Claimed by the Rebel

Katie struggled to keep her face composed. Yearning, sweet and tantalizing, burned through her. What she wanted to do was bury her face in the sweetness of that baby’s scent and never come up for air again.

“Leave him with me,” she whispered.

“Hey, stinker,” Dylan warned his nephew sternly, “don’t live up to your reputation.” And then he turned and followed the nurse down the hallway.

Katie watched him go, and even though she knew better, even though she was trying so hard not to get any more entangled with a man who could exercise so much power over her—without any awareness of that power on his part—she felt her treacherous heart go right down the hall with him.

Dylan found his sister. She was being prepped for surgery and needed to give him some instructions, but he was having trouble focusing on her completely.

He wanted to kill somebody, or at least hurt them badly. He wanted to kill a man he’d never met before. He wanted to kill the man who had been so selfcentered he’d left Katie all alone with her grief for that unborn child. What had she said? Her husband had been relieved.

Dylan couldn’t believe a man could look into those eyes and not find it in himself to be there, one hundred per cent for her. Not want to be there for her.

“No chocolate, candy, choking-size hazards, hamburgers or steak and lobster,” his sister said.

Dylan focused on Tara. Sheesh. She had been given something to control pain until her surgery. “What are you talking about?” he asked her.

She sighed elaborately. “Earth calling Dylan. I’m trying to tell you how to take care of a baby.”

“Me?” he said. Katie’s face faded from his mind and he focused on his sister. “I’m not looking after Jake. Where’s Sam?”

“San Francisco. Fogged in. So unless you want your favorite nephew to go to foster care, time to step up to the plate.” She giggled helplessly. “Step up to the plate. Get it? That’s priceless, given your old career.”

“Ha, ha,” he said without an ounce of humor. “When’s Sam going to get in?”

“Dylan, I have no gift for predicting the weather even when I’m not on drugs.”

After getting a ton more of unhelpful advice from his sister, Dylan went back down the hall to the emergency waiting room. Katie had found a box of toys, and was now sitting on the floor with his nephew, unmindful of getting her outfit dirty; though of course that was, one would assume, why you wore an outfit like that. You wouldn’t worry about wrecking it, you’d hope you could! Thank goodness, she had lost the babushka somewhere.

Or maybe not. Because without it, her hair fell like a shining wave to the slenderness of her shoulder.

As always happened, it felt as if it was not the outfit he saw at all. It was the look on her face, the sweet curve of her smile.

He realized why he had been so anxious to focus on the killing of her ex-husband. Because to focus on her was to threaten what remained of his tattered control after he had seen her do her spontaneous little dance over the Tac Revol tickets, after he had tasted the clear-brook sweetness of her kiss.

There was a look on her face as she studied Jake that was rapt, even more beautiful than when she had danced. She looked serene, almost like a Madonna.

A decent girl. A wholesome girl. A smart girl. A girl absolutely born to be a mother.

He was well aware that there on the cold hospital floor sat a woman he’d offered everything to: he’d offered to wine and dine her, escort her to the most-sought-after functions, take her on his motorcycle, give her dreams carved in ice.

She’d said no to each of his invitations without even a moment’s hesitation. And then when he’d finally done something genuinely nice—as accidental as it may have been that she thought those tickets were for her mother—then it had been her turn to issue the invitation.

That was what Katie was doing even now, sitting on the floor, playing with the baby, shining with an inner light that was nearly blinding. She was issuing him an invitation to a life he had turned his back on when his mother had gotten ill. A life that he had decided was too full of foibles, too unpredictable, that extracted too great a cost.

That’s why he had avoided her ever since she had ever so tentatively extended her invitation for coffee.

He was not unaware of a feeling of the universe conspiring against him. He’d decided, after seeing her dance with the Tac Revol tickets, after her kissing him, that the game was up. Over. The stakes had become a little too high for his tastes. And yet here he was, tangled with her again.

“Thanks, Katie,” he said, coming up to her.

“Is your sister okay?”

“Whacked out on drugs. She seems to think I’d be a good candidate to look after Jake.”

“Aren’t you?”

What had he ever done to deserve the look of trust on her face?

“No.”

“Haven’t you ever looked after Jake before?”

“I’ve taken him out a couple of times by myself. To the mall. And the park. The little devil is a chick magnet. And the man-with-baby thing is unbelievable. The women are all over me when I have Jake.” He knew exactly what he was trying to do. Put back the barrier that had been so conveniently provided by names of women she didn’t know. Tara. Sarah. Janet. Margot.

“Trust you to see a baby as useful for that reason!”

“His usefulness is limited,” Dylan said. It was working. She looked justifiably horrified. Part of him was thinking, Katie, my lady, please see me in a bad light. You make the decision to not have anything to do with me. Because I can’t seem to follow through when I make that decision about you.

“The baby’s usefulness is limited?” she asked, indignant.

“Oh, sure, he’s cute, but he’s basically a poop machine. Just when things have the potential to get interesting, he fills his pants. He actually leaked on me once. I thought I was going to hurl.”

“Daredevil Dylan McKinnon was going to throw up over a little baby leak?” She started to laugh.

“Don’t be so damned sanctimonious. You weren’t there. The horror was unimaginable, even for someone like you, who probably has a fairly good imagination. Have you ever had to deal with a situation like that?”

