Claimed by the Rebel: The Playboy's Plain Jane / The Loner's Guarded Heart / Moonlight and Roses

She’d been invited to six different plays, all of which she wanted desperately to see. She’d been invited hiking, fishing and in-line skating. She’d been invited to dinners, sporting events, to meet celebrities. Oh, and she couldn’t forget the motorcycle ride, over which she still felt a crippling regret, a swooshing sensation in her stomach, every time she thought of that glorious afternoon that had not been.

Still, the barrage was beginning to tell on her. It was getting so that she jumped every time the door to her shop opened. She was feeling like a nervous wreck, her very skin seemed to tingle, in the way that limbs that had gone numb tingled when they came back to life.

That’s what was happening to her, whether she wanted it to or not. She had a feeling of being acutely, vibrantly alive.

Alive in a way she had not felt alive in a long, long time. She had not even been aware of the hibernation state she had fallen into, until he came along, woken her up, made demands of her, challenged her.

She glanced at the clock. Nearly one. She sidled over to the window. There he was, right on schedule. While she looked worse and worse—albeit deliberately—he looked better and better.

Today he was wearing jogging pants that hung low on his hips, an old Blue Jays jersey with no sleeves, a ball cap pulled low over his eyes against the brilliance of the spring day. Despite how new the days of spring were, Dylan was beginning to look sun-kissed, golden. It wasn’t even possible. He had to be artificially tanning. She could never respect a man who used a tanning bed.

Was Dylan stopping?

Her traitorous heart hammered as if it couldn’t care a less whether he used a tanning bed! He was slowing. The wild beat of her heart reminded her what it was to feel so alive.

She made a mad dash for the security of her counter—she was going to be in better shape than him if this kept up—and made a great show of stuffing flowers into a bouquet that she had no order for. Begonias for beware. Tuberoses for dangerous pleasures. And then her fickle fingers plucked a pink camellia—for longing—out of one of the jugs. And some gloxinia for love at first sight.

She had left her door open today, and so the bell didn’t even ring warning her he was there, looking at her. She smelled him.

A scent more delicious than the aroma of spring that wafted through her door—masculine, tangy, mountain pure—and enveloped her.

“I like the way you look when you work,” he decided after a long moment.

How could he possibly not notice these overalls? Any reasonable man would have seen overalls printed with huge pink peonies and vibrant green vines as a deterrent, but not him.

Peonies symbolized shame, which is what she felt about her inability to control the wild thudding of her heart as soon as he was around. They had other meanings, too. Happy life. Happy marriage. She had dared to dream those dreams once. She was over it.

She shoved the flower arrangement away from herself. Don’t ask. “And how do I look when I work?”

“Intense. As if those flowers speak a language and you understand it.”

“Hmm.” She glanced at the bouquet. It spoke a language all right. It told her she was a woman dangerously divided.

“And also you stick your tongue out when you work.”

“I do not!”

“Umm-hmm, caught right between your front teeth, like this.”

She looked at his tongue. A mistake.

“I see you managed to lose the sleeves for your shirt,” she said, not wanting him to notice that she was a woman who looked at a man’s tongue and understood the meaning of pink camellia in a way she never quite had before.

“I ripped them off. By the way, we’re completely bogged down on that jacket design. Runners like no sleeves.”

Especially runners built like him. No sleeves. Show off those newly tanned arms. Get any girl you wanted.

Naturally that was the only reason for his persistence. No one had played hard-to-get with him before. Though she didn’t feel as if she was playing. Running for her life was more like it. If she ran any harder, she was going to have to start looking for a sleeveless jacket of her own!

“Are you tanning?” she said, as if that was the mystery she was trying to solve by looking at his bare arms for far too long.

“Tanning? Even I haven’t hit the beach yet.”

“Not that kind of tanning!” The vain kind.

He actually threw back his head and laughed. “Katie, you have me so wrong. I’m not that kind of guy.”

That’s exactly what she was afraid of. That she wanted him—no, desperately needed for him—to be vain and self-centered, and that he wasn’t. A part of her was always insisting it knew exactly who he was.

