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“Come have a hamburger,” he said. “No strings attached. I promise I’ll make you laugh.”
“How can you promise that?” she said, aware suddenly that she ached to laugh. To feel light and unburdened. To forget that she had failed at marriage and miscarried a baby. In his eyes she thought she glimpsed something of herself she had lost, a woman who had been carefree and laughter filled. She longed, suddenly, to be that woman again, even if only for a little while.
The pull of being returned to a happier self was too strong to resist.
“Okay,” she said, “A hamburger. To reassure you that I’m not in any danger of turning into a tragic cat lady. And maybe to give you a few ideas for a jacket that people won’t lose the sleeves of. And then that’s the end of this. Am I clear?”
He nodded with patent insincerity.
She looked at her watch. She could make a quick trip to the mall before she met him. If sympathy had in any way motivated this invitation, there would be nothing like a new pair of jeans and a slinky top to convince him—and herself—that she was not in need of it.
“I’ll meet you. In an hour. At Doofus’s.”
“Perfect,” he said, and smiled that slow, sexy utterly sincere smile that had convinced a zillion women before her they were the only one that mattered to him.
It was once she was safe in her car, away from the mesmerizing magnetism of him, that she allowed herself to look hard at the terrible truth he did not know…or maybe he did.
She had a crush on him! That was why she watched him run every day! Look at how easily he had overcome her objections! She had vowed one moment she was never going out to dinner with him, and broken that vow within minutes of having made it.
“I can’t do this,” she realized.
Because what if—okay it was way out there—but what if they developed feelings for each other? What if she fell in love with him, and he with her? What if all her fairy-tale fantasies roared back to life?
And what if she lost again?
“I cannot survive another loss,” she whispered. So much safer to have an unrealistic crush on a man, to watch him run, to keep a safe enough distance that each of his faults remained crystal clear, not blurred by the beauty of his physique, his eyes, the totally unexpected firmness in his voice, when he’d said, “I bet he didn’t deserve you.”
No. Here was the thing she was going to have to realize with her and with men, whether it was Marcus Pritchard, who had seemed safe and stable, or Dylan McKinnon, who seemed dangerous, but who called to some part of her that wanted an adventure. Her judgment was just plain bad.
Some people had good instincts. They knew good people from bad, they knew which horse to bet on, they got a chill up and down their spine if the airplane they were about to board was going to crash.
Katie did not consider herself one of those people. Not anymore. The girl most likely to stay married forever was now divorced. Following her heart the first time had led her to heartbreak. But had it been her heart she had followed, or a desperate need to believe in family after her own had broken apart?
She wanted to impress Dylan that she could look great in hip-hugging jeans and tops that showed a little décolleté? She had to fight that impulse and do the exact opposite! She didn’t need to upgrade her wardrobe! She needed to downplay it even more than it was downplayed now.
So, instead of driving to the mall, she drove home. Her three cats, Motley, Crew, and Bartholomew greeted her at the door with enthusiasm that could have only been earned by a tragic cat person.
Though it was still early, she reached way into the back of her closet, found her ugliest, frumpiest and most comfortable flannel pajamas. She heated a frozen pizza in the microwave and finally looked up the number of Doofus’s.
“Is Dylan McKinnon there?”
“Who’s asking?”
The question said it all. It was asked warily, as if the bartender fielded dozens of these calls. Women, infatuated beyond pride, beyond reason, calling for Dylan, after hearing he hung out there.
“Um, I was supposed to meet him there in a few minutes. Could you tell him I can’t make it?”
“You’re standing up Dylan McKinnon? Who are you? Leticia Manning?”
The mention of the young and very gorgeous Canadian actress served as a reminder of the kind of woman Dylan really went out with, the status of the kind of women he really went out with. Katie Pritchard was a plain Jane. He was a playboy. She needed to remember that.
“Unless he’s expecting more than one woman to meet him tonight—” a possibility? “—he’ll know who I am!” she said, slammed down the phone, and took a bite of her pizza. It tasted exactly like cardboard. Bartholomew climbed on her lap and she broke off a piece and fed it to him. He purred and sighed and kneaded her with his paws.
Which begged the question—what was so wrong with being a crazy cat lady? She’d send Dylan a bouquet of flowers tomorrow by way of apology. After all, he did it all the time.
