9 Out Of 10 Women Can′t Be Wrong
9 Out Of 10 Women Can't Be Wrong
Cara Colter
There was some innocence in that kiss Ty could barely fathom.
Once he broke it off, she stared at him, her eyes huge. He could see she was trembling. She actually took her fist to her mouth, and bit on it, as if to stop the shaking.
The gesture stopped him cold. “Harriet,” he growled. “Harriet Pendleton.”
She laughed nervously. “All grown up,” she said, as if that in some way made what had happened between them all right.
Ha. She was a friend of his sister’s. A kid.
Off-limits to him.
He had to get through the remaining four days without looking at her lips again. Because those were not the lips of a kid. Actually, hers wasn’t the body of a kid, either.
Yes, Harriet Pendleton was a woman now. And Ty Jordan wanted her like the red-blooded man he was….
Dear Reader,
Summer is over and it’s time to kick back into high gear. Just be sure to treat yourself with a luxuriant read or two (or, hey, all six) from Silhouette Romance. Remember—work hard, play harder!
Although October is officially Breast Cancer Awareness month, we’d like to invite you to start thinking about it now. In a wonderful, uplifting story, a rancher reluctantly agrees to model for a charity calendar to earn money for cancer research. At the back of that book, we’ve also included a guide for self-exams. Don’t miss Cara Colter’s must-read 9 Out of 10 Women Can’t Be Wrong (#1615).
Indulge yourself with megapopular author Karen Rose Smith and her CROWN AND GLORY series installment, Searching for Her Prince (#1612). A missing heir puts love on the line when he hides his identity from the woman assigned to track him down. The royal, brooding hero in Sandra Paul’s stormy Caught by Surprise (#1614), the latest in the A TALE OF THE SEA adventure, also has secrets—and intends to make his beautiful captor pay…by making her his wife!
Jesse Colton is a special agent forced to play pretend boyfriend to uncover dangerous truths in the fourth of THE COLTONS: COMANCHE BLOOD spinoff, The Raven’s Assignment (#1613), by bestselling author Kasey Michaels. And in Cathie Linz’s MEN OF HONOR title, Married to a Marine (#1616), combat-hardened Justice Wilder had shut himself away from the world—until his ex-wife’s younger sister comes knocking…. Finally, in Laurey Bright’s tender and true Life with Riley (#1617), free-spirited Riley Morrisset may not be the perfect society wife, but she’s exactly what her stiff-collared boss needs!
Happy reading—and please keep in touch.
Mary-Theresa Hussey
Senior Editor
9 Out of 10 Women Can’t Be Wrong
Cara Colter
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To my nephew, Mathew, (Sarvis the Silent) with love
Books by Cara Colter
Silhouette Romance
Dare To Dream #491
Baby in Blue #1161
Husband in Red #1243
The Cowboy, the Baby and the Bride-to-Be #1319
Truly Daddy #1363
A Bride Worth Waiting For #1388
Weddings Do Come True #1406
A Babe in the Woods #1424
A Royal Marriage #1440
First Time, Forever #1464
* (#litres_trial_promo)Husband by Inheritance #1532
* (#litres_trial_promo)The Heiress Takes a Husband #1538
Wed by a Will #1544
What Child Is This? #1585
Her Royal Husband #1600
9 Out of 10 Women Can’t Be Wrong #1615
The Coltons
A Hasty Wedding
CARA COLTER
shares ten acres in the wild Kootenay region of British Columbia with the man of her dreams, three children, two horses, a cat with no tail and a golden retriever who answers best to “bad dog.” She loves reading, writing and the woods in winter (no bears). She says life’s delights include an automatic garage door opener and the skylight over the bed that allows her to see the stars at night.
She also says, “I have not lived a neat and tidy life, and used to envy those who did. Now I see my struggles as having given me a deep appreciation of life, and of love, which I hope I succeed in passing on through the stories that I tell.”
Dear Reader,
There is someone I would like you to know. She was my favorite heroine. Ruth Caron was petite and pretty. She had china-blue eyes and sandy brown hair. Her front teeth were a little crooked. She was a playful spirit who loved to dance. She was afraid of water and was always a little self-conscious about her lack of education. She quit school when she was seventeen, got married and started having babies. One of whom was me.
Many of my heroines are ordinary women who reach inside themselves to find the extraordinary depths of their spirits. My mom was like that. Just one example was her terror of water. Instead of surrendering to that fear and passing it on, she made sure my sisters and I had swimming lessons. My mom baby-sat kids to make money, and I think of the sacrifice she made to ensure I would know only joy in the water. In her later years, she even took up swimming herself! (Shallow end only!)
When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990, her courage was monumental, far beyond what anyone would have ever expected of such an ordinary and humble woman. She died in August of 1995 at the age of 57. The hole in my heart will never be filled.