“Tell me you can’t picture me in a tanning bed,” he pleaded.

She wasn’t even sure what a tanning bed involved beyond absurd self-involvement. Nudity? She could feel a blush that was going to put that pink camellia to shame moving up her neck.

“So, what can I do for you today?” she asked, all brisk professionalism.

“Say yes,” he said, placing both hands and his elbows on the counter, leaning over it, fixing his gaze on her.

“You haven’t asked me anything yet!” Except if she could picture him on a tanning bed, and she was not saying yes to that! Even if, despite her best efforts to stop it cold, a sneaky picture was trying to crowd into her head.

“I know, but just to surprise me, say yes.”

“Is it your birthday?”

“No.”

“Then I have no occasion to surprise you.”

“Would you surprise me if it was my birthday?”

She was hit with an illuminating moment of selfknowledge. She was coming to love these little conversational sparring matches. She only pretended to hate them. She only pretended to herself that she wanted him to keep on running by her door. In some part of her, that she might have been just as content to keep a secret from herself, she would be devastated if he stopped popping in.

He was delivering what she needed most, even if she wanted it the least: he was delivering the unexpected; he was shaking up her comfy, safe little world; he was making her want again.

Dylan McKinnon was a born tease, a born charmer. He had a great sense of humor and a delightful sense of mischief. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, these spontaneous, unscheduled interchanges added spark to her day, brightness to her world, a lightness to her step. Not that she would ever let him see anything beyond her aggravation.

“No, I wouldn’t surprise you even if it was your birthday. I’m not the kind of person who does surprises well.”

She knew, even if he wouldn’t admit it, that was the biggest surprise of all to him. That anybody could say no to him. Some days it was all that gave her strength. Knowing if she ever weakened and said yes, it would be the beginning of the end. Before she knew it she’d be getting the equivalent of the fourth bouquet—the nice-knowing-you bouquet.

“Au contraire, Katie, my lady, I think you are full of the most amazing surprises.”

His voice had gone soft, his gaze suddenly intent, stripping. He did this—went from teasing to serious in the blink of an eye. It left her feeling off balance, unsettled. Alive.

“I assure you, I am not full of surprises.” But hadn’t she just surprised herself by acknowledging how she was coming to look forward to his visits?

He shrugged, unconvinced. “Do you want to know when my birthday is?”

He was back to playful again, and he wagged his eyebrows at her with such exaggerated hopefulness she had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing.

“If I did want to know your birth date,” she said, struggling for composure, “I could find an old baseball card, I’m sure. Just think, I could find out all kinds of interesting information about you. How much you weigh, how tall you are, all your baseball stats. I could be just like all the other girls.”

“No you couldn’t,” he said, serious again, quiet. “You could never be like the other girls, Katie.”

She didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, and she was not going to let him know she cared by asking!

He sighed, looked at her with aggravation, then smiled as if he’d hit a home run. “What would you think about hitting opening day at the Ice Hotel, in Quebec? Coincidentally, it coincides with my birthday. Approximately.”

She scowled at him. Looked over his shoulder. Today was the first day it had been warm enough to leave her door open, spring warmth creeping in, full of promise. It was not the kind of day that normal people thought about ice hotels.

She had seen pictures of the Ice Hotel. It was magnificent: every piece of the structure, from walls, to floors, to beds, to vodka glasses carved out of ice. Seeing the ice hotel was on her list of one hundred things she wanted to do someday, right along with swimming with dolphins. How had he managed to stumble onto something from her list?

She eyed him suspiciously. He was a man driven. He probably broke into her apartment when she wasn’t there and found her list.

Then she sighed. How much easier all this would be if she really could believe the worst of him. That he tanned. That he stalked. But no matter how badly she wanted to believe it to protect herself, she had that sense again, of knowing him.

She had a weird kind of trust in him even if he had spoiled the Ice Hotel for her.

