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

“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.

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 he was wearing jogging pants that hung low on his hips, an old Blue Jays jersey with no sleeves, a ball cap pulled low over his eyes against the brilliance of the spring day. Despite how new the days of spring were, Dylan was beginning to look sun-kissed, golden. It wasn’t even possible. He had to be artificially tanning. She could never respect a man who used a tanning bed.

Was Dylan stopping?

Her traitorous heart hammered as if it couldn’t care a less whether he used a tanning bed! He was slowing. The wild beat of her heart reminded her what it was to feel so alive .

She made a mad dash for the security of her counter—she was going to be in better shape than him if this kept up—and made a great show of stuffing flowers into a bouquet that she had no order for. Begonias for beware. Tuberoses for dangerous pleasures. And then her fickle fingers plucked a pink camellia—for longing—out of one of the jugs. And some gloxinia for love at first sight.

She had left her door open today, and so the bell didn’t even ring warning her he was there, looking at her. She smelled him.

A scent more delicious than the aroma of spring that wafted through her door—masculine, tangy, mountain pure—and enveloped her.

“I like the way you look when you work,” he decided after a long moment.

How could he possibly not notice these overalls? Any reasonable man would have seen overalls printed with huge pink peonies and vibrant green vines as a deterrent, but not him.

Peonies symbolized shame, which is what she felt about her inability to control the wild thudding of her heart as soon as he was around. They had other meanings, too. Happy life. Happy marriage . She had dared to dream those dreams once. She was over it.

She shoved the flower arrangement away from herself. Don’t ask . “And how do I look when I work?”

“Intense. As if those flowers speak a language and you understand it.”

“Hmm.” She glanced at the bouquet. It spoke a language all right. It told her she was a woman dangerously divided.

“And also you stick your tongue out when you work.”

“I do not!”

“Umm-hmm, caught right between your front teeth, like this.”

She looked at his tongue. A mistake.

“I see you managed to lose the sleeves for your shirt,” she said, not wanting him to notice that she was a woman who looked at a man’s tongue and understood the meaning of pink camellia in a way she never quite had before.

“I ripped them off. By the way, we’re completely bogged down on that jacket design. Runners like no sleeves.”

Especially runners built like him. No sleeves. Show off those newly tanned arms. Get any girl you wanted.

Naturally that was the only reason for his persistence. No one had played hard-to-get with him before. Though she didn’t feel as if she was playing . Running for her life was more like it. If she ran any harder, she was going to have to start looking for a sleeveless jacket of her own!

“Are you tanning?” she said, as if that was the mystery she was trying to solve by looking at his bare arms for far too long.

“Tanning? Even I haven’t hit the beach yet.”

“Not that kind of tanning!” The vain kind .

He actually threw back his head and laughed. “Katie, you have me so wrong. I’m not that kind of guy.”

That’s exactly what she was afraid of. That she wanted him—no, desperately needed for him—to be vain and self-centered, and that he wasn’t. A part of her was always insisting it knew exactly who he was.

“Tell me you can’t picture me in a tanning bed,” he pleaded.

She wasn’t even sure what a tanning bed involved beyond absurd self-involvement. Nudity? She could feel a blush that was going to put that pink camellia to shame moving up her neck.