The remainder of the morning dragged on the same way it had begun. Only a few more regulars came and went, and no one could come up with any real reason why it was so dead. It seemed like a normal day—just a less interesting one. When Paige had finally broken down and asked Alvin what he thought was going on, he had no answers for her. Only a shrug.

“Sometimes them’s just the breaks, doll.”

So Paige continued to entertain herself by shooting the breeze with Alvin, worrying about Dylan, and finding little tasks to keep herself busy. She was just rechecking and refilling the condiments, even though they weren’t really due to be checked yet, when she heard the little bell over the entrance jingle. Never had a sound been so welcome.

Like clockwork, her standard waitress smile spread across her face. The words “Welcome to the Coffee Cup,” were supposed to follow, but they stuck in her throat.

There, standing in the entrance with a look on his face like he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at, but he was already sure he liked it, was a strikingly attractive man of seemingly Middle Eastern descent.

It wasn’t just his appearance that made him look like he didn’t belong in the generally plain town of Stockton; he had an air about him of someone who was always walking just a few feet above the ground and didn’t realize it. His face looked like it had been carved out of expensive stone. He had high, prominent cheekbones and a strong jaw. He might have seemed almost unrealistic, except for the intent care he seemed to put into surveying his surroundings. He stood up stock straight, with perfect posture, but didn’t seem to be uncomfortable in doing so. It wasn’t an act. It was just who he was.

When his eyes rested on her, Paige felt young and vulnerable in a way she hadn’t since before Dylan was born. And, she realized, from his curious, bemused expression, that her normal waitress smile had gotten stuck on her face, and she probably looked like a ridiculous grinning fool.

Typical. Just typical. On just the kind of day when I’m least prepared for it, something like this steps through the door.

She shook her head, not sure if she was trying to dislodge the smile, or get her thoughts in order, or both.

“Welcome to the Coffee Cup,” she managed at last, although with considerably less polish than she normally said the words. “Feel free to sit anywhere.”

His expression remained bemused as he looked around at all the tables, searching for one to sit at. And, as much as it was embarrassing for her to be the focus of his attention, as soon as he looked away, Paige found she missed it.

She saw him eye the booths at the far end of the diner. She could tell a lot about the kind of tourist that came into the Coffee Cup by where they chose to sit, if they were alone. Most of the time, if they were just checking things out, they would sit in one of those booths. Paige had had a lot of time to think about it over the years and had decided that it was to create the illusion of privacy as they looked over either their paper maps or the info their found on their smartphones. That way, they just made small talk with her as she was taking their order. There was a politeness to it which Paige appreciated.

But already, Paige found herself desperately hoping that he didn’t go sit in one of those booths. As firm as her assertions had been earlier that she was happy there and that she liked her life—as confident as she had been that she was telling Alvin the truth—there was now a part of her that abruptly changed her mind.

Wherever this man had walked in from, that was where she wanted to be. He had yet to even open his mouth and yet he had already brought in a world with him that was entirely unlike the one that Paige had ever known. He probably wouldn’t have chosen to represent an escape to some random small-town diner waitress, Paige thought. But all the same, he already did.

It was all Paige could do to avoid breathing a sigh of relief when he made a sharp turn and headed for the bar. It would give Paige exactly zero privacy, but she didn’t mind that at all. And maybe, she thought, he sensed as much. A man like that—a man who looked like he did—had to be used to the effect he had on women by now.

And she was hardly being subtle. As soon as he’d walked through the front door, any hope of subtlety had fled swiftly out the back.

“So,” he said. “What’s good around here?”

His accent was hard to identify. Enough foreign tourists ended up coming through in the high tourist seasons that Paige fancied that she had become pretty decent at figuring out where people were from, but even so, this man’s voice was a mystery. There was a good deal of British in there, mixed with something else.

But she stopped herself from thinking about it too much. She’d already made a fool of herself with the smile, earlier. She should at least try to be professional, if she was going to get through this interaction without deeply embarrassing herself at every turn.

“Do you mean to eat here, or do you mean in town?”

The handsome man shrugged.

“Either. Both. Maybe start with the former and move on to the latter.”

Yes, he sounded British. But not like he was from there…more like he had learned English with that accent, but there were traces of where he was from shining through. But even that wasn’t quite right. He still sounded more American than that.

“Is there something wrong?”

Apparently, she had completely failed at her mission to not get caught up observing him and keep up with the conversation.

Paige smiled in a way she hoped was disarming.

“No, sorry. It’s been kind of a slow day, so I guess I’m a little out of it. And I’m trying to figure out where your accent is from.”