Somehow, now, knowing she would be seeing it alone, when she had been invited to see it with him wrecked it for her. She would never be able to see those caribou-skin-covered beds now without wondering—

“No,” she said, and her voice sounded just a teensy bit shrieky.

“Hey, it’s not until next year.”

“Dylan, you strike me as the man least likely to plan for something a year in advance.”

“Not true. I mean, okay, I might have a slight problem with birthdays, but other than that I’m quite good at planning ahead. The next line of Daredevils jackets, for instance, will come out a year from now. If we can ever decide on a design.”

“Well, the answer is still no.”

“Ah,” he said with a sad and insincere shake of his head, “Shot down again.”

“Dylan, I wish you’d stop this.”

“No, you don’t,” he said softly, suddenly serious again.

She folded her arms firmly over the bright pink peonies on her chest, but it didn’t matter how she tried to hide those peonies. That was her shameful truth. She didn’t really want this to stop, and it was nothing but embarrassing that he saw that so, so clearly.

If she really wanted it to stop, after all, she’d just say yes to something. Anything. Motorcycles or rollerblading or dinner and dancing. And then this whole thing would follow a very predictable pattern, the age-old formula for every story. It would have a beginning. A middle. And an end.

An end, as in stopped. Over. He probably wouldn’t even drop in here anymore.

“I’m not going out with you, Dylan,” she said. “Not ever. You must have better things to do with your time than pester me.”

“Ah, Katie, my lady, oddly enough I’ve come to adore pestering you.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” she said solemnly.

He laughed. His laughter was beautiful, it twinkled through his eyes, showed the whiteness of his teeth, the strong column of his throat. He laughed from his belly, with sincere enjoyment, a contagious joie de vivre. But his laughter just made her more aware of how much she stood to lose the moment she said yes.

Sitting at his desk, throwing foam basketballs at his net and missing with heart-wrenching regularity, Dylan McKinnon was struck by inspiration.

He realized he had been going about this the wrong way. He’d asked Margot to find out for him what girls liked, and gotten more than what he bargained for when their answers had poured in. He’d tried to talk Katie into doing what he liked, but with the same result.

But he had always known she wasn’t like any other girl he’d ever met. Her ability to say no to him being an unfortunate case in point.

It was time to tackle this differently.

He thought about what he knew about Katie for sure. He knew she was heartbroken.

Aside from that he knew she liked books and possibly cats. She was devoted to the library.

She wanted to swim with dolphins. And he knew he’d seen just the tiniest flicker of interest in her eye when he’d mentioned the Ice Hotel.

Absently he did an Internet search. Cats + books + libraries.

Astonishingly he got a hit, and it was close to home, too. The gods had taken pity on him, seen the worthiness of his mission. Because there it was, as simple as that: the event she would find irresistible. The Toronto Public Library was hosting a fund-raising meet and greet with famous cat cartoonist Tac Revol. Tickets, naturally, were sold out, an obstacle that meant absolutely nothing to Daredevil Dylan McKinnon. By the end of the week, he had them.

He walked into her store, practically swaggering with confidence. He paused and studied her. She was trying not to acknowledge him. Could she possibly be miffed that he had not been in here every day? Oh, yes, he thought happily, that seemed to be a distinct possibility! Did she look different?

Yes, much worse than she had a week ago. She had her hair loose, which was unusual, but the style was uninspiring, lying limp to the curve of a shoulder hidden by a ruffled neckline. The skirt was a multilayered affair in several deep and distressing shades of purple.

She looked everywhere but at him. Then she met his eyes, smiled with bright phoniness, and said, “So, have you met someone new? Time to send out your famous let’s-get-to-know-each-other bouquet?”

Ah, so that’s why she thought he hadn’t been around. “No, I haven’t met anyone new,” he said.

“Well, time’s awasting,” she said, still spilling over with phony brightness. “If you’re going to keep up your same schedule, a woman a month, for this year, you’ll have to get busy.”

How right his sister had been. No decent girl wanted to go out with a guy like that.

