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

“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 .

KATIE stared at Dylan with absolute astonishment. Here was a man who had jumped out of airplanes, bungee jumped, raced motorcycles. Here was a man who, as he had just pointed out, made million-dollar decisions, was responsible for employees, ran a company.

And yet there was an unmistakable bead of sweat on his forehead as he gazed at his nephew. His gorgeous blue eyes had a glint of pure fear in them. He was drumming his fingers nervously against the muscle of his thigh.

And all because his adorable nephew had stopped all activity—building block suddenly frozen in midair—a look of fierce concentration on his now reddening chubby face.

“Is he,” Katie asked, uncertainly, “you know?”

But Dylan didn’t have to answer. They were enveloped in a stench that seemed as if it could not possibly have been produced by the adorable little cherub in front of them. The look of concentration evaporated from Jake’s face, he gurgled with what would seem to be self-satisfaction and returned to his blocks.

“Now what?” the president and CEO of Daredevils asked her in an undertone.

“I don’t have a clue,” she said.

She recognized how absurd this was. It was a baby. And it had two full-grown adults almost completely tied up in knots.

She couldn’t help it. She started to laugh. When Dylan glared at her, mistakenly thinking she was laughing at his weakness instead of her own, she laughed harder. Finally, her howls of laughter petered down to sputters. She hoped she wouldn’t snort. Of course she snorted.

Dylan was looking at her intently, as if he had never seen her before. More absurdity: she might have dreamed such a look over wine and dinner, with her hair upswept, diamonds sparkling at her ears, lips painted a beguiling shade of red. Such a look should be reserved for a woman wearing the perfect little black dress. But over baby poop? In hideous daisy-printed culottes? Right after she had snorted? Welcome to your life, Katie Pritchard . She licked her lips uncomfortably.

“You should do that more often,” he decided, then looked away, as if he had said too much, revealed too much.

“What should I do more often?” she breathed, feeling her stomach drop out at the way his eyes had fastened, with searing heat, on her mouth. She might have dreamed such a look to be appropriate right before a man leaned forward to take his true love’s lips with his own.

“Laugh.”

Part of her had hoped he meant lick her lips!

“Okay, Mr. Daredevil,” she said, “I’m waiting for the plan.”

“You’re the one who knows how to keep plants alive!”

A nurse came by, gray haired, very efficient looking. “If you check at the reception desk before you leave, we can lend you a car seat to take the baby home.”

Dylan turned up the full wattage of his smile. Katie guessed he was going to put his charm to good use and get that diaper looked after for them.

Instead he surprised her by saying to the nurse, “Uh, we have two rank amateurs here who don’t know the first thing about a messy diaper. Or maybe I should say two messy amateurs who don’t know anything about a rank diaper. Could you find somebody to give us a quick lesson, before we take him home?”

The nurse smiled at him. Was nobody immune to this man’s charms? “I’d be happy to show you how to change a diaper.”

A few minutes later they were in a little room, the nurse not as charmed by Dylan as Katie had thought. She made him change the diaper!

Katie was not unaware, as she watched, that this was something she had thought she would be doing with her husband one day. She had looked forward to every little thing about that baby coming. Foolishly, the day she had found out she was pregnant, she had even begun to buy diapers, pajamas with feet in them, soothers, stuffed crib toys.

Now, in a room with reality , she wondered if Marcus ever would have tackled a mess like that! She had not allowed herself to think much about what if . But now she did wonder. What if they had stayed together? Would she have felt as alone with parenting as she had started to feel in their marriage?

Certainly, she could not imagine Marcus bending over such an arduous task with such a look of grim determination on his face.

Dylan shot a look at her. “I don’t have anything on me, do I?” he whispered.

“Such as?” she whispered back.

He glared at her, then at the baby. “Such as brown.”

“You look like you’re okay. So far.”

The baby gurgled happily and wagged his legs.

“I wish he wouldn’t do that,” Dylan said grimly.

“Me, too,” she admitted.

They both laughed, and the nurse joined in. The impromptu diaper changing class was a strangely intimate moment. A mommy-and-daddy kind of moment that made Katie feel that stab of longing for the life she did not have, a life that had been snatched from her by a cruel twist of fate.

That’s what she needed to remember as she was admiring the confidence with which Dylan was taking on this task. She need to remind herself that life had cruel twists and turns that she had no hope of controlling. That she had withdrawn from the race for a reason . It could hurt too much to run.

But standing in this little room, almost shoulder to shoulder with Dylan, the pain of not running the race could compete with the pain of running with all your heart.

“Just hold his feet in one hand, lift him up and swab,” the nurse suggested helpfully.

For a man who had made his living being a professional athlete, Dylan suddenly seemed hopelessly uncoordinated. But determined. “You take his feet,” he told Katie. A small thing, but it somehow solidified them as a team.

Gingerly she did. Jake tried to kick free.

Dylan scowled at the baby as if he were a puzzle that needed to be solved, then took a deep breath and did what needed to be done.

That, Katie thought, was the kind of man he was. He wanted people to believe it was all fun and frolic about him, but that was not the truth at all. She felt as if she could see the truth about Dylan.

“You don’t shirk from the hard stuff do you?” she said. That was why he was such a success at business

Dylan cast a glance at her.

“You just dig in and get the job done.”

“I don’t think dig in is exactly what I want to hear right now,” he said lightly, but rather than looking pleased at her assessment, Dylan looked pensive. “That’s not what my sister would tell you,” he said. “She thinks I shirk from the hard stuff.”

“Like what?” Katie asked, incredulous.

But he was engrossed in his task, and didn’t answer. Several wrecked diapers later—the tabs would not stick once his hands were slippery with baby oil and powder—the job was done. Dylan, unaware he was dusted from head to toe with baby powder himself, looked very pleased as he lifted his nephew off the table.