He smiled, and whatever part of Paige that had remained together thus far completely melted.

“Ah,” he said. “Well, let me save you the trouble. I’m originally from Al-Derra, in the Middle East, but I learned English in Europe before attending college in the States, so I’ve been told that my accent is somewhat Americanized. Does that answer your question?”

“The peaches and cream waffle,” Paige answered, then immediately felt her cheeks burn. What was wrong with her? At no point in the last nine years had she felt like a schoolgirl this way. “Sorry, yes. That answers my question,” she continued. “And to answer yours, the waffle is probably the best thing on the menu. At least, that’s what everybody says.”

Again, that smile. That meltingly beautiful smile.

“Then I guess I’ll have the waffle.”

Paige couldn’t help but smile in response, and not in the usual, routine way she did after taking someone’s order.

She went back to the kitchen where she found Alvin standing there with a smile on his face. It wasn’t easy to make out exact words from the kitchen to the dining room, but on quiet days, tone was easy enough to distinguish. And her tone must have been humiliatingly easy to decipher, even from the other side of a wall.

“Say, what’ll it be, doll?” he asked, although the wry expression on his face was asking something entirely different.

“He’ll have the waffle,” Paige said.

When the old man didn’t immediately move to get to work on the meal, Paige raised an eyebrow in question.

“What?” she asked, with more exasperation in her voice than she had intended to come through.

Again, Alvin’s cheeky grin lit up his face.

“Oh, nothing… Just wondering if he’s actually as handsome as it looks like you think he is.”

And with that, he got to work, muttering to himself and barely reacting to the playful slap on the arm that Paige gave him.

She had to stop herself from taking an audibly deep breath before heading back out to the dining room. Though, if he was able to hear her trying to calm her own nerves at talking to such an attractive man, she’d probably already have heard Alvin making fun of her for it.

But when she stepped back out, the man showed no evidence of having heard anything embarrassing at all. His attention seemed fixed instead on something in his hand.

With a start, Paige realized she was jealous. Jealous of an inanimate object—that had to be a new low. She cleared her throat, trying to pull his attention back to her and away from whatever he held.

“And as for your other question, Mr.…”

“Kehlan,” the man said.

“Mr. Kehlan—”

A laugh interrupted her sentence. It was a good laugh. Light and mirthful, spilling out like music.

“Sorry, did I say something funny?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“No, only that Kehlan is my first name. I should have been more clear—I know it’s uncommon here.”

Paige found herself smiling like an idiot again, and this time there was no question that it had nothing to do with her job and everything to do with her customer.

“You’ve got that right,” she said. “Usually, it’s just locals around here this time of year. What brings you this way?”

She was supposed to be answering his question, not asking one. But her curiosity overrode her usual duties of unofficial tourist information officer at the town’s only real diner.

His answer wasn’t immediate, and Paige found that she liked the way he was thinking things over. It gave him an air of honesty—as though he wasn’t just saying whatever came to mind or whatever easy explanation he had, but rather that he was really trying to think about it to be as truthful as he could.

“I guess I was just looking for something different,” he said at last. “I found myself in Seattle with a few free days and saw a brochure that made this place look like heaven on earth, though it doesn’t have a lot of information other than the basics. But when I got to town, I saw the signs for this place on Main Street, and well, here I am.”

Nothing he was saying was unusual, but still, Paige hung on every word. It was a pretty straightforward explanation on the face of it, but she couldn’t help but feel curious about the details hiding around the edges. It took her a moment before she looked at the object in his hands that he was holding up. The same object that she had been jealous of just a moment before.

The brochure.

She felt herself drawn forward, forgetting herself and plucking the paper from his hands in wonder.

“My brochure!” she exclaimed. “I thought these had all gotten trashed.”

He looked at her quizzically.

“Your brochure?”

She spoke quickly now, her embarrassment overwhelmed by the unexpected trip down memory lane.

“I made them a while back. It must be three or four years now…not sure how this little guy survived. My sister lives in Seattle and I sent her off with these when she was visiting a few years back.” She smiled at the memory. “I made her promise to put them in the visitor center.”

The man—Kehlan—gently held out his hand. It wasn’t a demanding gesture. A man like that didn’t demand. He could only expect, and the world would arrange itself around those expectations, Paige suspected.

And, as though she were compelled by whatever invisible force had granted him this power, she handed it over.

“Well, you can tell your sister you know she keeps her word. I found this at the visitor center, right where it belonged.”

