Claimed by the Rebel. Jackie Braun
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Название: Claimed by the Rebel
Автор: Jackie Braun
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Контркультура
Серия: Mills & Boon By Request
isbn: 9781472001368
isbn:
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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