The Mighty Quinns: Dylan

“Mary Margaret Flanagan,” Dylan said. Just the sound of her name on his lips brought back a flood of images. The sight of her face, covered in soot and marked with the tracks of her tears, then the fresh and natural beauty he discovered just an hour ago. Why couldn’t he put her out of his head? There was just something so fascinating about her—the contrast between the girl she’d been and the woman she’d become.

Conor frowned. “Mary Margaret who?”

Sean leaned over the bar and chuckled. “Meggie Flanagan? Meggie Flanagan with the horn-rimmed glasses and the mouth full of metal?” He glanced over his shoulder toward the far end of the bar. “Hey, Brian, come here. Guess who Dylan saved.”

“I didn’t save her,” Dylan insisted. “It was just a little fire. She’s opening a coffee shop over on Boylston, not too far from the station. It looks like it’ll be a real nice place. Anyway, yesterday afternoon her coffee machine shorted out and started a small fire. I had to carry her out when she refused to leave.”

“You carried her out of her shop?” Conor asked.

Dylan took another long sip of his Guinness, then licked the foam from his upper lip and nodded. “Yeah, like a sack of potatoes. Although she wasn’t nearly as lumpy.”

“Oh-oh,” Olivia warned. “That’s how it starts.”

Dylan’s eyebrow rose. “What?”

Conor chuckled softly. “That’s how Olivia and I met. I picked her up, tossed her over my shoulder and hauled her back inside the safehouse. Then she kicked me in the shin and called me a Neanderthal. After that, it was true love. That must be how it starts for us Quinns. We carry a woman away and that’s the beginning of the end.” He shrugged. “I guess I should have warned you.”

“I’m not going to fall in love with Meggie Flanagan,” Dylan insisted. “Carrying her out was part of the job, I had no choice. Besides, she hates me. She was downright hostile. She called me a Hun.”

“Why?” Brendan asked. “You barely know her.”

“But she knows you,” Brian said. “At least by reputation. You cut a wide swath through the girls at South Boston High School. Was she one of the girls you left weeping in your wake?”

Why was that the quality that seemed to define Dylan Quinn? He wasn’t remembered as a great athlete, which he was. He wasn’t remembered as a loyal friend or a nice guy. It always came back to the women. “She was the kid sister of my best friend,” Dylan muttered. “Even I have scruples. In fact, I was the one who got her a date to that sophomore dance. Didn’t Sean take her?”

Brian shook his head. “No, that was me. And that was my very first date and probably the most traumatic experience with the opposite sex I’ve ever had.”

“Oh, do tell,” Olivia said, bracing her arms on the bar and leaning forward.

There was nothing a Quinn brother could refuse Olivia. Each one of them would jump into Boston Harbor in the dead of winter if that’s what she asked. Recounting an embarrassing memory, complete with mythical Quinn embellishments, was nothing as long as it pleased her. “I was a foot shorter than Meggie and I had a pimple the size of Mount Vesuvius on my nose that night. I was so nervous I almost puked on her shoes. After that night, I didn’t ask a girl out for two years.”

“Do you think she’s still mad about the pimple?” Dylan asked. “Or did you do something stupid? Did you try to feel her—” He stopped, then gave Olivia an apologetic smile. “Did you try to get to first base with her?”

“Second base,” Sean said. He pointed to his chest. “That’s second base.”

“I didn’t touch her,” Brian insisted.

“Why don’t you just ask her why she doesn’t like you?” Olivia suggested.

All the brothers looked at each other, then shook their heads. “That would involve a discussion of feelings,” Brendan said. “It’s part of Quinn family genetics that we avoid discussions like that. Haven’t you read the manual?” He turned to Conor. “You have to give her the manual.”

“Hell, it doesn’t make a difference,” Dylan said. “I’m not going to see her again, anyway.”

But even as he said it, Dylan knew it was a lie. He had to see her again, had to figure out this strange and undeniable attraction he had to her. Maybe if he figured that out, he’d be able to unravel the rest of his feelings.

“I guess you’re just going to have to wonder, then,” Olivia said, giving his arm a squeeze. “But she must have a good reason. After all, how could any woman resist the charms of a Mighty Quinn?”

“YOU LOOK LIKE A girl who just found out her dress was caught in the back of her panty hose during the Grand March,” Lana commented as she looked over Meggie’s shoulder.

Meggie stared down at the photo from the Sophomore Frolic. She was dressed in a pouffy formal that looked like it was already out of style when she’d chosen it. But it was pink and shiny and at the time, it was the most beautiful gown she’d ever seen. She and her date stood beneath a flower-draped arbor. “At that moment, I would have rather walked the length of the gym with my dress up over my head,” she murmured to Lana. “It was tragic. Humiliating. I thought I’d never be able to love another boy in my entire life.”

“Your evening couldn’t have been that bad. He’s cute. A little short, but cute.” She squinted at the photo, then reached over and scratched her nail on the surface. “What’s that on his nose?”

“He wasn’t Dylan,” Meggie continued. “When they played our song that night, I thought I’d cry. ‘Endless Love.”’

“See there,” Lana said. “You two had a song. It couldn’t have been that bad.”

“It was our song—Dylan’s and mine.”

A frown wrinkled Lana’s brow. “How could you and Dylan Quinn have a song? He barely knew you existed.”

Meggie shoved the photo back into her purse and tossed her purse behind the counter. Then she grabbed a handful of pour spouts and began to shove them into the bottles of flavoring syrup. “Believe me, we had a whole relationship—in my poor deluded sophomore mind.”

Lana slid onto a stool on the opposite side of the counter, then sipped at the latte she’d just prepared. “Sounds like you had it bad. No wonder you want revenge.”

“Not revenge,” Meggie said. “Just a little payback. Maybe then I wouldn’t always wince when I think about high school. That whole thing followed me around until I graduated. I was defined by that night. I was the girl who carried the huge torch for Dylan Quinn, then got it dropped on her head. The geek and the god.” She paused. “I’ve come a long way since then, but all it takes is one look at Dylan Quinn and I’m right back there, standing in the gymnasium with everyone staring at me.”

It sounded like a good explanation for her attraction to Dylan—just a few residual feelings left over from that night so long ago. She was attracted to him because she hated him. After all, there was a thin line between love and hate, isn’t that what people said? Or maybe seeing him again 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.”