“The hot guy nursing the beer at the end of the bar is staring at you,” Gina said to Cate. “Do you know him?”

“No. He’s new.”

“You should go flirt with him. He looks like fun.”

“Think I’ll pass on that. I’ve had about all the fun I can handle for one night,” Cate said. “My mom invited another Mr. Right to dinner. He tried to kiss me when I left for work, I instinctively kneed him in the groin, and he said he liked a feisty woman.”

“Obviously you didn’t knee him hard enough.”

“Seemed pretty hard to me. He went down to the floor and rolled around some before he said I was feisty.”

Gina’s attention was fixed on the hot guy. “Did he look like him?”

“Not even a little,” Cate said.

The guy at the end of the bar was fine. Black hair, styled short, but long enough from its last cut to wave a little over his ears and fall onto his forehead. Nice mouth, dark eyes, broad shoulders. He had his button-down shirtsleeves rolled to his forearms. Clearly he had some muscle. He caught her looking and his face creased into a full-on smile showing big-bad-wolf-perfect white teeth.

Cute, Kellen McBride thought, readjusting his former opinion of Cate Madigan. She looked like she should be tucked away in an old Celtic castle, wearing a flowing dress of emerald green, waiting for a knight in shining armor. He’d been watching her refill glasses and mingle with the regulars and had reached the conclusion that she was confident, spirited, and in control. This dragged a mental sigh out of Kellen. Cate Madigan was not the type who would ever need rescuing. She would make the dragon into a pet, defeat the villain, and use the moat of fire to bake cookies. Cate was, in a single word, enchanting. And the second word that came to mind might be intimidating. Not that any of this mattered. Kellen had a plan, and he was sticking to it until something better came along. He was going to finesse himself into Cate Madigan’s life.