“I used to babysit in high school. I wouldn’t let a baby leak scare me!”

He snorted. “That’s like a soldier who has never been in a combat zone saying bullets don’t scare him.”

“It’s not quite the same thing,” she said dryly.

“Yeah, well, baby leaks scare me, and I’m man enough to admit it.”

“I appreciate your vulnerability,” she said, tongue-in-cheek.

“Don’t tell anybody. I’d be ruined. And don’t you start smiling!”

Really, her smile was becoming the hardest thing to handle. It lit something in her. Had he known, right from the beginning, in some place he’d been afraid to go within himself, that her smile would be like this? Worth it. Worth everything. Even the uncertainty of his own soul. Even coming face-to-face with all his own fears.

“Why does everyone think me being tortured is funny?” he asked. He was asking the universe as much as her!

“Oh, Dylan, it’s not exactly you being tortured that’s funny. It’s you being terrified of something so darling as a little baby.”

That showed what she knew! “You won’t think he’s such a little darling when his forehead wrinkles up, he holds his breath and starts turning red.”

He could see way too clearly that he was playing with something far too big now, something he might not be able to control. He’d never be able to forget the beauty he discovered, all her hopes and dreams in her face.

Wasn’t that at the heart of this whole thing? Some instinct had told him she was beautiful, and he had wanted her to look beautiful again, had wanted to see those hopes and dreams shining in her face, had needed to know that some precious part of her had not been destroyed by whatever she had been through.

Proof his plan was working—there she sat on the floor in her Maria Von Trapp outfit, playing with baby toys, radiating absolute and extremely worrisome beauty.

“Hey,” she said, looking up at him, wrinkling her nose. “Don’t look so worried.”

He had that sensation, watching her play building blocks with his nephew, that Katie could know him in ways he had never allowed people to know him. No one in the world ever guessed when he was feeling pressure, when he was rattled, when he was scared. Not even when he’d been posed at the door of that airplane waiting to jump had he betrayed how truly frightened he was. He’d made some wisecrack remark that had made everyone laugh.

But if she had been there he had the uneasy feeling she would have known, just as she had known to take those car keys from his hand a half an hour ago.

And Dylan McKinnon wasn’t quite sure if it felt good or bad to be quite so transparent to another human being.

“So, what’s the battle plan?” she asked him, brushing off her skirt/short fashion disaster and getting to her feet.

“The same as any battle plan,” he told her. “Survival.” And he was not sure he was referring to looking after a baby, either!

She looked askance at him. “Battle plans aren’t about survival,” she pointed out. “They’re about victory. Winning.”

Now, if anyone should know that, it should be him. He did know that. He’d had a battle plan all along, prove a decent girl would go out with him, give her the gift of hope in return and then, mission accomplished, withdraw. Now his battle plan was wavering before him like a mirage of an oasis on a blistering desert afternoon.

But now he saw it differently. Survival. His.

“I can take it from here,” he said bravely. “I’ll take him over to my sister’s. I have her key. The place is babyproofed and supplied.”

Something flitted across her face. Relief? But it was quickly replaced by another look. Determination. “You don’t think I’m leaving you alone with this baby, do you?”

“I can manage a baby.”

She rolled her eyes. “No, you can’t.”

He should have felt insulted, but he didn’t. He felt relieved. And, oddly enough, not relieved at the very same time. As confused as he had ever felt. Before, even if she had been saying no, he’d felt as if he was in control. Now he didn’t. And he was pretty sure Dylan McKinnon out of control was not going to be a good thing.

“Really,” he said, a bit more forcefully, “I can manage it. I make million-dollar decisions every day. Forty-two people work for me. I’m the honorary spokesperson for three different charitable organizations. What is one twenty-pound baby in comparison to all that?”

She looked entirely unimpressed. “Dylan McKinnon, have you ever kept a plant alive for more than three weeks?”

“What kind of plant?” he hedged.

“Any kind. A garden flower? A houseplant?”

Mental pictures of a sordid history that included many dead, dead plants formed in his mind’s eye.

“Anything green?” she asked, as if she was relaxing her standards to give him a chance.

“Bath towels?”

She shook her head. “Living green.”

He lived in a condo. He didn’t even have to remember to water the lawn! “The fact that plants, er, fail to thrive around me is irrelevant.”

“Hmm. How about a puppy? Or a kitten?” She looked at him, shook her head. “A goldfish? Guppies?”

He scowled at her. “My lifestyle has never allowed for pets.”

“Precisely my point. You don’t know how to care for things.”

“I travel! I know how to care for things! My car is cared for! That’s diamond finish on the wax job in case you didn’t notice.”

“Living things,” she amended.

Her chin was getting a stubborn set to it. A smart man would have been running. But he was in charge of a baby now, and it was hard to run with twenty pounds of squirming baby under your arm, and plus, he was thinking he kind of liked her chin pointed at him like that.

“Speaking of cars,” she said, “do you have a car seat?”

And that clinched it. Dylan McKinnon knew, that whether he wanted to or not, he needed Katie Pritchard right now. Only a girl like her could be trusted to think of something as all important to his nephew’s wellbeing as a car seat.

The baby did that wrinkly thing with his forehead, held his breath and started to turn a very unbecoming shade of red.

How humiliating. Dylan didn’t just need Katie. He needed her desperately.

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