did mean it!” she said, with far more feeling than she would have liked.
“So it was his fault.”
She was not going to have this way-too-intimate conversation with Dylan McKinnon on a chance meeting on a public street.
“Does it have to be somebody’s fault?” she asked woodenly. Who, after all, could predict how people would react to tragedy? She had miscarried the baby she wanted so badly. It had all unraveled from there.
Sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep at night, she tormented herself by wondering if it had been unraveling already, and if she had hoped the baby would somehow glue it back together, give her someone to love in the face of a husband who was distant, from a life that was so far from the fairy tale she had dreamed for herself. This was exactly why she now dedicated her life to her business. Business was not painful. It did not cause introspection. It did not leave time for self-pity or self-analysis.
“Come grab a burger with me at Doofus’s,” he said, and laid a persuasive hand on her wrist.
She heard something gentle in his voice, knew she had not succeeded in keeping her pain out of her eyes.
“They make a mean burger.”
“I’m a vegetarian.”
“Really?” he said skeptically.
“If I went there, would you come to the library after?” she said, sliding her arm out from under his touch as if she was making a sneak escape from a cobra. Maybe the best defense was an offense. He’d be about as likely to visit a library as she would be to visit a turkey shoot. Still, as he contemplated her, her heart was acting as if she was in a position of life-threatening danger, racing at about thirteen million beats per minute.
“Sure. I’ll come to the library. I like doing different things. Surprising myself.”
Right. He just had all the answers. He’d never go to the library, just say he was going to, and then send a bouquet of flowers when he didn’t show.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked, folding her rescued limbs over her chest, protectively.
He sighed, looked away, ran a hand through the rich darkness of his hair. “I want a change,” he said, and she was pretty sure he surprised them both with his sincerity.
Still, to be asked out because he needed a change from his bevy of bimbos? It was insulting!
“And you’d like a new toy to play with,” she guessed, with a shake of her head.
He regarded her thoughtfully. “I bet your husband didn’t deserve you. He probably wasn’t worth the sadness I saw in your eyes when you mentioned your divorce.”
The comment was unexpected, his voice quiet and serious, a side of him she had never seen.
Dylan McKinnon’s charm was dangerous when he was all playful and boyish. But it turned downright lethal when he became serious, the cast of his face suddenly accentuating the firmness around his mouth, the strength in the cut of his cheekbones and chin.
“I have to go,” she said.
She whirled away from him. Her eyes were stinging.
“Hey, Katie,” he said, jogging up beside her now, blocking her attempt to escape from all his sympathy with some dignity, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Would you go away? Guys like you always hurt girls like me.”
He stopped. Stared at her. She saw her arrow had hit.
“Not every man is going to be like your ex-husband,” he said evenly.
“How do you know? You didn’t know him.” Or me.
The truth was it didn’t really matter if Dylan was like Marcus, if she was still like her. It was herself she didn’t trust after her whole life had fallen apart. She did not trust herself to make good choices, and certainly not to be able to survive that kind of pain ever again.
But it was true Dylan was nothing like Marcus had been. Dylan had his faults, but he didn’t try to hide any of them. If anything, he seemed to celebrate them. He didn’t seem to have any secrets, unless she counted that one bouquet that he picked himself every week and delivered himself.
Other than that her remark about guys like him hurting girls like her was really undeserved. He had been her most loyal customer. He’d always only been kind to her, funny and charming. He’d helped her pick up the glass that time she had broken the rose vase. He had a gift for making her feel oddly pretty—or at least interesting—even on her ugliest days. He was aggravatingly sure of himself, yes, but he never crossed that line into conceit.
“Come have a hamburger,” he said. “No strings attached. I promise I’ll make you laugh.”
“How can you promise that?” she said, aware suddenly that she ached to laugh. To feel light and unburdened. To forget that she had failed at marriage and miscarried a baby. In his eyes she thought she glimpsed something of herself she had lost, a woman who had been carefree and laughter filled. She longed, suddenly, to be that woman again, even if only for a little while.
The pull of being returned to a happier self was too strong to resist.
“Okay,” she said, “A hamburger. To reassure you that I’m not in any danger of turning into a tragic cat lady. And maybe to give you a few ideas for a jacket that people won’t lose the sleeves of. And then that’s the end of this. Am I clear?”
He nodded with patent insincerity.
She looked at her watch. She could make a quick trip to the mall before she met him. If sympathy had in any way motivated this invitation, there would be nothing like a new pair of jeans and a slinky top to convince him—and herself—that she was not in need of it.
“I’ll meet you. In an hour. At Doofus’s.”
“Perfect,” he said, and smiled that slow, sexy utterly sincere smile that had convinced a zillion women before her they were the only one that mattered to him.
It was once she was safe in her car, away from the mesmerizing magnetism of him, that she allowed herself to look hard at the terrible truth he did not know…or maybe he did.
She had a crush on him! That was why she watched him run every day! Look at how easily he had overcome her objections! She had vowed one moment she was never going out to dinner with him, and broken that vow within minutes of having made it.
“I can’t do this,” she realized.
Because what if—okay it was way out there—but what if they developed feelings for each other? What if she fell in love with him, and he with her? What if all her fairy-tale fantasies roared back to life?
And what if she lost again?
“I cannot survive another loss,” she whispered. So much safer to have an unrealistic crush on a man, to watch him run, to keep a safe enough distance that each of his faults remained crystal clear, not blurred by the beauty of his physique, his eyes, the totally unexpected firmness in his voice, when
