her chest. "It's been enough for other men."
Something blazed inside him. "We're not talking about other men." Christ, he didn't want to. "There's this - this thing between you and me. It's - "
"A figment of your imagination."
His eyebrows jumped. There were a lot of things you could say about what just happened, about what was between them, but that wasn't one of them. "I think - "
"Well, you can just think again." She looked ready to stamp her foot, and her cheeks were flushed with angry color. "I don't like you and I didn't want you to kiss me and I don't want you to kiss me ever again."
"Okay," he said cautiously.
She was obviously working herself up to a real mad. "You don't have the slightest idea who you were kissing."
He wasn't sure she was capable of hearing him, but he tried anyway. "Well, I think I know you - "
"You don't know anything about me." She started pacing around the small cell, agitation rippling off her.
"Okay, but - "
"But nothing." She kept on pacing. "For example, I bet you don't know that I won every handwriting contest in second grade, or that I broke my wrist trying to ride a skateboard, or that I was this close to a president's physical fitness award, except I could only do four push-ups instead of ten."
His panic was quickly subsiding in the wake of Kitty's surprising aggravation. If she couldn't do a few girlie push-ups, he thought, what kind of danger to him could she possibly be? "You're right. Four out of ten is definitely 'close,'" he murmured.
She shot him a suspicious look, but then kept on pacing. "And I don't want to be kissed by someone who doesn't know that. I don't want to be kissed by someone who doesn't know that Sue Ellen Moffett didn't invite me to her birthday party in fourth grade because her mother said my mother was a tramp. I don't want to be kissed by someone who doesn't know that I can speak French like a native - well, like a native with a bad accent - and that I know all the words to every song New Kids on the Block ever sang."
The last of his unruly emotions now completely dissolved, he pressed his top molars against his bottom ones, trying not to laugh in the face of all these hotly spoken, sweet, and earnest facts. "Kitty - "
"But you're not interested in those things, are you? You don't care that my favorite flavor of ice cream is butter pecan, my favorite chocolate is semisweet, and my favorite car is a Chrysler Town & Country minivan, but I almost like the Honda Odyssey better because it comes in snazzier colors."
He looked at her with fascination. "I didn't know any make of minivan came in snazzy colors."
With a flurry of skirts, she came to a stop in front of him. "There are a lot of things you could learn."
He shouldn't want to know what they were, but he discovered he couldn't help himself. "Keep going. Tell me more about you."
Her eyes narrowed. "Why?"
He lifted his shoulders in a casual shrug. "Maybe I want to kiss you again."
That galvanized her. "Not in a million years," she declared vehemently. "Not unless you know I'm afraid of hospitals and spiders and that when I swim in the ocean I'm terrified a whale might swallow me whole."
"Interesting," he said, rubbing his chin and trying not to laugh again. "A Jonah complex."
"No." She shot him a look. "A bad experience at a showing of Pinocchio."
His shoulders shook. "Ah," he choked out. This was just too good. "What else should a man know who wants to kiss you?"
"My favorite season is fall, my favorite holiday is Halloween, and I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was four years old because the presents he left under the tree I'd found the week before in Aunt Cat's hall closet. I like the snow but I can't ski, and the truth is I don't do any sport very well that requires a piece of equipment between my feet and the ground."
"I guess that lets out sledding too," he murmured.
Her eyes widened and then her face brightened. "No. I'm actually an okay sledder." She paused. "Well, of course, that's behind to the ground, which is probably why."
Dylan suppressed another impulse to laugh. Just like that, his mood was the best it had been in days. Weeks. Years. Why the hell he'd let himself