Dylan took a sip of his beer, put the nine ball in the side pocket and glanced at the door. The smug sense of self-congratulation that he had felt ever since he’d so easily changed her mind about coming here was dissipating. Was she coming or not? He was a little unsettled by how tense he felt now that it was getting later and she wasn’t here. Katie was not the “fashionably late” kind of gal. It was raining quite hard now. The streets would be slick. Did her lack of coordination extend to her driving? Had she—
“Hey, boss,” Cy called, “your lady friend ain’t coming. She just called.”
Rafe Miller looked up from the pool table, guffawed with great enjoyment. “Hey, Dill, you been stood up!”
Dylan liked coming to Doofus’s because it was just a local watering hole. It was staffed by people he’d known for a long time. Most of the clients were his buddies. No one here was the least impressed with his celebrity, which at the moment, for one of the first times in his memory, he was sorry for. Guys who really knew you had no respect; they didn’t know when to back off.
“Are you seeing Leticia Manning?” Cy asked.
More guffaws.
Dylan glared at him.
“Because she was snooty sounding, just like Leticia Manning.”
Well, that left absolutely no question about who had called.
“Want me to cancel your burger?” Cy said helpfully.
“Hell, no.” That would make it too much like he cared. And he didn’t. Though when he’d seen that pain flash through her eyes at the mention of her divorce, he had cared, for a second. He had sincerely wanted to make her laugh, not just prove to his sister—and himself—that a decent girl would so go out with him.
Then there was the possibility she was teaching him a little lesson. She’d been sending his flowers too long. She knew he stood people up sometimes. She knew he’d let down Heather last night. It would be just like Katie to want him to know how it felt.
And the truth was it didn’t feel very good.
Tonight he’d been the one who had learned something, whether she’d intended it or not. It didn’t feel too good to be the one left waiting. Dumped. Stood up. Imagine Katie Pritchard being the girl who taught him that!
But he doubted Katie was trying to teach him anything. She was terrified, plain and simple. Marriage had burned her.
He thought of his parents. Maybe marriage burned everyone, given enough time. Which was why, for the past year, he’d been intent on not getting serious, not committing, not caring. Katie needed to learn just that. You could still live, without risking your heart. He bet he could have made her laugh. He bet he could show her laughing again didn’t have to mean hurting again.
If he was so determined to tangle his life with hers a little more deeply it occurred to him it was going to require more of him than he had required of himself before. He would actually have to think a bit about her, not just about himself. He would have to be a better man.
Right there at Doofus’s, with the tang of beer in the air, and pool balls clacking, Dylan McKinnon had an epiphany.
This is what his sister had tried to tell him: that he could be more. That he had not expected enough of himself. That to get a decent girl to even have dinner with him he had to be a decent man, someone capable of putting another person’s interests ahead of his own, capable of venturing out of a place where he risked nothing.
His sister had seen a painful truth. Dylan McKinnon was known as being fearless. But in the area of caring about other people, he was not fearless at all.
He was not the man his mother would have wanted him to be.
So, it was a good thing Katie hadn’t shown. Because that type of total attitude shift was the type of thing a man wanted to think about long and hard before he committed to it. Dylan didn’t want to be a better man. He liked the man he was just fine. As far as erasing that flit of sorrow from the flower lady’s eyes, he was the wrong man for the job.
“Rack ’em, Rafe. Cy, bring everyone a drink.”
“What are we celebrating?” Cy asked, suspiciously.
“Freedom,” Dylan said, remembering he’d ordered the kiss-off bouquet for Heather today, too.
That announcement was followed by some serious whistling and whooping.
But for all that he tried, and hard, to catch the mood of his own celebration, in the back of his mind a single word worried him.
Terrified.
And he just wasn’t giving up on her that easily. Not even, damn it, if it did require that he be a better man.
The fact that a bright bouquet of flowers awaited him on his desk when he arrived the next morning only made him more determined. He flicked the card open.
“Sorry I couldn’t make it last night, Love K.”
Well, at least he’d taught her something in the year he’d known her!
He sat down and thought. Obviously, a burger at a sports bar had limited appeal to Katie. He’d always been able to count on his own appeal to convince women to take a leap out of their comfort zone, but Katie just wasn’t most women. He needed a Plan B.
