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“Because I’m not blinking my eyelids at you with the devotion of a golden retriever?”
Well, there was that! “Katie, don’t be impossible. I’ve got these great tickets to this great event. I know in your heart you want to say yes. Just say yes.”
“You don’t know the first thing about my heart.”
Actually, he did. He’d seen a whole lot of things about her heart in one split second last night. That’s why he was standing here trying so damned hard to be a decent guy. Obviously it was a bad fit for him. “That’s what I mean about the minefield.”
“Look, Dylan,” she said with extravagant patience, as if he was a small child, “I know most girls would fall all over themselves to do just about anything you suggested, including dogsled naked in the Yukon in the dead of winter, but I don’t like hockey.”
“Well, how do you feel about dogsledding naked, then?”
Ah, there was that blush again.
“Would you stop it? I don’t want to go anywhere with you!”
“That hurts.”
Oh, he saw that slowed her down a little bit: that he was a living breathing human being with feelings, not just some cavalier playboy.
But it only slowed her down briefly. “Don’t even pretend my saying no would hurt you. Just go pick someone else out of your lineup of ten thousand hopefuls.”
“I told you I’m taking a break.”
“Well, I told you, not with me!”
“Give me one good reason!” he demanded.
“Okay. Going out with you is too public. I don’t want my picture on the front page of the Morning Globe, I don’t want the gossip columnist dissecting what I wear, and my hair.”
“Then we’ll go someplace private.”
“No! Dylan, I don’t want anything to change. I like the way my life is right now. You might think it looks dull and boring, but I like it.”
There, he thought, he’d given it his best shot. He had tried to rescue the maiden in distress and failed. She had no desire to be rescued, he could go back to being superficial and self-centered, content in the knowledge he had tried.
She’d almost convinced him, but then he looked more closely as she jabbed the last rose into the flower arrangement and managed to prick herself again.
She glanced at him, and looked quickly away.
And that’s when he knew she was lying. She didn’t prick herself all the time. She pricked herself when she was distracted.
She didn’t like her life the way it was now. She’d settled. Katie really wanted all kinds of things out of life: dazzling things, things that made her heart beat faster, made her wake up in the morning and want to dance with whatever life offered that day.
She was afraid to hope.
And he was more determined than ever to give that back to her. But this was going to be the hard part, figuring out what was irresistible to her, not to him.
He walked back to his office, put the tickets on Margot’s desk.
“Treat hubby to a night out,” he said gruffly. Almost at his office he turned and looked back at her.
“And figure out what is the perfect date. Not for a guy. For a girl. What would be an absolutely irresistible outing to any woman? Ask your girlfriends. Get back to me.”
His receptionist was looking at him as if he’d lost his mind. He stepped into his office and slammed the door.
Later, just to show Miss Snooty next door what she was missing in the excitement department, he got on his motorcycle and pulled a wheelie right in front of her window. Just in case she’d missed the first one, he went around the block and came back and did another one. Then just for good measure, he zipped back the other way.
As always, he was completely predictable to her.
The drapes of The Flower Girl were firmly closed.
CHAPTER THREE
KATIE could hear the sound of the motorcycle coming back down the street, the sudden change in engine pitch warning her Dylan was going to pop it up again.
She firmly closed the curtains.
Good grief! You would think no one had ever said no to that man. Of course, look at him. There was a chance, and a darn good one, that no one ever had said no to him. Or at least no one female!
And no wonder. It was not just hard to say no! A woman had to manually override all the biological and chemical systems in her entire body. And then, to add to the complexity of the task, she had to exercise steely control over her emotions.
Saying no to Dylan McKinnon was not fun and it was not easy. And he knew it! Imagine him leaning over that counter, dropping his voice a dreamy notch, looking straight into her eyes and saying as clearly as if he could see her soul, I know, in your heart, you want to say yes.
Of course she wanted to say yes! Thankfully she had a policy in place for dealing with him. In the interest of self-preservation, she had developed a new number-one rule: do exactly the opposite of what she wanted to do.
It was necessary. Her very survival felt as if it depended on saying no to him. For some reason she had shown up as a blip on Dylan McKinnon’s radar. He had decided she needed something that he could give her.
But a hockey game? She considered hockey a barbaric, thinly disguised upgrade of the gladiator ring. Saying yes would be that first chip out of her soul: pretending she liked something she didn’t to please him, becoming something other than what she was just to spend time at his side!
Even the way Dylan worded his invitation to attend that hockey game with him underscored the wisdom of her rejecting it. He was off women, but she’d do? He wanted a change, so she would be a slightly interesting distraction?