I wanted you, the reader, to at least have a glimpse of this remarkable woman. I wanted you to know, right this instant, someone feels the great love for you that I felt and feel for my mom. Please do breast self-exams and have mammograms regularly. Donate to breast cancer research. Do it for your mother, your daughters, your sisters, your friends. Do it for yourself.
With all my best wishes,
Contents
Prologue (#u96d1c467-bc8b-5e55-b6ef-fd9d8d33dabe)
Chapter One (#ud85e7f12-6eec-5dc6-85fe-06ef18f57c2b)
Chapter Two (#uca452895-4267-5dd8-9c7e-03266c42d64d)
Chapter Three (#u3a2f8866-65a9-5f2b-bf68-9a39e3d907ce)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
“Your brother is a photographer’s dream. And a red-blooded woman’s nightmare.”
“Harriet,” Stacey said sleepily, from the other side of the bed, “Ty doesn’t see you as a red-blooded woman. Go to sleep. He’s going to have us up at five in the morning, because you said you wanted to see them bring in the cattle from the upper pasture. Your enthusiasm for the ranch is beginning to make me very sorry I invited you. I thought we were going to sleep in, watch videos and make pizzas.”
“You can do those things in Calgary,” Harriet said, as if her mind wasn’t solidly locked on the words Ty doesn’t see you as a red-blooded woman.
Why would he? Stacey Jordan’s older brother, Ty, was the most astonishing man Harriet Pendleton had ever seen. He was tall, broad-shouldered, lean and hard-muscled from years of ranch work. His face passed attractive and went straight to sinful. When his eyes rested on her, dark as melted chocolate, Harriet felt the shiver of pure male energy in the air.
Don’t ask, she ordered herself firmly. But a small voice, definitely hers, asked aloud. “Why doesn’t he see me as a red-blooded woman?”
As if she didn’t know. Harriet Pendleton was well aware she was too everything. Too tall, too skinny, too freckled. Add to that crooked teeth, and bottle-bottom eyeglasses. Too ugly.
“Harriet, he doesn’t see you as a red-blooded woman because you’re my friend. He thinks we’re both kids.”
“But I’m older than you!” Harriet protested. “Twenty-two is not a child.”
“So, tell him!” Stacey said grumpily. “And let me go to sleep.”
“Someday,” Harriet said, “I’m going to be a famous photographer and I’ll have enough money to get my teeth fixed and have laser surgery done on my eyes.”
“Harriet, don’t be so silly. You glow. Anyone who knows you, knows how beautiful you are.”
Except your brother.
Harriet and Stacey were roommates at the Alberta College of Art. Harriet was upgrading some photo courses, Stacey was taking commercial art. Stacey had invited Harriet to spend spring break on her brother’s ranch, the Bar ZZ, south of Calgary.
It had sounded like so much fun.
It would have been so much fun, except for him. A man like that made breathing in and out seem difficult. Words caught in Harriet’s throat. She was in such a constant state of blush that he thought her face was naturally beet red. He’d remarked they needed to keep her out of the sun! She was so self-conscious in his presence that she did everything wrong, tripped over her own feet. After she’d fallen and spooked the cattle, he’d remarked they needed to keep her away from the cattle, too.
“He calls me Lady Disaster,” she fretted, out loud.
“He’s teasing you, Harriet! Please go to sleep. Please?”
She willed herself to go to sleep. She promised herself that tomorrow everything would be different. And it was.
The next day Harriet fell off a horse and broke her arm.
Her trip to the Bar ZZ was over, ending in the emergency ward of the tiny High River Hospital. At least she had felt his arms! He had carried her, strong and sure, gently teased her out of her pain.
And then he’d said goodbye.
But when she developed the photographs she had taken, she realized she would never really say goodbye to him.
The photos of Ty shone, as if the man was lit from within. She had done on film what she had no hope of doing in real life. She had captured him.
On the basis of those pictures, she was offered a photo assignment overseas.
And on the basis of a badly bruised heart, she took it….
Chapter One
Tyler Jordan was aware he was being watched.
There it was again. The secretary, a woman old enough to be well beyond such nonsense, glanced up coyly from behind her work, looked at him longer than he considered strictly polite and then, with the flash of a secretive smile, looked back to her computer screen.
Ty pretended he hadn’t noticed her scrutiny and studied the room uncomfortably. The outer waiting area of Francis Cringle and Associates struck him as being more like the kind of office he’d seen in the rare movie he watched than like a real life office, or at least not any real life office he’d ever been in.
He couldn’t believe his sister—a girl born and raised on a ranch—worked in a place like this…actually fitted in here.
He was sitting on a sofa of butter-yellow leather. Another faced him. Huge deep-green plants were scattered throughout. He wasn’t sure how a real plant survived in an atmosphere with no natural light. The artificial lighting was muted; the rug, covering marble tiles, looked old and worn in a way that convinced him it had been picked up at an African bazaar.
