She stood when he reached her table.
“Frank?” she said, feeling like a ridiculous schoolgirl.
He smiled broadly, revealing a set of white, healthy teeth that looked real. Never a thing to take for granted in the over-fifty crowd.
“You must be Julia.”
She was about to extend her hand for a handshake when he leaned in and gave her a brief, friendly hug. This could have been awkward or even creepy, but he managed to make it feel utterly natural, and Julia found herself charmed already.
“I’m going to grab a cup of coffee. Can I get you anything while I’m at the counter?” he asked.
“Oh, no.” She cast a glance at her now-cold cup of tea. “I’m fine.”
He grinned again, and she thought she detected the slightest hint of nervousness, which made her feel a little more at ease. He was human, like her.
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.”
“No!”
He shook his head, smiling ruefully. “She told me about it afterward, said I might start getting e-mail from ladies interested in going on dates with me.”
“And?”
“I thought, am I so pathetic my daughter needs to intervene in my personal life?”
“I wouldn’t say that’s pathetic. It’s kind of sweet, actually. Like an older version of Sleepless in Seattle.”
“Anyway, I figured I’d better log onto the Web site and see what the heck she’d gotten me into, and before I could stop myself I was looking at your profile and e-mailing you.”
“Wow. I’m the first person you contacted?”
“The only one. When I saw that self-deprecating smile of yours, I knew there had to be something special about you. Not many people could communicate so much with one facial expression. But you…it’s all written right there on your face.”
Julia blushed. She’d been told before that she wore her emotions on her sleeve, but she’d never quite gotten used to the fact that she could be so easily read.
“Self-deprecation is underrated,” Frank said. “A person who knows how to laugh at herself is a person I want to call my friend.”
“I’m glad you e-mailed me,” Julia said. “I heard from a bunch of men. It was kind of bewildering to get all that e-mail once I signed up on the site.”
“What made you join?”
She laughed. “Foolishness, mostly. I clicked on one of those ads by accident, and next thing I knew, I was looking at your profile.”
“It wasn’t foolishness-it was fate.”
“That sounds far more romantic than my version of it.”
He sipped his coffee. They’d already done a lot of the getting-to-know-you conversation via e-mail and phone, which, Julia realized now, was probably a mistake. It left them with less to talk about face-to-face.
“I was thinking, maybe you’d like to take a walk after this?” Frank said finally.
“Where to?”
“I do a little sculpting. I have a studio down the street. I don’t normally bring people to it, so it’s a mess, but something tells me you might enjoy it. Also, my wily daughter will be there, so you can meet the person responsible for our having met.”
“Sure, that sounds lovely. Why don’t we go now. These are portable,” she said, nodding at the paper cups.
“Great. Let’s go.”
They left the coffee shop, then headed north along a side street. The day was sunnier here than it had been in Promise, and Julia breathed in the fresh, crisp air, enjoying looking at the funky shops they passed along the way.
Frank’s gait was casual and not too hurried. He made a point of keeping the conversation rolling along, telling her anecdotes about the town of Guerneville, and Julia was grateful since she still felt too nervous to think straight.
A few minutes later, they were standing in front of a brown-shingled building with large windows and a sharply pitched roof. The first floor of the building was a business called the Green Gallery.
“This is my place. My daughter runs the gallery, and I work upstairs in the loft.”
“Oh.” Julia blinked at the news, as she quickly reformed her mental picture of Frank as retired engineer and all-around outdoorsman to…sculptor and art-gallery owner? He had a few surprises up his sleeve. She hoped his artwork wasn’t awful, so she could find something nice to say about it without lying.
“Come on in and meet Chloe.”
Julia followed him into the light, clean space of the gallery. Polished bamboo floors gleamed, and the white walls bounced light around so much that overhead lights were barely necessary.
“Hey, Pop,” said a slender, pretty, dark-haired woman who looked to be in her late twenties.
She glanced curiously from Frank to Julia, smiling warmly.
“Chloe, this is my friend Julia Morgan. She lives over at Promise Lake. I thought I’d show her around the gallery and studio.”
“Great. I just finished putting up the new stuff.”
“Chloe was an art history major in college. Poor girl can’t get a real job so she has to work for me.”
Chloe rolled her eyes at this. “Don’t believe a word he says.”
“Actually, I’m lucky to have her,” he confessed. “She had a choice between working at a prestigious gallery in San Francisco, or staying here in backwater Guerneville to help out her old pa.”
“It wasn’t such a hard choice. Dad lets me do whatever I want with this place, so I get to display the work of environmentally conscious artists. Most of the works here are made entirely with recycled materials.”
“That’s wonderful,” Julia said as her gaze landed on a dazzling installation of brightly colored smashed aluminum cans.
At first the piece looked to be made out of something else entirely, and Julia wouldn’t have guessed about the cans until she heard the words recycled materials.
“And she tells me what I’m doing wrong with my works in progress,” Frank added in a teasing tone. “She’s a brutal critic.”