“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!”
“Why is having a simple conversation with you like crossing a minefield?”
“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