A girl just had to have some pride, and Katie knew that better than anyone. She knew how much pride you had to have to come to a small town after a failed marriage. And she knew she had a fragile hold on selfpreservation. She could care about that man, and she simply did not want to. She had managed to put her life back together, barely, once, but she was pretty sure she couldn’t do it again.
Still, the past year had made her privy to some important knowledge about Dylan. His passions were furious and frantic, but thankfully short-lived. As Hillsboro’s most famous son, his every passing fancy, from motorcycle racing to whitewater rafting was carefully documented. He never stuck to anything for very long. He needed a fast pace, plenty of excitement, and if he didn’t find them, he moved on. It was his modus operandi for life. From sending his flowers for the past year, Katie knew it was doubly true for the romantic part of his life.
He sent four bouquets during the course of a relationship. The first was his nice-to-meet-you, I’m-interested. The second, usually followed fairly closely on the heels of the first, and she was pretty sure it was the great-sex bouquet. Third, came the sorry-I-forgot, which he didn’t really mean, and then the fourth was the goodbye bouquet. The cycle of a relationship that would probably take a normal person a year to play out—or at the very least a few months—he could complete in weeks.
Katie tried to sew warnings into the bouquets, bachelor buttons to signify celibacy for instance, but nobody paid the least bit of attention to the secret meanings of flowers these days, more’s the pity.
There were two notable exceptions to Dylan’s flower sending and his short attention span, one was the one bouquet he came in for once a week and chose himself.
He had never told her who it was for, but at some time she had let him start choosing his own flowers for it, even though her refrigerator room was sacred to her. Naturally, he had no idea of the meanings of what he was selecting, and yet he unerringly chose flowers like white chrysanthemums, which stood for truth, or daisies, which stood for purity and a loyal love. She never pressed about who the bouquet was for. His choice always seemed so somber, it did not seem possible it was a romantic bouquet.
The other exception to his short attention span was his business. In fact his drive, his restless nature, probably did him nothing but good when it came to running his wildly successful company, Daredevils.
He was constantly testing, developing and innovating. He loved the challenge of new products and new projects, which meant he was always on the cutting edge of business. He’d found the perfect line of work for his boundless energy. But those same qualities put him on the cutting edge of relationships, too, and not in a good way. He did the cutting!
The motorcycle roared by again, and against her better judgment she went and slid open one vertical pleat of her shades a half centimeter or so. He was wearing a distressed black leather jacket, jeans, no helmet. He looked more like a throwback to those renegades women always lost their hearts to—pirates and highwaymen—than Hillsboro’s most celebrated success story.
Dylan gunned the bike to a dangerous speed, his silken dark hair flattened against his head, his eyes narrowed to a squint of pure focus. In a motion that looked effortless, he lifted the front wheel of that menacing two-wheeled machine off the ground. He made it rear so that he looked more like a knight on a rearing stallion than a perpetual boy with a penchant for black leather. For a moment he was suspended in time—reckless, strong, sure of himself—and then the front wheel crashed back to earth, he braced himself to absorb the impact and was gone down the street.
Dammit! She knew what he was doing was immature! Silly, even. Her head knew that! But her heart was beating hard, recognizing the preening of the male animal, reacting to it with a sheer animal longing of its own.
“I should call the police,” she declared primly, even as she recognized her own lack of conviction. “I’m sure he’s being dangerous. It’s illegal not to wear a helmet.”
That, she thought firmly, was just one more reason she had to say no to him. It was a classical and insurmountable difference between them. If she ever got on a motorcycle without a helmet, the anxiety of getting a head injury or getting a ticket would spoil it for her. Obviously it was taking chances that made the experience fun for him, that put him on the edge of pure excitement.
Here he came again, but instead of popping it up this time, he slowed down and pulled into a vacant parking spot outside her shop.
She ordered herself to drop the curtain, but was caught in the poetry of watching him dismount, throwing that long, beautiful leg up and over the engine.
She prayed he was going back to work, and not—
Her shop door squeaked open. She pretended a sudden intense interest in rearranging the flowers in the pot in the window, letting her hand rest on the white heather, which promised protection. But also could mean dreams come true. She hastily turned her attention to a different pot of flowers.
“Dark in here, Katie-my-lady.”
She glanced at him, and then quickly away. She had to keep remembering his restless nature when he turned the full intensity of those blue eyes on her. Blue like sapphires, like deep ocean water, like every pirate and highwayman who had ridden before him.
“These flowers in the window were wilting. That’s why I closed the drapes.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What do you want?”
“Play hooky with me,” he said. “Come for a motorcycle ride.”
One of the flowers snapped off in her hand. She stared at it. A pink carnation, rife with its multitude of meanings: fascination, a woman’s love, I can’t forget you, you are always on my mind.
