and it didn't end with her death. When he was ten, standing by her grave, worrying that she might be cold that night, he'd decided to plant snowdrops there, knowing they would bloom into a soft white fleece to cover her. Each year since then he'd planted a few more. Twenty years later his mother's grave had a blanket of flowers every spring.
    "She would be very proud of you," Olivia said softly. "To see all that you've achieved."
    He lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug.
    "Since you took the farm over and expanded your holdings you've turned an excellent profit every year."
    But he wasn't always the good boy of the family. Storm used to raise his fists to any man who looked at him the wrong way, and he'd had to work hard to get his rage under control. Olivia knew none of that and she refused to listen to gossip. To her he had always been the cheerful, easy-going fellow, the calm one in the family.
    "To ignore your success is very un-Deverell like," she added.
    He sighed. "There's a lot about me that's un-Deverell like."
    Ransom— the half-brother next to him in age, but still six years younger— had once said, "You're too soft-hearted to be one of us. I daresay it will come to light one day that your father was the boar-walker. Even you must admit it's a very strange coincidence that big-bosomed Louisa, the gamekeeper's daughter, didn't hold True Deverell accountable for siring her bastard until she saw that he'd made a tidy fortune in the years since he tupped her on a haystack. She didn't crawl out of the woodwork to make trouble until he had married our mother, Lady Charlotte."
    Ah yes, Ransom was just as protective of his mother, and he didn't believe in sugaring his words either.
    But Storm never had any doubts about his parentage.
    When he was a baby, his mother married a blacksmith for a roof over their heads. The man resented providing for a child that was not his and took no pains to hide his dislike for "the little bastard." Fortunately he drank himself into the grave within a few years. There were no tears shed at his funeral.
    Then, when Storm was five, True Deverell came to find them, having just discovered the existence of a son. Their lives changed from that moment and very much for the better. His father paid for Storm's schooling and rented a house for them in Truro.
    As a boy, when he wanted to know why his parents weren't married, it was quietly and carefully explained that his father had another wife. But as he grew older Storm understood that even if Lady Charlotte did not exist, his father would never have married his mother. Theirs had been a brief tumble when True was not much more than a boy himself, and Louisa an experienced, eager young woman. It was a playful summer tryst, a single fateful coupling in their past, and since then their lives had gone in different directions. Their moment in time had passed. At least it had in the minds of everyone except Louisa, who, until the day she died, still clung to