The Mighty Quinns: Dylan. Kate Hoffmann

just threw her off.

      She led such a well-ordered existence, focusing all her energies on the shop. Everything else, including her personal life, had its place and he was an anomaly. Even she knew a crazy attraction to Dylan Quinn didn’t have any place in her life!

      Lana shrugged. “Too bad you can’t get him to fall in love with you. Then you could dump him and everything would be cool.”

      “You could do that,” Meggie said. “You can wrap a man around your little finger and make him love every minute of it. And considering your strategical abilities, you’d go in with a battle plan that was sure to succeed.” She grabbed a bottle of hazelnut syrup and turned the notion over and over in her brain as she twisted off the cap. If only she were more like Lana. More brazen with men, more uninhibited, more—

      “We could do it,” Lana murmured. “Why not? I mean, we put together a business plan for this place then convinced the bankers to finance it. If we use the same approach, we could make Dylan Quinn fall for you. We’ll just use the same basic business and marketing principles we learned in b-school.”

      “How will that work?”

      “We’re selling a product—you. And we have to make the consumer—Dylan Quinn—want that product. Once he does, we’ll just discontinue production and close the factory doors.” Lana slipped off her stool, hurried around to the other side of the counter and rummaged around in a small drawer. She pulled out a battered old notebook where they kept a list of supplies they needed to order. She grabbed a pencil and drew a square at the top of an empty page. “This is our end goal. R-E-V-E-N-G-E.”

      “Not revenge,” Meggie said, her interest piqued. She stepped to Lana’s side. “That sounds so nasty. I’d rather call it…the careful restoration of the balance in my love life.”

      “We’ll just call it revenge for short,” Lana countered. “Now our intermediate goal is to get him to fall in love with you.” She drew another box, then an arrow between the two. “Once that’s accomplished, you can dump him and all will be right with the world.”

      “And just how do I make that happen?” Meggie asked. “You know what a disaster I am when it comes to men. As soon as I say something stupid or do something weird I get all flustered and they think I’m mentally unstable.”

      “You’re exaggerating,” Lana said. “You’ve just had bad luck with men.”

      “Do you have any little boxes and arrows to change my personality?”

      “We won’t need to change your personality,” Lana said with a sly grin. “With my vast and detailed knowledge of the male ego, I could make Dylan fall in love with a parking meter if I wanted. Dylan Quinn is an unrepentant ladies’ man. As such, he’ll be quite easy to manipulate. All you have to do is play hard to get.”

      Meggie laughed. “I can barely get a date when I’m working at it. Why would he ask me out if I act uninterested?”

      “Because you’ll be a challenge and men like Dylan want what they can’t have.” She quickly wrote numbers down the side of the page. “Now, we’ll have to develop guidelines. And you’ll have to trust that I know what I’m talking about.”

      “I do,” Meggie said. When it came to men, Lana definitely knew what she was doing. What Meggie didn’t trust was her own feelings. Could she actually maintain her resolve and her objectivity around Dylan Quinn? She cursed silently. If she didn’t do something, she was doomed to spend the next thirteen years as she had the last, reliving her mortification at the hands of Dylan Quinn, caught in the humiliation of a certified wallflower. “And I’ll do whatever you say.”

      “There are few unbreakable rules regarding scheduling. First, there has to be at least four days between the time you accept a date and the time you go out on a date. If you accept a date for the same day, you’ll appear too eager.”

      “All right,” Meggie said. “What else?”

      “When he calls, you have to wait at least a full day to call him back. And you can only call him once. If he’s busy or he’s not home, you don’t call again.”

      Meggie nodded. This didn’t seem difficult. It was all about what she couldn’t do, not what she had to do. “Rule number three?” Meggie asked.

      “On your first three dates, he can’t pick you up at the house. You have to keep it casual. You’ll meet him there, you’ll be polite and gracious, and you’ll call an end to the date at least an hour before you really want to.”

      She stepped back from the counter and frowned. “And this is supposed to make him fall in love with me? If I were him I’d slap me silly and leave with the next woman who walked out of the ladies’ room.”

      “Think about it,” Lana said. “This is the sex that invented the lost cause. Every man wants to be either a professional baseball player, a photographer for Playboy or the next lotto winner. Even if they can’t hit a ball, operate a camera or don’t bother to buy lottery tickets. It’s part of their nature to want things they can’t have.”

      “Is that it?”

      “Then there are the kissing rules,” Lana said. “No good-night kiss on the first date, a kiss on the cheek for the second date, and lips, no tongue, on the third.”

      “He’ll think I’m prissy,” Meggie said.

      “This is all basic economics, Meggie, supply and demand. The less you supply, the more he’ll demand. You have to give him just enough to keep him coming back for more. He’ll think you’re mysterious and unattainable and he’ll try even harder.”

      “This seems a little manipulative.”

      “Of course it’s manipulative,” Lana said. “The great thing is that men are so easy to manipulate.”

      “I’m not sure I can do that,” Meggie murmured.

      Lana scoffed then glanced around the shop. “Look around you. What we do at Cuppa Joe’s is manipulative. We sell the best-smelling product on earth, we tempt people with special blends and fancy recipes. But basically we’re selling them legal stimulants made with almost one-hundred-percent water at a seven-hundred-percent markup. When you have a good marketing plan, you can’t go wrong.”

      Meggie considered the notion. It was a good plan and with any other woman, it might just work. But she’d never been a smooth operator with men. If she had to remember charts and diagrams and rules and regulations, she might just pass out from the effort. “It’s too complicated,” she said.

      “We’ll use my planning software to make a flowchart,” Lana said. “Then you’ll just have to remember one step at a time.”

      Meggie considered her options for a long moment. If she could pull this off, then she’d never have to think about Dylan Quinn again. And maybe she’d learn something. She hadn’t had much luck with men up to this point. And the men in Lana’s life seemed to multiply like rabbits. If anything, this was good practice. Why not just brush aside her reservations and go for it? “All right,” she said.

      Lana smiled and wrapped her arm around Meggie’s shoulders, giving her a reassuring hug. “This will be fun. I’m bored with my own love life. It’ll be interesting to run yours for a while. Now the only thing we have to do is pray that he stops in again. You’re Catholic. Maybe you can go light a few candles.”

      “That’s not what candles are for,” Meggie said. “I can just call him and—”

      “Nope,” Lana said, shaking her head.

      “I could walk past the firehouse and just casually—”

      “Nope,” Lana repeated.

      “How is this going to work if he doesn’t call me again?”

      Lana sighed. “It won’t work if he doesn’t call you again. And it definitely won’t work if you contact