She dropped the flower on the floor and stammered, “Are you crazy? You’ve just demonstrated to the whole neighborhood how you ride that thing!”
“Oh, were you watching? I could have sworn your drapes were closed.”
It was like being caught red-handed at the cookie jar!
He bent and picked up the flower, smelled it, drawing its fragrance deep inside himself, his eyes never leaving hers. There was no way he could discern the secrets of that flower. He held it out to her, but she shook her head as if it was inconsequential, as if it meant nothing to her.
Absently, he threaded the carnation through the button hole of his leather jacket. How many men could do that with such casual panache? Wear a flower on their leather?
“We could cruise out of town,” he said, just as if she had not refused him. “The fields are all turning green, the trees are budding. I bet we’d see pussy willows. Babies, too, calves and ducks, little colts and fillies trying out their long legs.”
She could feel herself weakening, his voice a brush that painted pictures of a world she wanted to see. She knew spring was here: so many wonderful flowers becoming available locally, but somehow she had missed the essence of spring’s arrival, its promise: gray and brown turning to green, plants long dormant bravely blooming again, sudden furious storms giving way to sunshine. It was the season of hope.
In fact, Dylan McKinnon was making her feel as if she had missed the essence of everything for a long, long time. He looked so good, standing there so full of confidence, the scent of leather in the air, his hair windswept, his eyes on her so intently.
She could almost imagine how it would feel to go with him, to feel the powerful purr of that bike vibrating through her, to wrap her arms tightly around his waist, to mold herself to his power and confidence, feel them, feel him in such an intoxicatingly intimate way.
“Say yes,” he whispered. “You know you want to do something wild and crazy.”
Yes. Yes. Yes.
“No!” The vow. Do the opposite of what she wanted. “I did something wild and crazy once. It involved saying yes, too. And it was a mistake.”
They both knew she was referring to her marriage.
“You can’t go through life without making mistakes, Katie.”
“You can sure as hell try.” It was because of his bad influence on her that she was using bad language. If she let this go any further, there was no telling what his influence would do. She would become a different woman than the one she was today.
She could picture herself with her head thrown back, laughing into the wind, while she clung to the motorcycle and him. Sensuous. Exhilarated. On fire with life. Willing to take chances.
Heartbroken! she snapped back at all those dreamy voices.
“Everybody makes mistakes, Katie. You learn from them, you let them make you better, and you move on.”
“You with the charmed life!”
For a moment something so sad crossed his face that she was taken aback. But then he grinned, all devil-may-care charm again, and she could almost, but not quite, convince herself that she’d imagined it.
“What mistakes have you made?” she said. Oh, boy! She was getting sucked into this conversation when it was the last thing she wanted.
“Jumping out of an airplane a few months after signing my Blue Jays contract probably wasn’t one of my more brilliant decisions,” he said.
Was it that memory that had caused that brief sadness to chase across his features?
“So, why’d you do it?” All of Hillsboro still talked of his legendary jump. He’d agreed to do it as a fund-raiser for the local chapter of Big Brothers. Something had gone dreadfully wrong. He’d broken his arm in three places, ended his career as a pitcher before it had ever really even started. All of Hillsboro had gone into mourning over the misfortune of their most favored son.
He smiled. “I did it because I wanted to.”
His lack of regret over the incident seemed to be genuine, but it proved exactly what she had already decided about wanting.
“Wanting is not a reliable compass with which to set the course of your life,” she told him sternly. “You made an impulse choice that ruined your career.”
He touched one of the flowers in the window, absently. Surprise, surprise, a red rose. Passion. His fingers caressed the petal with such tenderness that she could not help but wonder if it wouldn’t be worth it. To give in. Just once. To give in to the impulse to play with the most dangerous fire of all: passion.
“You could look at it as an impulse choice that ruined my career,” he agreed mildly. Thankfully, he decided to leave the rose alone. “I prefer to think a series of events played out that led me to my true calling.”
She was startled by that. She had no awareness that he had moved on from his brush with fame without looking back, the same as he moved on with everything else. She shivered.
She didn’t really want to know that about him. Nor did she want to start thinking about the events of her own life in ways that took down her protective barriers, instead of putting them up, in ways that made her more open to the vagaries of life, instead of battened down against them.
Mostly she didn’t want to think about how that finger, tender on the petals of a rose, would feel if it brushed the fullness of her bottom lip.
Gathering all of her strength, she said, “I am not getting on that motorcycle with you. I like living!”
“Do you?” he asked softly, the faintest mocking disbelief in his tone. “Do you, Katie, my lady?” And with that, he turned on his heel and left her.
But the question he asked seemed to remain, burning deeper and deeper into her heart, her mind, her soul. Did she?
