Tide and Sea Lavender

Sukey Dove refuses to marry for the good of the family. Falling for an unsuitable Frenchman was never part of her plan.

After watching her brothers and sisters marry, Sukey has had quite enough of other people deciding what love ought to cost. When her mother announces a spring visit from the grave, kind, eminently eligible heir to the Manor, her answer is firm.

"I shan't."

Then she goes out on the marsh at dawn-and discovers a stranger nailing a painted tide-pole to her brother's slip.

Théodore Lanoë has come from Cherbourg to measure the Solent's tides. He is clever, poor, Catholic, and thoroughly inconvenient. He also carries a grief he cannot put aside: his brother died at Trafalgar, and the English sea has never looked innocent to him since.

Sukey has questions. Théodore has precise answers. Neither expects to find so many reasons to continue the conversation.

But his father's dealings with a Guernsey lace house connect him to the scandal that nearly ruined her family. Affection is one thing. Trust will be considerably more difficult.

Then a young widow arrives from Guernsey with a little girl-and asks for the mother of a dead man.

Kit Dove drowned in 1811. Now Marianne has come looking for his family, bringing questions that threaten to overturn everything they thought they knew.

Only Sukey will ask what everyone else is afraid to hear. Only Théodore can read the French register that may hold the truth.

For once, Sukey knows exactly where she wishes to give her heart. But before she can claim her own future, she must help her family face the past.

Tide and Sea Lavender is a spirited, tender Regency romance about a determined youngest daughter, a Frenchman far from home, and an unexpected arrival at a house already full of love. Book Six of The Sea Lavender Saga can be enjoyed on its own.

A clean and wholesome romance with a gentle mystery, no explicit content, and a happy ending assured.