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

“Leave him with me,” she whispered.

“Hey, stinker,” Dylan warned his nephew sternly, “don’t live up to your reputation.” And then he turned and followed the nurse down the hallway.

Katie watched him go, and even though she knew better, even though she was trying so hard not to get any more entangled with a man who could exercise so much power over her—without any awareness of that power on his part—she felt her treacherous heart go right down the hall with him.

Dylan found his sister. She was being prepped for surgery and needed to give him some instructions, but he was having trouble focusing on her completely.

He wanted to kill somebody, or at least hurt them badly. He wanted to kill a man he’d never met before. He wanted to kill the man who had been so selfcentered he’d left Katie all alone with her grief for that unborn child. What had she said? Her husband had been relieved.

Dylan couldn’t believe a man could look into those eyes and not find it in himself to be there, one hundred per cent for her. Not want to be there for her.

“No chocolate, candy, choking-size hazards, hamburgers or steak and lobster,” his sister said.

Dylan focused on Tara. Sheesh. She had been given something to control pain until her surgery. “What are you talking about?” he asked her.

She sighed elaborately. “Earth calling Dylan. I’m trying to tell you how to take care of a baby.”

“Me?” he said. Katie’s face faded from his mind and he focused on his sister. “I’m not looking after Jake. Where’s Sam?”

“San Francisco. Fogged in. So unless you want your favorite nephew to go to foster care, time to step up to the plate.” She giggled helplessly. “Step up to the plate. Get it? That’s priceless, given your old career.”

“Ha, ha,” he said without an ounce of humor. “When’s Sam going to get in?”

“Dylan, I have no gift for predicting the weather even when I’m not on drugs.”

After getting a ton more of unhelpful advice from his sister, Dylan went back down the hall to the emergency waiting room. Katie had found a box of toys, and was now sitting on the floor with his nephew, unmindful of getting her outfit dirty; though of course that was, one would assume, why you wore an outfit like that. You wouldn’t worry about wrecking it, you’d hope you could! Thank goodness, she had lost the babushka somewhere.

Or maybe not. Because without it, her hair fell like a shining wave to the slenderness of her shoulder.

As always happened, it felt as if it was not the outfit he saw at all. It was the look on her face, the sweet curve of her smile.

He realized why he had been so anxious to focus on the killing of her ex-husband. Because to focus on her was to threaten what remained of his tattered control after he had seen her do her spontaneous little dance over the Tac Revol tickets, after he had tasted the clear-brook sweetness of her kiss.

There was a look on her face as she studied Jake that was rapt, even more beautiful than when she had danced. She looked serene, almost like a Madonna.

A decent girl. A wholesome girl. A smart girl. A girl absolutely born to be a mother.

He was well aware that there on the cold hospital floor sat a woman he’d offered everything to: he’d offered to wine and dine her, escort her to the most-sought-after functions, take her on his motorcycle, give her dreams carved in ice.

She’d said no to each of his invitations without even a moment’s hesitation. And then when he’d finally done something genuinely nice—as accidental as it may have been that she thought those tickets were for her mother—then it had been her turn to issue the invitation.

That was what Katie was doing even now, sitting on the floor, playing with the baby, shining with an inner light that was nearly blinding. She was issuing him an invitation to a life he had turned his back on when his mother had gotten ill. A life that he had decided was too full of foibles, too unpredictable, that extracted too great a cost.

That’s why he had avoided her ever since she had ever so tentatively extended her invitation for coffee.

He was not unaware of a feeling of the universe conspiring against him. He’d decided, after seeing her dance with the Tac Revol tickets, after her kissing him, that the game was up. Over. The stakes had become a little too high for his tastes. And yet here he was, tangled with her again.

“Thanks, Katie,” he said, coming up to her.

“Is your sister okay?”

“Whacked out on drugs. She seems to think I’d be a good candidate to look after Jake.”

“Aren’t you?”

What had he ever done to deserve the look of trust on her face?

“No.”

“Haven’t you ever looked after Jake before?”

“I’ve taken him out a couple of times by myself. To the mall. And the park. The little devil is a chick magnet. And the man-with-baby thing is unbelievable. The women are all over me when I have Jake.” He knew exactly what he was trying to do. Put back the barrier that had been so conveniently provided by names of women she didn’t know. Tara. Sarah. Janet. Margot.

“Trust you to see a baby as useful for that reason!”

“His usefulness is limited,” Dylan said. It was working. She looked justifiably horrified. Part of him was thinking, Katie, my lady, please see me in a bad light. You make the decision to not have anything to do with me. Because I can’t seem to follow through when I make that decision about you.

“The baby’s usefulness is limited?” she asked, indignant.

“Oh, sure, he’s cute, but he’s basically a poop machine. Just when things have the potential to get interesting, he fills his pants. He actually leaked on me once. I thought I was going to hurl.”

“Daredevil Dylan McKinnon was going to throw up over a little baby leak?” She started to laugh.

“Don’t be so damned sanctimonious. You weren’t there. The horror was unimaginable, even for someone like you, who probably has a fairly good imagination. Have you ever had to deal with a situation like that?”

