She knew she probably should have warned Kehlan that the best place to see the sunset in Stockton required hiking up the side of a steep hill. They’d been skiing all day, after all, and he’d just had a transcontinental flight, so the way he still kept up with her as they hiked up the mountain was nothing short of impressive.

That’s not to say that she wasn’t already impressed with him. With everything about him, really. With his body, and his incredible features. With his skill and his cool attitude under pressure. With his careful observance of her moods and his gentle comfort when anything rubbed her the wrong way. With his skill on the mountain and gameness to try anything. With his attention—his incredible attention—that made her feel as though everything she told him were so much more interesting than she suspected it really was.

But as she walked behind on him on the path, she found herself watching him more than the beautiful sights around them. The view headed up the hill nearest town was incredible. She’d seen it many times, as this had been a favorite spot of hers for years. She even brought Dylan part of the way up here, sometimes with her family, when she was feeling up to the task of hiking with a young child. She looked forward to the day he’d be able to make the trip all the way up to the top.

But these incredible views were familiar, and Kehlan was something new and exciting. How was the commonplace splendor of nature supposed to compete?

Plus, there was the timing. In order for Kehlan to really catch Stockton in the best possible light, they would need to make it up the trail and to the top in record time. And she found that she deeply wanted him to have his first aerial view of Stockton to be in the best possible light. That was more important to her than she could explain to herself. So, she avoided trying.

Kehlan must have sensed her urgency, because he kept up a breakneck pace, and they made it to the overlook at the summit just in time to catch the best of the shifting sunset colors as Paige had hoped.

“So, this is Stockton,” he breathed.

As accustomed to his uniquely blended accent as she had become over the course of the day, she still found it mesmerizing when she heard him talk. And she found watching his face beholding the view for the first time to be an even more entrancing sight.

“This is Stockton,” she answered. She could hear the pride in her own voice, as though the town were hers and hers alone, and the approval implicit in his overawed tone was somehow a credit to her.

“It’s a beautiful place,” he said, and she nodded, even though he wasn’t looking at her and wouldn’t see.

“It really is.”

They stood for a while in silence. She wasn’t sure where the lines were. Was she just showing him around, or was this a date? It certainly felt like a date, and there was a part of her that desperately wanted him to take her hand.

But then, there was another part of her that didn’t want it to be a date. Because if it were a date, and not just a pleasant afternoon with a passing tourist, then she would have had to tell him about her son, and that was something she definitely had not done.

The further they went along, the more she liked the feeling of being with him—of being the person who could just spend a day with a charming, handsome man with no responsibilities in the world. She liked the feeling that anything could happen, and that at any moment they might just blow off the mountain together and end up in Switzerland or the Middle East, or even somewhere else, completely new to him as well.

Real Paige, normal Paige, couldn’t act that way. In her real life, she had responsibilities. She had a life that required constant commitment and a man who was from here, and wasn’t a part of all of that out there.

So no, it was right that he didn’t take her hand, as much as she wanted him to. It was right that they stood there slightly apart in silence, watching the light play over the town in front of them, still in the impossible altered state that had defined their entire day together so far.

After a time, she saw his scowl of concentration that she had already grown so fond of appear on his face.

“Where’s the Coffee Cup?” he asked. “I’ve gotten turned around, I think.”

She leaned in, close but not quite touching, and pointed.

“Just there,” she said. “See, that’s the main road in from the highway, and there’s where it branches off towards Main Street…”

And just like that, she found herself describing everything in front of her. It was just like at the restaurant, when he had asked her about sourcing local ingredients and she’d found herself talking and talking about things that he couldn’t possibly find interesting, but somehow seemed to anyway. All the details, he seemed to drink up just as quickly as she could provide them, and his rapt attention just drew more out of her.

Before she knew it, she was telling him the little-known histories of the tiny little side streets, and the people that lived on them, and the interesting, amusing, or heartbreaking things that had happened to them. As she spoke, she realized how much more she knew about this town than she had even realized—how much of it had seeped into her mind without her knowing it, and how much she was eager to share it with him.

She kept waiting for him to show any sign of boredom at all this useless, irrelevant information she’d unintentionally been storing up, but he never did. Instead, he listened and asked questions, and laughed and commiserated with each new story.

They spoke until the sun was truly down, and the residual light on the horizon was waning. They had to use their phones as flashlights to make their way back down the steep mountain path.

By the time they had made it most of the way down the hill, the darkness was absolute around them. They could see lights in the distance here and there—the street light over the trailhead parking lot that was their destination, and the lights of Stockton peeking up from the valley.

But the darkness of the growing night closed in around them and made Paige feel as though they were alone together in some secret, private space. The glow of their phone lights was the vessel carrying the two of them together through the darkness, and the sound of the bugs in the forest around only served to increase the sense of shared isolation.

By the time they reached the trailhead, and the car that waited for them, Paige was sad to have to set aside the closeness she’d begun to feel on the hike—the closeness she had felt throughout the day, if she was honest. And she dreaded what was going to come next. She tried to speak casually as they got back into the car, but the words sounded breathy and uncertain coming out of her mouth.

“So, I don’t know if you were thinking to hang around Stockton or if you wanted to move on, but there’s really just one hotel in town. And ‘hotel’ is honestly a big name for it—it’s really just a couple of rooms that the Haases rent out above their house. If you wanted to keep going, there’s a bigger place over in Springfield on the other side of the mountain that I can give you directions to.”

It was hard to tell much about his expression in the limited light of the car interior. Paige cursed the shadows that fell across his face and kept her from being able to make out his reaction.

“The place off of Oak Street that you pointed out from the overlook?”

