She sat and took advantage of the chance to stare at Frank as he waited to place his order, his back to her. He wore a sage-green T-shirt tucked into a pair of worn khaki pants, a small braided leather belt that also seemed to have lived a long and well-loved life. On his feet were a pair of brown leather thong sandals, revealing tanned skin and well-shaped toes.

The whole effect was casual, relaxed, unpretentious…

Nice.

Her gaze returned to his broad shoulders, solid and strong, tapering to a narrow waist. He looked like a man who stayed in shape, and she remembered his online profile, which had read like an itinerary at an outdoor-adventure resort-kayaking, hiking, surfing, biking…

Could Julia keep up? She managed to stay fit between her daily yoga practice, a pilates class twice a week, long walks and hikes and religiously working in her garden, but she was no extreme-sports person. Not by a long shot.

Heck, she wasn’t even sure what extreme sports meant.

Oh, well, at the age of fifty-eight, she was as happy as she could be with her body, and she wasn’t about to worry for more than a moment about how Frank Fiorelli would feel about her physique. She was strong and healthy and still looked nice in a pair of jeans, and if he wasn’t happy with that, he could keep right on looking.

Yet another glorious thing about aging-the loss of the crippling self-consciousness of youth.

Frank returned to the table with coffee in hand, sat across from Julia and grinned again. “So,” he said. “You’re even prettier than your photo. Too bad you can’t say the same about me.”

She laughed, grateful for the joke to break the ice.

“You’re the first person I’ve met online,” she confessed.

“Really?”

She nodded. “It’s even stranger than I thought it would be.”

“Can I make a confession, too?”

Oh, dear. “Sure.”

“My daughter signed me up on the site without my knowing it.”