His parents had moved into town a few years ago. His father had suffered a heart attack, and although the doctors had said he was good as new following his bypass surgery, his mother wasn’t taking any chances. For years they’d talked about moving into Promise one day. His father had insisted he wasn’t ready to retire, so they’d bought the Howe Mansion, which wasn’t really a mansion, just the largest house in town. Before another year was up it’d been renovated and turned into a bed-and-breakfast.

Glen had had his doubts about this venture. Cal, too. But their parents had proved them both wrong. The bed-and-breakfast was thriving, and so were Phil and Mary Patterson.

His mother complained that she didn’t see near enough of her sons. That being the case, she certainly looked surprised to see Glen when he walked into her kitchen.

“Hi, Mom,” he said, slipping up behind her and kissing her cheek.

Mary Patterson hugged him as though it’d been a week of Sundays since his last visit. “Taste this,” she said, sticking a spoon in his face.

“What is it?” Glen asked, jerking his head back. He preferred not to be part of a culinary experiment.

“Chili. I’m practicing for the cook-off.”

“Mom, that’s not for months yet.”

“I know. This is a new recipe I’ve been playing around with. What do you think?”

Despite his better judgment, Glen tried the chili and tried to hide his response. It tasted...well, not like food. Not like something you’d seriously consider eating.

“It needs work, right?” she asked, studying him.

He nodded. For her guests his mother generally stayed with plain basic food. Good thing. “This recipe needs a rethink, Mom.”

She sighed and tossed the spoon into the sink. “I was afraid of that.”

“Where’s Dad?” Glen asked, hoping to make the inquiry sound casual.

“Upstairs. The sink in the bathroom’s plugged again.” Her gaze didn’t waver from his. “Something on your mind?”

He nodded. He could never hide anything from his mother.

“Does it involve Ellie Frasier?”

“Yeah.”

She grinned and pointed toward the stairway off the kitchen. “Talk to your father, but if you want advice about how to romance her, talk to me. Your father doesn’t know a damn thing about romance.”

Hiding a smile, Glen headed for the stairs. Just as his mother had said, he found his dad lying on the tile floor staring up at the sink, wrench in hand.

“Hi, Dad.”

“I thought I heard you downstairs talking to your mother.” Phil Patterson slid out from beneath the sink and reached for a rag to dry his hands. “And to think she was worried about me working too hard on the ranch. If anything’s going to kill me, it’ll be this sink.”

Glen sat down on the edge of the tub.

“Did you have something you wanted to ask me, son?”

Leaning forward, Glen removed his Stetson, slowly turning it in his hands. “How many years have you and Mom been married?”

“Well, your brother’s thirty-six, so this year we had our thirty-seventh anniversary. Thirty-seven years! Damn, it doesn’t seem that long. Hell if I can figure out when I got old.”

“You’re not.”

Phil smiled. “That’s my boy. Buttering me up, are you? So what do you need?”

“Just some advice.”

“Be glad to help if I can.” With an exaggerated groan, he stood up, lowered the toilet seat and sat there.

Glen wasn’t sure where to start. “When did you know you loved Mom?”

Phil considered the question for a moment. “When she told me I did.” He chuckled and Glen joined in. “Don’t laugh too hard, boy, it’s the truth. We’d dated in high school some, but she was two years younger. After I graduated, I enlisted. Joined the Navy. We wrote back and forth and I saw a little of the world. Eventually your mother graduated and went away to college in Dallas. We didn’t see each other for three years, but we kept in touch. I must say she wrote a lot more letters than me.

“Then one Christmas, we both happened to be home at the same time. It was a shock to see her again. We’d been friends, stayed in touch, but somehow I’d never noticed how pretty she was.”

Glen nodded; his mother was still a pretty woman.

“I wasn’t the only one who noticed, either,” his father continued. “She got more attention than a prize heifer at the state fair. Until that Christmas I’d always thought of her as a friend. We’d dated from time to time, but it was nothing serious. That Christmas my eyes were opened.”

“Did you ask her to marry you then?”

“Hell, no. I wasn’t happy about other men paying attention to her, but I figured if she wanted to date someone else, I didn’t have the right to stand in her way.”

“You were sweet on her, though?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t realize how much until we’d kissed a few times.”

Now that was something Glen could understand. “Did you try to talk to her?”

Phil chuckled again. “I sure did, but all we seemed to do was argue. Nothing I said was right. I told her I thought she was pretty, and even that came out like an insult.”

This story was sounding more familiar by the minute. “So what happened?”

His father grew thoughtful. “It was time to head back to the base, and I knew if I didn’t try to explain myself one last time, I might not get another chance. I called her all evening, but she was out—you can imagine how that made me feel, especially since I couldn’t very well ring her doorbell in the middle of the night.” He smiled at the memory. “So I stood outside her bedroom and threw stones at the window until she woke up.

“It’s not a good idea to wake your mother out of a sound sleep, even now. It took me a while to convince her to hear me out. Luckily she agreed and sat with me on the porch. By that time I was so confused I didn’t know what to say.”

Glen edged closer to his father, keenly interested in the details of his parents’ courtship.

“I stammered and stuttered and told her how much I valued her friendship and hated the idea of returning to Maine with this bad feeling between us. That was when she looked me full in the eye and asked if I loved her.”

His mother had always been a gutsy woman and Glen admired her for it. “What did you tell her?”

“I didn’t know what to say. It was the first time I’d ever thought about it. We were friends, hung around with the same crowd, exchanged letters, that sort of thing. She wanted to know if I loved her, and for the life of me I didn’t have an answer.”

It went without saying that wasn’t what his mother had wanted to hear.

“When I hesitated, Mary leaped to her feet and announced I was the biggest fool who’d ever lived if I hadn’t figured out how I felt about her after three years. My, was she mad.” Shaking his head, he rubbed the side of his jaw. “Her eyes had fire in them. In all the years we’ve been married, I’ve only seen her get that riled a handful of times. She told me if I married some Yankee girl I’d regret it the rest of my life.”

He paused a moment, lost in his memories. “Then before I could stop her, she raced into the house. By the time I’d gathered my wits and followed her, she was already running up the stairs. Her father and her mother both stood on the landing, looking down at me as though they wanted to string me up from the nearest tree.”

“What’d you do?”

“What I should have done a hell of a lot sooner. I shouted up at her father for permission to marry his daughter.”

That scene filled Glen’s mind. His father a young sailor, standing at the bottom of the stairs, watching the love of his life racing away. “What’d Mom do?”

“She stopped, halfway between her parents and me. I’ll never forget the look of shock on her face as she turned around and stared at me.”

“She burst into tears, right?”

“No. She stood here, calm as could be and asked me when I wanted the wedding to take place. Hell if I knew, so I said that was up to her, and she suggested six months.”