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

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СКАЧАТЬ a few squares. Since he had yet to get past “go,” that was a depressing thought.

      To offset the depression, he said, aware he was pleading, “Just tell me one thing off your hundred must-do’s. I promise I won’t use it. I’ll never mention it again.” He gave her his Boy Scout honor look, which was practically guaranteed to win the instant trust of fifty per cent of the human race—the female fifty per cent.

      She had fixed those enormous hazel eyes on him—they had taken on a shade of gold today—and looked hard at him over the rims of her glasses. No one looked at him the way Katie did. The rest of the world saw the image: successful, driven, fun loving, daring, but it always felt as if she stripped him to his soul. The rest of the world fell for whatever he wanted them to believe he was, but not her.

      Still, when she gave him that look, so intense, so stripping, the ugliness of whatever outfit she was wearing suddenly faded. It was an irony that he didn’t completely understand that the uglier she dressed, the more he felt as if he could see her.

      She shrugged. “I’d like to swim with dolphins,” she admitted, but reluctantly. He was sorry he’d promised he wouldn’t use it to convince her to go out with him, because he had suddenly, desperately, wanted to see her swim with dolphins.

      Hopefully in a bikini, though he was startled to discover that was not his main motivation. He wanted to see her in a pool with dolphins: laughing at their silly grins, stroking their snouts, mimicking their chatter. He wanted to see her happy, uninhibited, sun kissed. Free.

      Had she been that once? Before her marriage had shut something down in her? He wanted to see her like that!

      Okay, the bikini would be a bonus. Though judging from what she was wearing at the moment, Katie in a bikini was a pipe dream. If she owned a bathing suit at all, it was probably akin to a bathing costume from the twenties, complete with pantaloons.

      “I’m going to put that on my list, too,” he’d said, amazed by how deeply he meant it.

      “You promised you wouldn’t do that!” she said, and actually looked pleased because she had assumed he had broken his word so quickly.

      “Not with you,” he said. “I’m putting swimming with dolphins on my list to do by myself someday.”

      For a moment in her eyes, he saw the answer to why he was keeping at this when she wanted him to believe he would never succeed. She had flinched, actually hurt that he didn’t want to pursue the dolphin swimming with her.

      She’d snorted, though, to cover up that momentary lapse in her defenses. “You don’t have a list.”

      “Okay, so I’m going to start one.”

      “And you don’t do things by yourself. If you ever swim with dolphins, I bet you have a woman with you. A gorgeous one, not the least bit shy about falling out of a bikini that is three sizes too small for her.”

      “You’re talking about Heather,” he sulked. “It’s over. You should know. You sent the flowers.” No need to tell Katie the flowers had been dumped on the seat of his open convertible. It would probably up her estimation of Heather by a few notches.

      “Dylan,” she said patiently, “your women are largely interchangeable, which is why I am determined not to become one of them.”

      “Planet Earth calling Dylan,” Margot said, giving him a bemused look.

      “Sorry. I was thinking about something. But that doesn’t mean I’m in a knot!”

      “Of course you aren’t in a knot,” Margot said soothingly. “Want some advice?”

      “No.”

      Margot ignored him. “Just be yourself.”

      Well, that was easier said then done because as his sister had very rudely pointed out to him, in the past year he had become someone none of them knew. He was trying to find his way back to himself, and somehow, in a way he did not quite fully understand, Katie could help him back to that. In the same way he could help her back to the woman he sensed she once had been. But trying to get through to a woman who did not want to be gotten through to was brand-new and totally frustrating territory for him.

      He waited for Margot to leave, picked up yet another letter from the pile. This wasn’t half-bad. Celeste’s dream date was a trip to the city, a quiet dinner, live theater, and a horse-drawn carriage ride afterward. He made a few calls. There was lots going on in Toronto, just a short drive away, but for live-theater options he narrowed it down to The Phantom of the Opera or a light romantic comedy called The Prince and the Nanny.

      Both sounded equally as oppressive to him, so what girl could resist that? For a moment, Margot’s voice sounded inside his head, Just be yourself, but he managed to quash it. He’d already tried being himself, with the motorcycle and the in-line skating offer.

      No, this was much better. He’d go to her world. Not today, though. He didn’t want to seem too eager or too persistent. He didn’t want her to think he was a stalker, after all.

      Still, the next afternoon he felt like a warrior girding his loins as he began the long walk to the business next door.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      THE GODS hated her. There was no other reason she was being subjected to such torture. In the last ten days Dylan had pulled out all stops. He was making it so much harder to say no to him that he no longer seemed to even notice what she was wearing! No matter how hideous the outfit—and many of them were plenty hideous—he seemed to see her. He seemed to see right through all the disguises to who she really was.

      Still, despite that, it was more than evident to Katie that this had become a game to him. Dylan McKinnon was a competitor and a formidable one. He did not lose, he did not take no for an answer.

      But he also took no prisoners. She knew that from a year of sending flowers for him. That fourth goodbye bouquet was as inevitable as the coming of the darkness after a day of luscious sunshine. Her effort to protect her heart from him had triggered his most competitive impulses.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