“One of my clients left me her granddaughter’s phone number, even though I advised her not to.” UnKatielike, she was babbling. More hurt that he had not been by than she would ever admit?

He was not even going to answer her about somebody’s granddaughter. As if he would ever phone a girl he had never met. No sense telling Katie that. His sister probably would not believe him, either. A man who had turned over a new leaf had to prove it. No one was going to take his word for it. But had he turned over a new leaf? There was that feeling again, of not knowing himself.

Without a word he laid the tickets on the counter.

She glanced at them, and went to push them back. But as her hand touched them, she really looked at the tickets, and her eyes went round. He was very pleased. It was so evident she coveted those tickets.

“Tac Revol,” she breathed. “Ohmygod. How did you get these? They’re harder to come by than two scoops of pistachio on the moon!”

“I thought you might like them,” he said solemnly. The look on her face had been what was harder to come by than two scoops of pistachio on the moon. He had managed, finally, to make her happy. The shadow of wariness disappeared from her features.

“For me?” she breathed with disbelief and delight. And then the unexpected happened. She picked up both tickets, and began to dance around her shop. She came out from behind the counter and whirled by him hugging both tickets to her bosom.

The dress suddenly didn’t seem so monstrously ugly as the full skirt moved around her, twirled up to show a beguiling glimpse of legs so long and slender his mouth went dry. Her long hair was doing gypsy things, and the neckline of the blouse had slipped sideways, showing him the creamy perfection of her skin, the curve of her shoulder.

After he’d watched her drop that vase full of roses, and trip over the edge of a rug, he’d always kind of written her off as a klutz. But now he saw how wrong he had been.

She was graceful and sensual, at ease in her body.

But he could see the truth now, so clearly it hurt his head.

True beauty had a shine to it.

A shine that could not be disguised, or manufactured, either.

Katie Pritchard was beautiful.

He registered this fact slowly, stunned. It had been necessary for him to become a better man to even begin to see the truth about her.

Really, now was the time to break it to her that only one ticket was for her. And the other was for her escort. Him.

But somehow he didn’t want to stop the dance, kill the radiant smile on her face. And somehow he needed some time alone with this astonishing revelation. Katie was beautiful. In a way that could change a man’s life in ways he was not prepared to have it changed.

He thought of what he had come to know about her over the past year, and even more in the past two weeks: that she was funny and shy and smart and sassy. And eminently decent. He realized exactly why he had avoided girls like her.

“My Mom is going to be in total shock,” she told him, finally, stopping in front of him. Her brow was just a little dewy from exertion, her breath was coming in faint pants.

A shameful waste of passion.

“She has tried everything to get tickets to this event,” Katie rushed on. “She even offered her first-born child. Which would be me. Oh, I could just kiss you!”

He closed his eyes and puckered up, but nothing happened. When he opened them again, she had whirled away, was in the back room on the phone. He felt an astonishing yearning to know what her lips would have tasted like, even though he now knew her to be far more dangerous than he had ever guessed.

Well, to his detriment, he had never shown nearly enough caution around anything dangerous.

“Mom,” she said, breathlessly into the phone, “You’ll never guess what just happened. I have tickets to Tac Revol!”

He stood there for a moment, letting her excited voice wash over him, thinking maybe he was too late. She already was a crazy cat lady, that was the only type of person who could get so excited about those tickets!

He was aware, suddenly, almost sadly, that he had gotten exactly what he wanted. He had transformed her. This was the moment he had waited for and worked toward. His stated mission was over, except for the going-out-with-him part.

He had seen her. Passionate. Laughter filled. Playful. This moment had come out of nowhere, a gift almost as good as getting to see her swim with dolphins. But what was even more astonishing than having seen her was the glimpse of himself. This was the kind of girl a man could fall in love with, before he even knew what had happened.

A woman who loved her mother. He was not sure any of his other recent girlfriends had ever mentioned a mother to him!

Love. He didn’t like it that that word had entered his mind in connection with Katie. Thankfully, she was the kind of girl a man like him was not really worthy of since he was not certain he could sustain this new and honorable self for long enough. He might even have bad genetics.

