Ilze

Read this one the first time a few years ago during my initial Mary Balogh glom.  I loved it then and gave it 5 stars (stars in my eyes, apparently). Just read it again a couple of days ago and I'm lowering the rating to 4 stars. The love story is good, but I now realize that the main characters of the story, Justin and Rosamund, the ones who meet up and fall in love while spending a couple of days snowbound in a cozy hunting lodge, are not actually the hero and heroine of the story. 

The hero and heroine of the story, in the sense that they are the ones who make the final HEA ending possible, are Amanda, who is Justin's almost-betrothed and Rosamund's niece, and Josh, a friend of Justin and a relative of Amanda and Rosamund, who was wounded in the battle of Waterloo. Without the actions of Josh and Amanda, Justin would have gone ahead with his engagement to Amanda, even though he realizes that Rosamund is the "second half" of his soul, and lived to regret it bitterly for the rest of his life. Justin is strangely passive in all the events that take place during the house party where the betrothal is supposed to be announced, so I can't really call him the "hero" of this story and for that reason I'm taking the rating of this book down a notch.

(Mary Balogh has another story where the "hero" is almost completely passive in securing his and his true love's HEA - "Tempting Harriet".)