What would be irresistible to her? It was humbling to realize for Katie it was not him! Dylan McKinnon had become accustomed to being irresistible to women!
Whether she knew it or not, Katie had thrown down the gauntlet.
He was going to help her get back in the swing of things whether she liked it or not! To prove to his sister he could be a decent guy. Or maybe to prove it to himself.
By midafternoon he had two tickets to the most sought after event in Canada—the NHL All-Star hockey game.
He went into her store. She glanced up, looked back down hurriedly. She was blushing. “Sorry I couldn’t make it last night. Something came up.”
“What?”
She glared at him, annoyed he was rude enough to push. “Sanity.”
He reminded himself, firmly, of his goal. One outing, or two, to make her feel attractive. Confident. Happy. To be who he guessed she once had been. He’d just help her get her feet wet again, so she didn’t end up a tragic cat lady.
He guessed she had never been gorgeous, but lovely in some way that transcended whatever the current trend or fad was. She’d always had a way of holding herself that had seemed proud, as if she was above caring what others thought.
He’d just be a knight, for once in his life, show her that she didn’t have to roll over and die since her marriage had failed.
Looking at her, he realized she seemed to have worked extra hard at not being attractive today. The dress was billowing around her like a tent city, and her hair was pulled back a little too tightly from her face. Not a scrap of makeup, though now that he’d noticed her lips he realized she didn’t really need it.
“Thanks for the flowers,” he said.
“You were supposed to think it was funny.”
“Ha-ha,” he said.
She glared at him again. That was more like it, the green suddenly dancing to life in those multicolored eyes, snapping with color.
“So what can I do for you today?” she said. “Heather has been history for a full twelve hours or so. Someone else on the radar?”
If he told her she was on the radar, she’d run. He wouldn’t catch her until Alaska, and then she’d probably throw herself into the Bering Sea and start swimming. It was an unusual experience for him to be having this kind of reaction from someone of the female persuasion.
“Um, no. I’m going to take a break for a while.”
She was punching flowers into some sort of foam thing, but she lifted her eyes, looked at him, squinted.
“Uh-huh,” she said, skeptical and not even trying to hide it.
“Here’s what I was thinking. Maybe while I took a break, you could do a few things with me. Like the All-Star Game next weekend in Toronto.”
Getting tickets to that game was like winning a lottery, and he waited for her face to light up. Maybe she’d even come around the counter and give him a hug!
He was a little surprised by how much he would like to be hugged by Katie.
But instead of her face lighting up, she stabbed herself in the pad of her thumb with a rose thorn, glared at it, distracted.
“The what?” She stuck her thumb in her mouth and sucked. She really did not have to wear lipstick. Even watching her suck on that thumb was almost erotic. That was impossible! Look how the girl was dressed. He had just finished dating Miss Hillsboro Bikini, and never once felt the bottom falling out of his world like this.
Well, impossible or not, there was no denying how he was reacting.
“Haven’t you got a Band-Aid?” he suggested, just a bit too much snap in his voice.
“Oh, it’s just a little prick. They happen all the time. So, what kind of game is it you have tickets for?” she asked.
“Hockey,” he said. Obviously she was in a completely different world than him if she didn’t know that! “Canada’s national game,” he supplied when she looked blank. “Our passion, our pastime, our reason to be, during the long months of winter. You know the game?”
She took her thumb out of her mouth, thank goodness, went back to her flower arrangement. “Oh.”
She wouldn’t sound so unenthused if she knew what it took to get those tickets!
“The best players from the Western and Eastern Conferences get together and play each other. Every great player in the league on the ice at the same time.” He began to name names.
She looked as if what he was discussing was about as interesting as choosing between steel-cut and quick cook oats for breakfast.
“Everybody wants tickets to that game,” he snapped, feeling his patience begin to wane. He was being a knight, for goodness’ sake. Why was she having such difficulty recognizing that?
“Oh,” she said again, her vocabulary suddenly irritatingly limited.
“I could probably sell them on the Internet for a thousand bucks a pop.”
“Oh, well then,” she said, “don’t waste them on me.”
“It wouldn’t be a waste,” he sputtered. “You’d have fun. I guarantee it.”
“You can’t guarantee something like that!”
