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He looked at her for a moment, and then his brow rose, and Ruthie realized that the coma would have been the kinder choice here.

She swallowed, hard. “I’d love some coffee.”

Dallas looked at her for a long moment. Or maybe all the moments felt long, because she couldn’t seem to fully breathe in his presence. It was like her lungs couldn’t get past the shock of him, of how astonishingly good-looking he was, and bailed halfway through.

He didn’t say another word. He turned away and went over to the counter, where she could see a shiny espresso machine, as well as a full pot of coffee.

Dallas Lisle did not ask her how she liked her coffee. He simply poured some from the carafe and she could smell the hazelnut scent in the air, her favorite. Then she watched him pull out a carton of heavy cream and put a hefty dollop into her mug before he brought it over to her.

Ruthie gulped. Audibly, she was very afraid. She stared down at the coffee and the cream that was slowly turning the top of her mug cloudy, then white.

“How do you know how I like my coffee?” she whispered.

It took her a moment to meet his gaze, because he was standing there on the other side of the counter. She had to look up, and she felt dizzy, suddenly. Looking at him made her head spin.

“Lucky guess,” Dallas said flatly.

She felt… almost breathless.

“So why are you here, Ruthie?” he asked, and there was something about his tone. It wasn’t impatient, necessarily. But there was something there. Something…edgy, she thought. “Do you have family in the area?”

And the coffee was made so perfectly that she kind of wanted to dive into it face-first, but the way he asked that question made her gaze snap to his.

She set her mug back down on the counter between them. “I don’t know why I’m here,” she said, opting for full disclosure, and she smiled her way into it, too.

And she was standing so close to him, with only the counter separating them, that she could see that he reacted to the smile. That those blue eyes of his widened slightly, and then flashed. She could feel both of those things—the blue of his eyes and the way they lit up like that—inside her, spiraling around and around, like a spinning sort of top that winnowed all the way down toward her core.

“Just threw a dart at a map?” Dallas asked, darkly.

“Not exactly.” When he only looked at her, that brow of his creeping up again, she laughed. A nervous laugh, clearly, but she couldn’t do anything about that. “I got a postcard sometime over the summer. It had the lighthouse on front. But on the back, it said that the inn was opening in late fall. I don’t know. It was pretty and unexpected. What’s a lighthouse doing on a mountain? I decided to come check it out.”

His gaze narrowed and became something shrewd.

“A postcard,” he said. Like he was calculating something.

“As marketing goes, I think it’s pretty clever,” she said brightly. “I don’t know how you got my address, but there’s certainly nothing like it in Georgia. It felt…aspirational, I guess.”

“I’ll have to take that up with the marketing department,” Dallas said, but in a way that suggested it was not going to go well for said marketing department.

Then he moved back across the kitchen, which coincidentally allowed her to get a breath in, and made her some eggs and toast to go with the perfectly crisped bacon, which she ate very greedily. Until it occurred to her that he hadn’t asked her how she liked her eggs, or whether she wanted him to butter her toast like that, and she didn’t understand how this man could divine her choices out of thin air.

But she also didn’t know how she was going to go about asking him, either.

Dallas Lisle didn’t exactly strike her as a man who was interested in answering questions. Or not from her, anyway.

So she was pretty much shocked when, after she’d gone up to her room after breakfast, had a little moment about the Greek god of it all, and was googling things to do in Cowboy Point in winter, there was a sharp knock on her door.

She cracked it open, and he was standing out there on the landing of the spiral staircase, looking…

And the thing about Dallas was that he looked pissed. Again. As if he was doing something he very much didn’t want to do. But that in no way took away from how outrageously hot he was. She couldn’t get over it.

Ruthie didn’t know what was the matter with her. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen a good-looking man before. Not that they were particularly thick on the ground in her life in Columbus over the last six months, where she was either related to them or knew way too much about them from a lifetime of living there, but still. There was no reason at all that she should be having this reaction to someone who could barely manage to look her in the eye.

Though maybe he couldn’t look her in the eye, she scolded herself. There was nothing wrong with that. Eye contact wasn’t comfortable for everyone. Maybe she should be a little more understanding.

“If you want,” Dallas said, sounding gruff and, frankly, unwilling, “I can show you around Cowboy Point. Since you’re so drawn to it.” And when she stared at him in astonishment, he jerked his chin in the general direction of where she’d parked last night. “Besides, I’m not sure I’d trust that car in the snow.”

“Oh,” she said, very eloquently. “That would be great, I guess?”