No wonder she’d experienced a sense of familiarity the moment she’d arrived here. She’d stepped through the pages of her books right into Nightingale Woods.

Instead of heading along the lake where she might meet someone, Lilly followed a narrow path that led into the woods beyond the Common. She’d changed into a pair of slacks and a square-neck, tobacco-brown top, but she was still hot, and she wished she were thin enough to wear shorts. Those little white ones that had been a permanent part of her wardrobe on Lace, Inc. They’d barely covered her bottom.

Weeds brushed her legs as the trees opened into a meadow. Her toes felt pleasantly gritty inside her sandals, and some of the tension she’d been carrying all day began to ease. She heard running water from a stream and turned to look for it only to see something so out of place that she blinked.

A chrome diner’s chair with a red vinyl seat.

Lilly couldn’t imagine what it was doing in the middle of the meadow. As she began to walk toward it, she saw a creek with ferns growing among the reeds and mossy rocks. The chair sat on a lichen-encrusted boulder. Its red vinyl seat sparkled in the sunlight, and there was no visible rust, so it had been put there recently. But why? Its perch was precarious, and it wobbled as she touched it.

“Leave that alone!”

She spun around to see a big bear of a man crouched in bars of sunlight at the edge of the meadow.

Her hand flew to her throat.

Behind her the chair splashed into the creek.

“Damn it!” The man jumped to his feet.

He was huge, with shoulders as wide as twelve lanes of L.A. freeway and a scowling, rough-hewn face that belonged on the villain in an old B Western. I got ways of makin’ a woman like you talk. The only thing missing was a week’s worth of stubble on that grim jaw.

His hair was a Hollywood stylist’s nightmare or daydream, she wasn’t sure which. Thick and graying at the temples, it grew too long at the collar, where it looked as if he might have swiped at it with the knife he undoubtedly kept in his boot. Except he wore a pair of battered running shoes instead, with socks that slouched around his ankles. And his eyes—mysteriously dark in that deeply tanned, dangerously lined face.

Every casting agent in Hollywood would salivate over him.

All those thoughts were scrambling through Lilly’s head instead of the one thought that should have been there: Run!