And just like that, she was stuck staring at his face. Between her rush to look at the brochure and his leaning in to retrieve it, she had wound up far nearer to him than she had been before.

“Heaven on earth…” She turned the words over idly in her mouth while she stared at his too-close face. “I guess some days it does feel that way.”

He cocked his head, a playful smile gracing the corners of his lips.

“And on the other days…?”

Was he flirting? Previously he’d absolutely melted her without even seeming to mean to. This time, it seemed like he meant it. Did he?

A man like that…flirting might just be how he walks through the world. It might be second nature to him to flatter and destroy girls like me, leaving them awestruck in his wake.

Still, she tried to match his flirtatious tone. What else was there to do today?

“Other days, it’s still pretty good. Maybe only a little better than everywhere else, rather than a lot.”

Was it intentional, the way he looked away and smiled, as though he were charmed by her? Was that play, or was that genuine? Did she even care at this point? Whether he was flirting with any kind of purpose or just doing it out of habit, this was still the most interesting thing to happen to her in months. And they’d barely spoken a handful of sentences to each other.

“Well, then. It looks like I came to the right place.”

Without asking if he wanted one, Paige found herself pouring him a cup of coffee and sliding it across the bar towards him. He caught it with casual ease.

“That you did. And here I am, holding out on you.”

That got a raised eyebrow.

“Oh, are you? How so?”

She looked at him coyly.

“You asked me what’s good to do around here, and I still haven’t answered.”

Who was she? This was not the practiced, carefully planned Paige she had been since Dylan was born, nor was this the overwhelmed, overawed small-town girl she had been when she walked back to give Alvin his order. But it felt like if he was going to flirt with her, then she should definitely flirt back. And as soon as she started down that path, she couldn’t help but find that she liked it. And the further she went, the harder it was to turn back.

But that was all right. She was probably only stuck in this feedback loop because none of this mattered, she reasoned. He would take her recommendations, leave the diner, and she’d never see him again. At the end of the day, he was still just a tourist passing through. It was just the weirdness of the day and the striking attractiveness of his features that had brought out this side of her. She may as well have something fun to remember when she was sitting at home tonight, missing her son.

Kehlan seemed to feel the same, for he leaned forward, resting his chin on his hands, forming a kind of tent over his steaming, un-asked-for cup of coffee.

“I have to admit I’m not used to women holding out on me. Can’t say I like it much.”

“Oh, no?” she asked, trying not to get distracted by the definition of the muscles she could see beneath his thin button-down shirt. Had he moved his arms like that on purpose? She had to wonder.

“Well then, I’d better not keep you waiting any longer. Wouldn’t want you to think this town is anything less than advertised. You should know this isn’t a popular time of year here because we’re right between seasons. It’s getting too warm for snow sports, but you might just be able to ski. Just need to watch out for patches of thawed ground, or you’ll take a tumble. Gotta say, with a face like yours, I wouldn’t take the risk.”

Seriously, where was this coming from? She’d never said anything that over the top in her life. She felt like she was somehow channeling some version of the old-timey movie character Alvin affected from time to time, only Kehlan wasn’t in on the joke. In fact, he was so not in on the joke that he somehow seemed to like it, as he smiled down at his cup of coffee.

“Well then, I’d better not ask you to come with me,” he said. “I’m fine to risk myself, but I wouldn’t risk any part of all this.”

At the word “this”, he looked her up and down, and again, Paige felt herself blushing. She’d been a waitress at the Coffee Cup for eight years now, and in all that time, she’d had countless advances from many a tourist. Most were opportunists, trying to have a little extra fun on their vacations, and she was never, ever interested in being anyone’s little bit of vacation fun. Absolutely none of those countless advances had ever set everything inside her on fire the way this man’s casual glance at her body did.

And just like that, there was a spell hanging in the air between them. Paige wasn’t sure if she had woven it or if he had, or if the two of them had somehow created it together. But she was sure that it was intoxicating, and that she could have stood there in its thrall forever.

Except that nearly as soon as she had the thought, the spell was shattered. A loud, startling clatter of pots, pans and who knew what else from the kitchen interrupted them. Paige straightened up, realizing as she did that she had been hunched down over the bar, leaning toward Kehlan.

“Alvin?” she called out, her heart already racing, hoping for a quick response and some joke about how clumsy he was. How old was Alvin now? He had to be in his seventies. She didn’t worry about him, usually. Not the way she should.

When no reassurance immediately answered her worried call, she immediately made a bee-line for the kitchen, barely registering that Kehlan was following close behind her.

