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.
“So, what can I do for you today?” she asked, all brisk professionalism.
“Say yes,” he said, placing both hands and his elbows on the counter, leaning over it, fixing his gaze on her.
“You haven’t asked me anything yet!” Except if she could picture him on a tanning bed, and she was not saying yes to that! Even if, despite her best efforts to stop it cold, a sneaky picture was trying to crowd into her head.
“I know, but just to surprise me, say yes.”
“Is it your birthday?”
“No.”
“Then I have no occasion to surprise you.”
“Would you surprise me if it was my birthday?”
She was hit with an illuminating moment of selfknowledge. She was coming to love these little conversational sparring matches. She only pretended to hate them. She only pretended to herself that she wanted him to keep on running by her door. In some part of her, that she might have been just as content to keep a secret from herself, she would be devastated if he stopped popping in.
He was delivering what she needed most, even if she wanted it the least: he was delivering the unexpected; he was shaking up her comfy, safe little world; he was making her want again.
Dylan McKinnon was a born tease, a born charmer. He had a great sense of humor and a delightful sense of mischief. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, these spontaneous, unscheduled interchanges added spark to her day, brightness to her world, a lightness to her step. Not that she would ever let him see anything beyond her aggravation.
“No, I wouldn’t surprise you even if it was your birthday. I’m not the kind of person who does surprises well.”
She knew, even if he wouldn’t admit it, that was the biggest surprise of all to him. That anybody could say no to him. Some days it was all that gave her strength. Knowing if she ever weakened and said yes, it would be the beginning of the end. Before she knew it she’d be getting the equivalent of the fourth bouquet—the nice-knowing-you bouquet.
“Au contraire, Katie, my lady, I think you are full of the most amazing surprises.”
His
