“She went hiking with me once, saw a snake about ten steps into the trail, and then ran back to the car,” Rachel said.

Willa shivered. “I don’t like snakes.”

“Most snakes are nice,” Colin said.

“Oh, great,” Willa said as she walked to the door. “You like snakes.”

Colin followed her out. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. In fact, I could show you one you might like.”

“I don’t want to see your snake, thank you very much. Anyway, I said I didn’t like them, not that I was afraid of them.”

“Is that a challenge?” he asked.

“What is with you and challenges? No.”

“Get a room already,” Rachel said as they left.

“I heard that,” Willa called as the door closed behind them.

Yes, Rachel Edney believed in love.

And she knew it when she saw it.

They drove through the entrance of Cataract National Forest, along winding roads with savagely beautiful vistas. There were several lookouts along the way where people could park and simply stare out over the horizon. A few of the lookouts even provided views of some of the waterfalls the forest was known for. Most of the waterfalls, though, could be accessed only on foot.

When Colin parked in the gravel lot at one of the trail heads, Willa looked around and said, “Where are we going, exactly?”

“To Tinpenny Falls.”

All things considered, that was a relief. Tinpenny Falls was a popular attraction, and the trail was probably not a treacherous one. She’d had septuagenarians come into her store and tell her they’d hiked the Tinpenny Falls trail. If they could do it, surely she could. “Did you ever hike these trails when you lived here?” she asked, still sitting in the car, stalling.

Colin unbuckled his seat belt. “No.”

“So this is the first time you’ve been here?”

“No, this isn’t the first time I’ve been here. Don’t worry.” He reached over and put his hand on her knee. His skin was warm against her air-conditioning-cooled leg, and it made her breath catch. “I know where we’re going. When I come back for visits, I always hike. It helps me cope.”

“Cope with what?”

“With being here.”

Not giving her a chance to respond, he got out and shrugged on a backpack, clicking the front strap around his waist.

This was certainly a strange seduction, she thought as she got out of the car. In fact, she’d been so caught up in his challenges to how she lived her life that she’d never actually questioned what his real motivation might be. Until now. And it was quite a revelation, how little this really had to do with her.

Colin headed down the trail, and she reluctantly followed him into the leafy green beyond. He was a natural tour guide, pointing out interesting flora and the differences between new tree growth since the logging stopped and old growth that had been preserved. She didn’t pretend to be fascinated. She mostly looked for snakes. She wasn’t a nature girl, though for some reason he wanted her to be. He wanted her to be a lot of things. He’d told her that she had inspired him to leave, to follow his own path, and she was slowly beginning to understand that her life here, the fact that she came back and stayed, challenged how he’d chosen to live his own life. He didn’t think he belonged here, so she was making him face some uncomfortable facts. People adapt. People change. You can grow where you’re planted.

And Colin didn’t like it one bit.

Not that she was particularly pleased to realize she’d grown to like this place far more than she’d ever thought she would.

So where did the seduction fit in? Was it only a means to an end, part of his trying to influence her to change to fit his expectations, so he could go back to thinking he’d made the right decisions in his life?

She didn’t think so, but she couldn’t be sure.

They stopped for water and the snacks Colin carried in his backpack, and she hadn’t realized how winded she’d gotten. She was thankful for the opportunity to rest and watch the quiet progress of a group on horseback across the river on the park’s only horse trail. But once the break was over, Colin was off again.

They finally reached the top of Tinpenny Falls, and it was a magnificent sight. The river leading to the precipice of the falls was very calm and surprisingly shallow. But when the water met the edge of the rock, it roared over and dropped more than a hundred feet into a pool littered with large, flat rocks below.

This was the area’s most famous waterfall, named after a handsome but boastful man named Jonathan Tinpenny. As the story went, almost two centuries ago, Mr. Tinpenny rode on horseback from his home in Charleston, South Carolina, through the rolling green mountains of western North Carolina, in search of the waterfalls he’d heard were in this area, where the waters were reportedly healing and there were claims of curative miracles. Mr. Tinpenny was only in his twenties at the time, but rheumatism came early to the men in his family. Though he suffered from this ailment, Mr. Tinpenny made the pilgrimage by himself out of pride for his supposed fortitude, because he was the youngest, tallest, and most hardy of his brothers. But he wasn’t expecting the roads in the high, cool mountains to become so rough and rutted. He wasn’t expecting a land of clouds. He led his horse through quagmires in the road that were waist-deep, and he filled several bottles with fog to take home with him, because he didn’t think anyone would believe how thick it was. The journey was hard on him. When he found Tinpenny Falls, he was almost delirious with pain. He lost his footing and fell over. Miraculously, he survived, and he was found by hunters only hours later. He was taken home by train, where he slept most of the time in a luxuriously appointed private car. He claimed the waters must have, indeed, been healing, because look how hard his journey was on him to get there, and how easy it was on him to get home. At his funeral years later, his children opened those jars of fog he’d collected, and legend had it that fog as thick as smoke filled the city for days.

Tourists loved that story. And they loved to buy those commemorative Jars of Fog in town.

But as beautiful as it was, this obviously wasn’t the destination Colin had in mind. He led her across a natural bridge of flat rocks to the other side of the falls. “What made you decide to become a landscape architect?” Willa asked, when he reached back and took her hand in his as they walked in single file.

He shrugged, still trudging forward. “There’s a grove of hickory trees on my parents’ estate, long rows of trees with their branches stretching into each other, constantly having to be cut back. I remember going out there when I was a boy and lying under them and just staring up at the canopy. My mother used to call it my thinking place. There was an uneasy symmetry to them. Their chaos was given structure by the landscapers, but that structure was always threatened by their own wild nature. I decided landscaping was like lion-taming,” he said, looking over his shoulder with a smile. “But I didn’t decide to go into landscape architecture until after I graduated from college. My undergraduate degree is in finance, which is what my dad wanted, because that was his degree, too. But after college, just as an excuse not to go home, I went on a tour of Europe with my girlfriend at the time, and the castle gardens there sort of reawakened my desire to lion-tame.” He paused. “And then there was you.”

“Yes,” she said, knowing where this was going. “And then there was me.”

“I was pretty miserable in college, and I remember thinking to myself, Willa Jackson is probably doing exactly what she wants to do with her life right now. You went out with such a bang.”

“This may come as a surprise to you, Colin, but I wasn’t any more happy when I left than when I was here. I was wild and irresponsible and flunked out of college. I was working as a gas station attendant and was two weeks away from losing my apartment when my dad died. I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t come back.”