Engaging Alex. Kristin Gabriel

had smiled at him.

      And he’d never recovered.

      When Alex walked inside the shop, his arrival set off a door chime and he saw Paige’s mother, Margo Weaver, turn from the potted rosebush she was grooming to greet him.

      But the moment she saw his face, she fell to the floor in a dead faint.

      Alex rushed around the counter, kneeling down beside her. He picked up the pruning shears that lay partially beneath her, then softly called her name. “Margo?”

      The sound of footsteps made him look up. He saw Paige gaping at him, horror in her big blue eyes as she looked at her unconscious mother on the floor, then at the pruning shears he still held in his hand.

      “Get away from my mother!”