“I don’t know what I’m going to do. You’ve had months to think about this, and I’ve had a couple of minutes.”

Right. It wasn’t fair of her to be sticking it to him now.

“Maybe I should skip lunch and go,” he continued. “We’ve both got a lot to think about.”

She cast a glance at him, so much larger than her, so much more male. So foreign, so other…

He both intrigued and repelled her, even now. She wanted to run away from him, and she wanted to reach out and knead the tension from his shoulders.

“I’ll be around. You’ve got my number,” she said. “Feel free to call if you want to discuss this further.”

His posture, beneath the gray wool fisherman’s sweater he wore, remained slumped. She hated to acknowledge that she’d been the one to take that toll on him. Even at her best, she’d never felt as if she’d beaten him. Until now. It was a bitter win, if it could even be called that.

He turned to go, and as she watched him walk toward the door, she had a bewildering urge to grab hold of him and beg him not to leave. But she didn’t.

Of course not.

It wasn’t in her vocabulary to ask for help.

Except now, walking out the door was the man she had a sneaking sense of dread she might need, whether she wanted to need him or not.

JULIA MORGAN had never set out to try online dating.

And as she sat in the Guerneville coffee shop, nervously scanning the passersby outside the window for a familiar face, she could hardly recall why it had ever seemed like a good idea.

It had all sort of, well…happened. First came the laptop computer her three sons had given her for her birthday. She’d never been a computer person, and she didn’t really see the need for it since she’d managed to teach for thirty years without one.

Then came her newfound love of e-mail. Who knew it could be so much fun. Instant communication with her friends, children and grandchildren. It was almost too good to be true. She could even get pictures of them on the computer, just like in all those commercials.