Claimed by the Rebel. Jackie Braun

you move on.”

      “You with the charmed life!”

      For a moment something so sad crossed his face that she was taken aback. But then he grinned, all devil-may-care charm again, and she could almost, but not quite, convince herself that she’d imagined it.

      “What mistakes have you made?” she said. Oh, boy! She was getting sucked into this conversation when it was the last thing she wanted.

      “Jumping out of an airplane a few months after signing my Blue Jays contract probably wasn’t one of my more brilliant decisions,” he said.

      Was it that memory that had caused that brief sadness to chase across his features?

      “So, why’d you do it?” All of Hillsboro still talked of his legendary jump. He’d agreed to do it as a fund-raiser for the local chapter of Big Brothers. Something had gone dreadfully wrong. He’d broken his arm in three places, ended his career as a pitcher before it had ever really even started. All of Hillsboro had gone into mourning over the misfortune of their most favored son.

      He smiled. “I did it because I wanted to.”

      His lack of regret over the incident seemed to be genuine, but it proved exactly what she had already decided about wanting.

      “Wanting is not a reliable compass with which to set the course of your life,” she told him sternly. “You made an impulse choice that ruined your career.”

      He touched one of the flowers in the window, absently. Surprise, surprise, a red rose. Passion. His fingers caressed the petal with such tenderness that she could not help but wonder if it wouldn’t be worth it. To give in. Just once. To give in to the impulse to play with the most dangerous fire of all: passion.

      “You could look at it as an impulse choice that ruined my career,” he agreed mildly. Thankfully, he decided to leave the rose alone. “I prefer to think a series of events played out that led me to my true calling.”

      She was startled by that. She had no awareness that he had moved on from his brush with fame without looking back, the same as he moved on with everything else. She shivered.

      She didn’t really want to know that about him. Nor did she want to start thinking about the events of her own life in ways that took down her protective barriers, instead of putting them up, in ways that made her more open to the vagaries of life, instead of battened down against them.

      Mostly she didn’t want to think about how that finger, tender on the petals of a rose, would feel if it brushed the fullness of her bottom lip.

      Gathering all of her strength, she said, “I am not getting on that motorcycle with you. I like living!”

      “Do you?” he asked softly, the faintest mocking disbelief in his tone. “Do you, Katie, my lady?” And with that, he turned on his heel and left her.

      But the question he asked seemed to remain, burning deeper and deeper into her heart, her mind, her soul. Did she?

      Did she like the nice safe predictable world she had created for herself? Were her flowers and her cats and her love of the library and her visits with her mother enough?

      The road she had not taken teased her, the choice she had not made pulled at her, tantalized her, tormented her. Katie could imagine how the wind would have felt in her face, the touch of sunlight on her cheeks. She could imagine laughter-filled moments, clinging to him on the back of his bike; relying on him to keep her safe. She felt intense regret for the courage she lacked.

      She pulled herself to her senses. Ha, as if Dylan McKinnon could be relied on to keep anyone safe! Safe was the least likely word association that would come up in the same sentence as Daredevil Dylan McKinnon.

      Then again, a little voice whispered to her, maybe safety was entirely overrated. She decided, uncaring of how childish it was, that she hated him.

      Which, of course, was the safe choice. So much safer than loving him. Or anybody or anything else.

      It occurred to her that if he had even noticed the hideousness of her outfit, it had not deterred him one little bit.

      She had to do better. Tomorrow she was wearing her Indian cotton smock dress. And she’d look through that old trunk in the attic. She was sure there were flowered pink and green overalls in there. Of course, that was assuming he was dropping by again tomorrow, and in the days after that, too.

      Considering she had decided she hated him, why was she looking forward to the possibility so much?

      A charmed life, thought Dylan, hanging up the phone a few days later after his morning call to the nursing home. He contemplated Katie’s assessment of him. In some ways it was so true. But he lived with another truth now.

      He would trade it all—every single success he had ever enjoyed—to have one day to spend with his mother the way she used to be. After his mom’s speedy decline into Alzheimer’s, his father had made the unspeakable decision, last year, to put her in a home.

      His grief was not just for his mother, but for the death of what he had believed. He had believed that someday he would have what his parents had, a quiet, steady kind of love that raised children and paid bills, that lived up to the vows they had taken, a love that stayed forever.

      Instead his father, his model of what Dylan thought a man should be, had bailed.

      His mother didn’t even seem to know she had been betrayed. She was oblivious to her own illness, a blessing. The only thing that seemed to bring that spark to her eyes that Dylan remembered so well, were the flowers he brought her once a week. And then, only for the moment it took to name them, before the spark was gone, and she was looking at him blankly, as if to say, “Who are you?”

      A knock on the door, Margot popped in.

      “Sorry, a bad time?”

      He had always disliked it when people could read him. It made him feel vulnerable. Margot was getting good at it. Katie had developed a disquieting gift for seeing through his fearless facade to what lay underneath. Maybe he should be remembering that when he was so intent on rescuing her, so intent on proving he could get a decent girl. That there might be a personal price to pay.

      No, he was good at protecting himself. He proved it by grinning at Margot, seeing the faint worried crease on her forehead disappear with relief. “No, of course it’s not a bad time,” he assured her. He nodded toward his in-office basketball hoop. “I just missed a few. You know how I hate that.”

      “Here’s the, er, research you asked me to do.” Margot seemed uncharacteristically uncertain as she placed an untidy mountain of papers in front of him.

      He didn’t remember asking her to do any research, except maybe about the new running jacket. Puzzled, he picked up the first paper on the stack, and flinched. It had a title on it, like a high school essay. It said “My Dream Date with Dylan McKinnon.”

      Whatever he’d asked her for, Margot had misinterpreted it. Or maybe not. He couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said to her.

      Sheesh. Katie Pritchard had him rattled.

      “Thanks,” he said, and Margot looked pleased and left him alone with the monster he’d created.

      Now because Katie had him rattled, Dylan’s receptionist had presented him, pleased with herself, with a sheaf of papers from Lord knew where—girlfriends, acquaintances, women on the street—all of whom were just a little too eager to share highly personal information about themselves and what they liked to do in their spare time.

      He looked at the stack of papers, rifled through. Tidy, messy, typed, printed, handwritten, perfumed. Someone extremely original had submitted her ideas written in red felt pen on a pair of panties. He disposed of the panties and wanted to just throw the rest of this self-created mess out, too.

      But then again, there might be something in here—one small idea—that would help him unlock the fortress that was Katie.