When she made her way through the door separating the kitchen from the dining room, she gasped. There, on the kitchen floor, was everything that Paige had been afraid of. Alvin’s face was twisted in a painful grimace, and his shaking hands were clutching at his chest.

She rushed forward towards him, but instead felt a pair of strong arms on her shoulders gently guiding her to one side.

“Let me,” the softly accented voice said, all deep and certain and surreally calm in the circumstances.

She watched as Kehlan deftly knelt by Alvin’s side. He knew what he was doing, that much was immediately clear, and it was almost hypnotic to watch him. If the circumstance weren’t so dire, Paige imagined she would have a hard time tearing her eyes away from him long enough to call an ambulance.

As she gave the operator the details—a familiar voice, someone she was almost certain she’d gone to school with—she watched Kehlan work. It was sexy, yes. But she had a feeling pretty much everything this man did was hopelessly attractive. More than that, though, it was impressive. He had a frown on his face, but it seemed to be concentration rather than unfriendliness. She couldn’t hear quite what he was saying to Alvin, or make out if Alvin was able to make any real response, but she was certain that, whatever the outcome might be, Alvin was lucky that this man had happened to come into town today.

It seemed to take an eternity for the ambulance to get there, and to Paige, it might well have been. For all she loved about this town, she hated the fact that the hospital was so far away, especially when so many of the permanent residents here were getting on a bit in age. By the time they finally arrived, Paige’s knees hurt from kneeling on the floor next to Alvin, and her body felt stiff as she straightened up.

“I don’t think it’s a heart attack,” she heard Kehlan tell one of the paramedics.

Together, she and Kehlan watched them load up a very frightened Alvin, who was still clutching at his chest, and obviously in a state.

“His wife is going to meet him at the hospital,” Paige told one of the paramedics, though she wasn’t sure that was information they needed. If Alvin was absorbing any information from the world around him, he’d already have heard the call and would know. But there was no way to be completely sure how aware he was. Kehlan seemed the only one capable of getting or keeping his attention.

When the ambulance was gone, Paige found herself standing under a different kind of spell entirely.

“It’s a horrible feeling,” she said, after a moment. “I just wish there was something I could have done.”

She felt Kehlan’s hand on her arm.

“You did everything you should have done. It’s always horrible. Especially when it’s someone you care about.”

There was a sadness in his voice, and it prompted a wave of curiosity in Paige. She wanted to ask him but all of a sudden, as it had before, the spell was broken; the serious moment had passed, and there they were, just two strangers thrown together in front of a diner.

“Unlucky day for you to come,” she said. “It’s not usually like this. Obviously.”

Kehlan gave her a gentle smile.

“Seems like a pretty lucky day to me. My father would say it was a good deal more than luck.”

“You’re a doctor, then?” she asked, and he responded with mock surprise.

“What gave me away?”

She chuckled, even though it wasn’t all that funny. But the nerves of the situation were all sort of shaking their way out of her, and she felt jangly and uncertain. Again, Kehlan’s hand was on her arm.

“He’s going to be all right. If it is what I think it is, then he’s going to make a quick recovery. These things can be scary, but that doesn’t make them life-threatening, you understand?”

Paige nodded, trying to let the words take hold.

“And now,” Kehlan said, drawing back from her, and standing up straighter even than he had been before, “I find myself here, without a meal and in need of a tour guide. And you look like you’re in need of a distraction, and are the only one around here I see who might be able to tell me where to get something to eat.”

Even as the obvious answer leapt into her mind, Paige almost blushed when she remembered their flirtatious conversation. Before Alvin had fallen, she had been so bold and forward. But with all they had quite unexpectedly been through, they’d been thrust into something much more real, and Paige found herself suffering from a little bit of emotional whiplash.

Kehlan must have noticed, because a look of concern crossed his impossibly perfect face.

“Have I said something wrong?” he asked.

She wasn’t sure if she wanted him to touch her arm again or not. That is, she definitely wanted him to, but the way her insides reacted to his touch felt a little extreme, and she was having a hard time figuring out what she wanted.

Dylan felt so far away. The perfectly planned, perfectly controllable first date that she had planned for this evening seemed so far away. Even the normal, boring, every-day kind of afternoon that she had assumed she would have seemed so far away.

All there was was this man, standing in front of her like a big unknown variable. The ‘x’ in the equation. Who even was the woman who would randomly go off with a handsome stranger on an unknown adventure? Particularly when that handsome stranger would almost certainly disappear the moment he learned that she had a son.

As she stared at the gorgeous look of curiosity and concentration on Kehlan’s face, she had her answer: she was. She was absolutely that woman.