The Playboy's Plain Jane

“Why is having a simple conversation with you like crossing a minefield?”

“Because I’m not blinking my eyelids at you with the devotion of a golden retriever?”

Well, there was that! “Katie, don’t be impossible. I’ve got these great tickets to this great event. I know in your heart you want to say yes. Just say yes.”

“You don’t know the first thing about my heart.”

Actually, he did. He’d seen a whole lot of things about her heart in one split second last night. That’s why he was standing here trying so damned hard to be a decent guy. Obviously it was a bad fit for him. “That’s what I mean about the minefield.”

“Look, Dylan,” she said with extravagant patience, as if he was a small child, “I know most girls would fall all over themselves to do just about anything you suggested, including dogsled naked in the Yukon in the dead of winter, but I don’t like hockey.”

“Well, how do you feel about dogsledding naked, then?”

Ah, there was that blush again.

“Would you stop it? I don’t want to go anywhere with you!”

“That hurts.”

Oh, he saw that slowed her down a little bit: that he was a living breathing human being with feelings, not just some cavalier playboy.

But it only slowed her down briefly. “Don’t even pretend my saying no would hurt you. Just go pick someone else out of your lineup of ten thousand hopefuls.”

“I told you I’m taking a break.”

“Well, I told you, not with me!”

“Give me one good reason!” he demanded.

“Okay. Going out with you is too public. I don’t want my picture on the front page of the Morning Globe, I don’t want the gossip columnist dissecting what I wear, and my hair.”

“Then we’ll go someplace private.”

“No! Dylan, I don’t want anything to change. I like the way my life is right now. You might think it looks dull and boring, but I like it.”

There, he thought, he’d given it his best shot. He had tried to rescue the maiden in distress and failed. She had no desire to be rescued, he could go back to being superficial and self-centered, content in the knowledge he had tried.

She’d almost convinced him, but then he looked more closely as she jabbed the last rose into the flower arrangement and managed to prick herself again.

She glanced at him, and looked quickly away.

And that’s when he knew she was lying. She didn’t prick herself all the time. She pricked herself when she was distracted.

She didn’t like her life the way it was now. She’d settled. Katie really wanted all kinds of things out of life: dazzling things, things that made her heart beat faster, made her wake up in the morning and want to dance with whatever life offered that day.