The Heart of a Man. Deb Kastner

dose of wishful thinking? “I certainly didn’t expect to hear from you so s-soon,” she stammered.

      “Well, I figured you owe me one.” He waited for her response, a grin pulling at his lips.

      Dead silence.

      He listened to the telephone line crackling and the praise music in the background, obviously coming from Isobel’s stereo.

      “Look at it this way. I put up with your torture yesterday, so today you’re on my terms. And that’s why I’m calling.” He chuckled.

      “That’s not how this scheme is supposed to work,” she protested immediately in a high, strained voice that only made Dustin’s smile widen. “We’re not supposed to be having a social relationship. I’m working on you, remember?”

      “How are you going to help me become an honest, hard-working citizen if you don’t know anything about me?” he countered. “Granted, you chopped off my hair without even knowing my middle name, but I don’t think you can turn me into the best I can become without knowing a little bit more about the real me.”

      “What is your middle name?” she asked, sounding distinctly uncomfortable.

      “So, you want to know now, do you? After you whack my hair off?” he teased. “How fair is that?”

      “Dustin,” she pleaded.

      “James.”

      “Dustin James Fairfax. That’s very nice. Now I will know that crucial bit of information for future whacking and/or cutting.”

      “Is that a threat?”

      “Oh, no,” she said with a laugh. “Consider it a promise.”

      “That doesn’t sound good,” he said. “Even more reason for us to get together today, though, if you ask me. Which you didn’t,” he pointed out wryly.

      She sighed extravagantly. Pointedly.

      “What did you have in mind?” She sounded as if he were about to ask her to walk the plank.

      The horrible pirate captain. That was him, all right. Fit him like an old pair of sneakers. He held in the callous chuckle that would befit his pirate status, but he was tempted.

      Instead, he told her why he’d really called. “I thought you could join me at my flower shop. To see what I do all day, you know? The regular nine-to-five thing my brother doesn’t really think I have going on.”

      She breathed an audible sigh of relief, and this time it sounded genuine. “That actually sounds reasonable.”

      “And you sound surprised.”

      She laughed. “Perhaps I shouldn’t be. I have an active imagination. You’ll learn that about me as we work together. I’m more tempted to believe the moon is made of green cheese than that astronauts have landed.”

      “I thought so—something like me holding you at sword point as you walk the plank?”

      “Mmm. Something like that,” she murmured thoughtfully.

      “Aaargh,” he said playfully in his best gravelly pirate’s voice.