Behind it was a small, tidy garden with a vegetable patch planted neatly. Imagine, thought Lissa, having time to tend a vegetable patch. She had never met anyone in her life with the time: not her family, always busy; not her fellow nurses, some of whom worked two jobs to get through nursing college and the university courses that were required these days; not her school friends. She barely knew anyone with a garden, not to mention a vegetable patch. She had assumed this nurse guy was . . . well, she hadn’t really thought about him at all after they’d failed to find much on Facebook. This was something that was happening to her, after all. She really, really hoped he didn’t expect her to keep his vegetable patch alive. Because she really didn’t have a clue how.

She added it to her worry stack, went back around the front, and turned the rusty key in the old lock, both nervous and rather excited.

The door creaked open straight onto a cozy sitting room—no hallway or corridor at all.

A wood-burning stove sat in the middle of the side wall, with an old fireplace surround; a leather sofa and a floral sofa bunched companionably around it. On the other side was a dinner table that looked underutilized, and through the back was a small, functional kitchen on a wobbly-built extension with several glass windows overlooking the back garden. Behind the house was the stream, cutting through the bottom of the garden, and then . . . nothing.

Beyond the wooden fence were fields leading to woods straight ahead, and the mountains loomed behind them. If there hadn’t been an electricity tower in the distance, she could have been in any time from the past three centuries. It was really rather extraordinary.

She turned back to go upstairs. She was slightly worried about entering a strange man’s bedroom as she mounted the small staircase. She needn’t have worried. There were two tiny rooms underneath the eaves, a tongue-and-groove bathroom in between them, and she was obviously expected to sleep in the spare, which suited her fine. The whole place was spotlessly clean. She wondered about him again. Gay? Some male nurses were, but that didn’t mean anything. A pickup artist? She couldn’t imagine many players would choose to live in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, though.

Lissa hauled her bag up the narrow stairs and considered unpacking. The house was freezing and she couldn’t figure out where the central heating was. It hadn’t occurred to her that it might not have heating. Hang on. How was that going to work?