She felt a thrill run up her spine just at the fact that he remembered one little detail out of the whole long, rambling speech she’d unloaded on him an hour ago.

“That’s the one. If you want, I can guide you there.”

“Oh, if you don’t mind, that’d be great.”

This time, the thrill running up her spine was considerably bigger. He was staying. He was staying in Stockton, at least for the night. This still wasn’t a date. It couldn’t be—not if she hadn’t been honest with him about her son. But the hazy dream the day had been would continue longer, and for that, she was grateful. She gave him directions to the Haases’ bed and breakfast off Oak Street, resisting the urge to take him there by a longer route so that she could stay longer in the car with him.

But when they reached their destination, Paige was in for a surprise.

“I guess they turn the lights off when they’re not expecting guests?” Kehlan offered. “I don’t imagine they get a lot of people showing up without a reservation.”

“No, not many…” Paige said. “But they usually keep the porch light on at least. Wait here; I’ll be right back.”

As she neared the front porch, she saw a small square of paper affixed to the door with a bright piece of tape. It was comfortingly consistent with the slightly quirky, arts and crafts-obsessed person she had always known Mrs. Haase to be, but it was still making her nervous. Of all the times for the bed and breakfast not to be open, did it have to be tonight?

She stepped up to the door and read the note. It was only a few lines about being closed for the weekend as the Haases were away visiting family, but Paige stood there staring at it for a long time, as though it were written in a foreign language. As glad as she was that the Haases were finally making it out to visit their grandchildren in Albuquerque, she couldn’t help but feel horribly inconvenienced that they’d picked this weekend.

It felt like she stood there for ages deliberating, but it could only have been a minute or two. There were two options in front of her in light of this new development. With no rooms available here, the closest accommodation was over an hour away on the other side of the mountain. Sure, Springfield wasn’t that far away, and maybe Kehlan would come back to Stockton the next day. But just as likely, he would take the opportunity to venture further into the countryside. There were some great hikes and waterfalls out that way. It would make more sense for him not to backtrack to a place he’d already seen so much of.

And if he did venture on, the dream that this whole magical afternoon and evening had been would be over. Paige would be back where she was, in her ordinary life, that had seemed so much more acceptable to her before Kehlan had shown up and made the day such an adventure.

But there was another option. She could offer him her couch to sleep on.

It wasn’t exactly luxury accommodations, and she doubted that a man who had attended a fancy boarding school in Switzerland had ever been reduced to sleeping on someone’s couch.

It was doubtful, she thought, that he would say yes, even if she offered. But the chance that he might, and that she might be able to extend what today had been over to another day was enough to compel her to ask.

There was only one thing holding her back: Dylan.

Paige was a single mother, and her house showed it. If she invited Kehlan over, there was no way she could avoid telling him about her son, and once he found out about him, she might as well not have invited him over at all—their little bubble would have been ruptured anyway.

Maybe it would be better just not to offer, she thought, and to preserve his image of her as unattached and free. To just let the afternoon and evening stand for itself. And that way she could imagine to herself, as well, what might have been, without having to face the reality that Kehlan, just like most men, would run when they found out that she had a son.

She honestly didn’t know what she was going to do as she slowly walked back to the car. But as soon as she sat down, and saw Kehlan’s inquisitive face, she knew what her choice had to be. She couldn’t live the rest of her life without at least taking the chance.

“So,” she said, “it turns out they’re out of town. And this is really the only place to stay around here. I can give you directions to that hotel in Springfield, if you like, but if you’d rather stay around here, I’d be happy to let you stay with me. It’s only a couch, but I swear it’s more comfortable than it looks.”

The next words stuck in her throat, but she knew she needed to get them out before he answered. It would only be more awkward if she added it after the fact.

“My son is on a field trip, so I’d be glad for the company. I haven’t slept in a house this empty in nine years.”

For a second, she thought she was going to be cursed to not see his facial expression as he sat in the shadows of the car. But then he leaned forward slightly, putting himself in the light of the street lamp spilling in through the sunroof. Paige’s heart was racing, thumping so hard in her chest that it seemed impossible that it wasn’t audible in the small space of the car.

But there on Kehlan’s face she saw a genuine smile.

“You have a son? You hadn’t mentioned.”

She felt herself involuntarily return his smile as relief flooded through her body.

“Yes, his name is Dylan. He’s nine.”

She had two conflicting drives: on the one hand, she wanted to tell him everything about Dylan, up to and including pulling the ultimate mom move and besieging him with all the pictures she had of Dylan on her phone. On the other hand, she was desperate to hear what he had to say about it.

With difficulty, she managed to stop at the basic information and keep her mouth shut.

“That’s wonderful,” Kehlan said, with barely a pause. “You know, I don’t have many regrets in my life, but I always wished I had found someone I wanted to settle down and have children with earlier on. I had always pictured myself with children by now.”

Another wave of relief, and Paige found herself talking again.

“Well, it has its moments. I can’t imagine how it would have been going through medical school with kids, that’s for sure. But he’s the light of my life. Before you showed up at the diner, I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through these next couple of days without him.”

Was it her imagination, or was there something devilish in his grin?

“Is that so?” Kehlan asked, and Paige blushed when she realized her accidental implication that they would be spending the next few days together.

She shrugged it off, hoping that the darkness hid the red in her cheeks.

He settled back, and she lost his face again. All she could see were glints in the darkness as his hands moved to start the car back up again.

“Then I would be happy to stay and keep your mind off worrying about him, if you’re sure it’s not a bother.”

There was an implied question in there, but also an assumed answer, as the car hummed to life, and he began to back out of the driveway.

“You’ve been doing a great job of it so far,” Paige mumbled under her breath, preparing to lead this strange, attractive, charming man back to her home.