A grandmother is desperate to get in touch with a Leicester man she met on holiday.
Katie Jones said she immediately clicked with 66-year-old Steve and felt a connection she never thought she would ever feel again.
She was enjoying 10 days in Benidorm, Spain, when she met Steve and his friends a few weeks ago.
At about 2pm on Wednesday, February 27, as she was sitting by the sea reading a book about The Yukon in Canada, the group of friends sat near her. Steve, whose surname she does not know, asked her about the book.
'We had a lovely time paddling'
Katie, who lives in Oswestry, Shropshire, said: “First he just asked where The Yukon was.
"Then I told him I was reading the book because I was going there in August, and he said I was very brave to be going there on my own."
She said she learned Steve worked as a driver and described him as looking like British actor Tim Roth, who starred in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction in the 1990s.
“We were looking out to sea and he said, didn’t the water look nice. I said yes. I told him, ‘It’s been ages since I had a paddle’, and he asked if I’d like to go for one.
“So we went down to the water and had a lovely time paddling.
“We’d only known each other about an hour but it didn’t feel like that.”
Steve and his friends, who included a man called Clive and a blonde woman called Jo, took Katie for a drink at the bar and Steve took down Katie’s phone number before leaving to get dinner with his friends.
The next day, Katie spotted the group in the same bar and they waved her over.
Katie said: “His friends left after a while and asked me to take care of him and we just talked and I felt like I’d known him for years.
“We just clicked. I’m an old lady and you don’t expect that sort of chemistry with someone else ever again.”
'We kissed goodbye'
She said that during the evening, Steve told her he had lost her phone number but she forgot to give him it again before they parted ways.
“He walked me part of the way back to my hotel and I told him he should head back to his hotel because it was a long way away from mine. We kissed goodbye – just a peck – and I never saw him again," Katie said.
“Every day I hoped I’d bump into him, but I didn’t.”
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Katie, a volunteer for the RAF befriending elderly veterans, is coming to Leicester next month to do training and was hoping to meet up with Steve to see if the magic was still there.
She said: “I would really love to see him again. It would be good to see him away from the sunshine and sangrias and if the connection is still there.”
Katie added: “I really anticipated seeing Steve again before I left Spain but I didn’t.”
Katie is no stranger to taking bold steps to achieve happiness. When she was 48, she abandoned her life in England and moved to the United States where she met a local man and married him.
They moved from Washington DC to Los Angeles and then, after the 1993 earthquake, to Las Vegas, where she opened a tea shop where she also sold her homemade cakes.
She spent 12 years living in the States in total, returning to England in 2005 after her husband died in a car crash.
She moved to Oswestry to be near her daughter when she became pregnant.
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Katie has been to Benidorm three times in recent years.
She said: “The people there are so friendly and although I go on my own I can happily spend the days singing karaoke and chatting with people.”
If you think you can help Katie find Steve, call reporter Tom Mack on 0116 366 5212 or email newsdesk@leicestermercury.co.uk