“I used to babysit in high school. I wouldn’t let a baby leak scare me!”

He snorted. “That’s like a soldier who has never been in a combat zone saying bullets don’t scare him.”

“It’s not quite the same thing,” she said dryly.

“Yeah, well, baby leaks scare me, and I’m man enough to admit it.”

“I appreciate your vulnerability,” she said, tongue-in-cheek.

“Don’t tell anybody. I’d be ruined. And don’t you start smiling!”

Really, her smile was becoming the hardest thing to handle. It lit something in her. Had he known, right from the beginning, in some place he’d been afraid to go within himself, that her smile would be like this? Worth it. Worth everything. Even the uncertainty of his own soul. Even coming face-to-face with all his own fears.

“Why does everyone think me being tortured is funny?” he asked. He was asking the universe as much as her!

“Oh, Dylan, it’s not exactly you being tortured that’s funny. It’s you being terrified of something so darling as a little baby.”

That showed what she knew! “You won’t think he’s such a little darling when his forehead wrinkles up, he holds his breath and starts turning red.”

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.

CHAPTER SIX

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.

“Next time, your turn.”

But it seemed to her maybe next time wasn’t such a good idea. She was looking for excuses to hang on to him, to hang on to the intimacy of this little mommy-daddy experience.

But really, if he could change a diaper, he was good to go.

Without her.

“My sister says that it’s different when it’s your own baby,” he said with an easy grin. “Not so nauseating.”

Your own baby.

“Are you planning your own baby?” she asked him. She said it ever so casually. Just conversation. Pathetic that she was holding her breath waiting for his answer.

“I thought that’s what I wanted once, but,” he suddenly looked uncomfortable, “lately I don’t seem to know what I want.”

There. His answer.

And yet, even though it was not what she wanted to hear, Katie appreciated Dylan was giving her something that he rarely gave. He presented himself to the world as an extremely confident man. A man who jumped out of airplanes, no hesitation. A daredevil.

And so, his showing her his doubt was a gift.

Seeing him with his nephew had brought her yearnings sharply to the surface, and sharply into focus. It had made her contemplate entering the race all over again, like a person drawn to the mystery of Everest, Mountain of Tragedy.

He didn’t know what he wanted. And she felt shadows of doubt on what she wanted. A month ago her flower shop, her quiet life had been enough. Now it wasn’t.

Like lightning, fear struck her. What if she lost another baby? Could she survive that kind of loss again?

Was it completely delusional to think being with a man like him would somehow make the burden of that loss a shared one?

She recognized the insanity of her own thoughts. She had never even had a cup of coffee with this man. Really, she knew less about him than what was printed on the back of his baseball cards. And here she was weaving a fantasy that he was at the center of! Her own baby. A home to call her own. A man like this one.

This was precisely why she had immersed herself in her business. This was why she had made a simple life for herself: reading, her cats, taking her mother on outings. This was precisely why she had done a voluntary exit from the whole man/woman game. She wasn’t strong enough to play again, to run the race again. Not yet, and maybe not ever. She reminded herself she liked her safe, predictable world.

Or had liked it. But maybe a small dissatisfaction had been stirring from the very moment she had given in to the temptation to watch a glorious man run.

She made the mistake of looking at the baby and his uncle.

Jake was nestled into Dylan’s chest, sucking sleepily on his thumb. The picture they made caused her heart to ache. Dylan’s strength and self-assurance in stark contrast to the baby’s helplessness and need. Dylan was all hard lines and taut muscle, a warrior, the baby was like a little puddle of warmth and softness, the one the warrior was sworn to protect.

And yet the tenderness that glowed in Dylan’s eyes when he looked at his nephew, that softened the masculine assuredness of his face, made him seem more attractive to Katie than he ever had.

And he had always seemed plenty attractive!

All her weeks of successfully resisting Dylan McKinnon were going straight down the tubes. Worse, at the moment she was feeling raw and vulnerable after the strange intimacy of the encounter in the bathroom, her confessions, his reassurances.

Katie recognized she was doing exactly what Dylan expected every single woman to do around him. She was capitulating to his charms!

It had to stop. There had to be one woman in the world who would not throw herself at his feet, and it had to be her!

And yet here she was, so taken with him she felt weak-kneed and dry-mouthed, and like she wanted to spend the rest of her life contemplating the sensual fullness of his bottom lip! Here she was, practically floating, feeling a strange and glorious little fire in her bosom because of the way Dylan’s eyes rested on her, for just a touch too long, when he looked over his nephew’s head.

Katie needed to remember that charm came as naturally to him as hunting came to the lion. And his charm probably fell in the same category—self-serving and predatory.

The thing to do before she was any more helplessly overwhelmed by his attractiveness, his playfulness, his allure, would be, obviously, to remove herself from this situation.

She knew she had to do it without it seeming as if she had to get away from him. There was nothing that would trigger a predator’s instincts like prey in full flight!

A nurse came and set down a car seat beside them.

“Dylan,” Katie said firmly “you take the baby home. I’ll grab a cab.”