His father had managed a pretext of honor for thirty-five years! His father had taken a vow to love and honor and cherish, through better or worse, and he had broken that vow. He had institutionalized his wife. If that wasn’t bad enough, he was reluctant to go and see her. Dylan was willing to bet it had been more than two months since his father had visited his mother. He suspected a new lady friend. And then his sister wondered what was wrong with him when he could not bring himself to return his father’s calls? The events of his mother’s illness had sent Dylan into a state of shock. He could not believe the fabric of a life that had seemed so strong, so real, could be so easily torn. He had become a man who did not believe in anything anymore.

And yet, looking at Katie talking to her own mother, he thought, A man could believe in that.

He realized the enormity of his error. He’d told himself he had been trying to give her back something she had lost. Now he saw he had tried to give her back what he missed about himself.

Hope. Belief. Trust.

He was not the man for this task. Foolish to have taken it on.

Katie glanced at him. Suddenly her whole demeanor changed. “Mom, I’ll call you back.”

“Dylan?”

“Huh?”

“Are you okay?” She came out of the back room, came and stood looking up at him.

He pasted his breeziest smile on his face, tried to see the plain Jane in her. But he saw something else. A girl who needed a man who could be one hundred per cent real. Katie needed someone brave enough to trust her with who he was once he laid down the shield.

He folded his arms over his chest. He wasn’t ever having a relationship with her. He’d done the decent thing. He’d given her back her spirit, however briefly. Both of them knew now that it had only been hidden, not lost.

And what of his own spirit?

He was aware of his lack, that he had overdeveloped many sides of his personality: strength, daring, persistence. Others he had managed to totally ignore: sentiment, softness, vulnerability. If he let this thing with Katie go any further, he was going to get to the place where he really hurt, and dammit, he didn’t want to go there! He was not the least bit interested in discovering his own humanity, what lay beyond the fearless facade.

He was about fun and danger, and lovely combinations of both. He was not about self-discovery. In fact he could honestly say he hated stuff like that. Nothing could bring on that nice-to-have-known-you bouquet faster than a girlfriend wanting to have a deep and meaningful conversation.

“Dylan, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said.

She looked doubtful. “Did you want to see Tac Revol?”

“Excuse me?” he said, lifting an eyebrow at her. “Like, I’d be caught dead at something like that!”

For a moment she looked unconvinced, and then her face relaxed.

“Oh. Of course you wouldn’t! You probably don’t even know Tac Revol spells Cat Lover, backward. You’ve just been so persistent. I thought, oh, never mind what I thought.” Her smile came back. “So, you don’t care if I take my mom?”

“I’m glad you’re taking your mom.” He ordered himself to stop talking. McKinnon, get out. Get out with your life. Full retreat. “I wish I could make my mom so happy. Just one more time.”

“Is she gone, Dylan?” she asked softly.

Such a complicated question. “Yes,” he said gruffly. She was gone. The mother of his youth, brilliant, witty, warm, loving, capable, sensitive, she was gone. And she was never coming back.

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

Everything brave and fearless in him was collapsing in the face of the light in her eyes, the wariness washed from them, replaced with something so warm, a place a man could lay down his shield and rest his head.

Katie Pritchard was beautiful in a different way than he had ever experienced beautiful before.

Hers was a kind of beauty that changed the things it touched, made them need to be worthy of her. She was deep and real and genuine, and she’d already been stuck with one guy who wasn’t anywhere near worthy of those things, who could not live up to her standard.

And that knowledge of her and what would be required of any man who linked his life with hers, even temporarily, made him feel oddly fragile, as if he had inadvertently touched something sacred. He was aware of feeling the route he was on had taken a dangerous twist and become very, very scary. Scary? But that was impossible. The Daredevil Dylan McKinnon was fearless. A little snip like her was not going to bring him to his knees.

Or maybe she was.

Because she reached up and touched his cheek with her hand, soothingly, as if she understood all the secrets he was not telling her.