Red Clover Inn

She’d have no problem.

* * *

Hours and hours after she’d left her cozy Edinburgh apartment for her westward journey, Charlotte relished the first sips of her coffee at Smith’s, a small restaurant in a converted house just off Main Street in picturesque, totally adorable Knights Bridge, Massachusetts. She was already in love with the tiny New England town.

In love.

She smiled, relaxing, at ease now that she had arrived. She’d be fine unwinding at Red Clover Inn for a few days. No wonder Samantha had decided to make her home here. Even without hunky Justin, Knights Bridge was home-worthy.

Charlotte cautioned herself against overreaching with her expectations. She didn’t want to set herself up for a crash later when she started noticing Knights Bridge’s warts. So far, though, her inn-sitting adventure was working out even better than she’d expected.

Smith’s first customer on the early Monday morning, she ordered a three-egg omelet with green peppers, onions and ham, home fries, local cob-smoked bacon and multigrain toast.

Just what she needed to get her internal clock onto her new schedule.

As she drank her coffee, she became aware of someone sliding into her booth across from her.

She blinked. No.

But it was true. Greg Rawlings had materialized in the little restaurant as if out of thin air. Maybe actually out of thin air. How else could Charlotte explain him? She hadn’t heard the front door, felt a breeze—anything.

“Don’t say a word,” she said. “You’re not here. You’re not real.”

“I’m not?”

“I conjured you up in a caffeine-deprived, jet-lagged haze. People can hallucinate after a long trip, a wedding, too many hours without coffee. It’s not possible that Diplomatic Security Agent Rawlings is here with me in a Knights Bridge café.”

Unfazed by her dismissal of him as a figment of her imagination, he motioned for the waiter to bring coffee, then turned back to her. “It’s a stretch to call this place a café. I like it, though.”

The waiter, a local teenager, brought Greg coffee, a sign that, in fact, Charlotte hadn’t dreamed him up. Maybe she was in a somnambulant state. Maybe she wasn’t really awake, or her flight yesterday had messed with her head due to her recent decompression illness.

“We need to work on your situational awareness,” Greg said, lifting his mug.

“I see you drink your coffee black. Is that only when you’re conjured up, or do you add cream in real life?”

“Always black. Never any cream. I don’t drink latte, cappuccino, café au lait, flavored coffee. Just coffee.”

“Of course. Not surprised.” She blinked. Then blinked again. “Nope. You didn’t vanish.”

“You’re a riot, Charlotte. Okay if I order breakfast or do you want me to pretend to be invisible?”

“I doubt you’d succeed.”

“You’d be surprised. I can be invisible when it suits me.”

“Order breakfast,” she said. “I’m not imagining you?”

He shook his head. “You are not imagining me.”

“I suppose we do need to work on my situational awareness. I didn’t notice you come through the door.”

“You also didn’t notice you had company at Red Clover Inn.”

She really needed more coffee and a few more hours’ sleep. “Company?”

“Correct. The car in the driveway was your first clue. Second was the house key missing by the hose spigot. Third was finding the back door unlocked.”

She ignored the quickening of her heartbeat. “How do you know all this?”

“Because I’m the one who used the key and left the door unlocked. Apparently we’re both inn-sitting this week.”

Charlotte gaped at him. She had no words.

Greg settled back on his cushioned bench. “I bet that doesn’t happen often—you not knowing what to say. I was up early and heard your car purring outside my window. Whose Mercedes-Benz?”

“It belonged to my great-uncle Harry. Samantha is sorting through his house in Boston. He...” She stopped, breathed. “Why didn’t you let me know you were there?”

“You were only inside for a minute and I didn’t want to scare the hell out of you. I needed to get dressed. I’d just come out of the shower and only had this threadbare towel tied around my waist.”

The image of him in only a towel did Charlotte in. She covered for herself by grabbing her water glass but then took a huge gulp, a dead giveaway.