He heard the quick tap of heels coming down the hallway outside this posh office and felt himself tensing.
If whoever it was went on by, then he knew he must be imagining all the unusual attention he was getting. But no, the tapping of the heels slowed, and then she came in. Tall and willowy, in a tight blue skirt and a short matching jacket, she glanced quickly his way, her confidence astounding, given the balancing act she must be doing on those high stiletto heels, then moved over to the desk and had a whispered conversation with the woman there. The conversation was punctuated with breathless giggles and sidelong looks.
At him.
The looks were loaded with secrets…and satisfaction. Looks not at all in keeping with the muted atmosphere of subdued professionalism that the well-known public relations firm’s office had achieved.
Ty frowned and picked up a magazine off the dark-walnut coffee table in front of him. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the highly polished surface, and it confirmed how out of place he was here. Cowboy hat, white denim shirt unbuttoned at the throat, jeans. He might have raised some of the cattle that provided the luxurious leather he was now sitting on.
A flurry of giggles and looks made him scowl at the magazine, flip it open and read the first paragraph of an article on office management.
He didn’t have an office, but looking at the article seemed preferable to pulling his cowboy hat even further over his eyes.
Another young woman flounced into the office, pudgy and cute, took a long look at him, then flung her blond hair over her shoulder, fluttered her eyelashes several times. If she was expecting a response, he didn’t give her one, and she hurried over to the desk and joined the other two in whispered conversation.
Which he heard snatches of. Something about being even better in person, something about people who should be sharing hot tubs and wine on starlit nights, something about crackers in her bed. He sent them a dark and withering look that had the unhappy result of eliciting sighs and a few more giggles.
He gave up pretending the article interested him, tossed down the magazine, stretched out his legs and crossed his cowboy boots at the ankles. He looked wistfully at the door.
His eyes drifted to the clock. Five more minutes and he was leaving. He didn’t care what kind of pickle Stacey had gotten herself into this time. At the moment he would be no help to his kid sister, anyway, since he felt as if he’d like to throttle her.
A one-and-a-half-hour drive into the center of Calgary. At calving time. Because she had an emergency. Life-and-death, she’d claimed on the phone.
So, if it was so life-and-death, where was she?
And if it was so life-and-death why had she asked him to not wear jeans with holes in them? And clean boots? What kind of person in a life-and-death situation thought of things like that?
Life-and-death meant the emergency ward at the hospital, not the outer office of Francis Cringle.
So here he was in pressed jeans and a clean shirt and his good boots and hat, being giggled at, and his sister was nowhere to be seen.
He resisted, barely, the impulse to send the secretaries into more conniptions by rubbing his back, hard, up against the wall behind him.
“Ladies, do you have business elsewhere?”
They scattered like frightened chickens in front of a fox, and his rescuer, a tall woman, distinguished, turned and looked him over, carefully. “Tyler Jordan?”
He practically leapt to his feet, took off his hat and rolled it uncomfortably between his fingers. “Ma’am?”
She smiled when he said that. That same damned smile he’d been seeing since he’d walked into this stuffy office!
“Will you come with me, sir?”
Sir. A phrase he’d heard rarely. Usually in restaurants where he was destined to use the wrong fork. He followed her down the hall, having to cut his long stride so that he didn’t walk on top of her.
She ushered him into an office, smiled again and shut the door behind him. The light pouring in the floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls blinded him momentarily after the dimness of the outer office.
But when his eyes adjusted, he registered more opulence, and Stacey. She was sitting in a chair on this side of a huge desk that looked as if it was made of solid granite.
“Hi, Ty,” she said with a big smile, and patted the seat of the empty chair next to her. “How’s my big brother today?”
If they didn’t have an audience, a wizened old gnome of a man sitting behind the desk, Ty would have given her the complete and unvarnished truth. He was irritated as hell today.
Life-and-death, indeed.
His little sister had never looked healthier! Her mischievous eyes sparkling, her dark hair all piled up on her head making her look quite sophisticated, wearing a suit and shoes just like all the other women he’d seen today.
“I’ve had better days,” he answered her gruffly, and reluctantly took the chair beside her. More leather. His boots sank about two inches into the carpet.
“I suppose you’re wondering what’s going on?” she asked brightly.
“Life-and-death,” he reminded her.
“Ty, this is my boss, Francis Cringle. Mr. Cringle, my brother, Ty.”
Ty rose halfway out of his chair, took Cringle’s hand and was a little surprised by the strength of the grip.
“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Jordan,” the voice was warm and friendly, the voice of a man who had spent a lifetime promoting items people had no idea they needed. “Thanks for coming. Stacey tells me you’re a busy man. She also mentioned you have no idea why you’re here?”
“None.”
“Your sister entered you in a contest. And you won.”
A contest. Ty shot his sister a menacing look. Life-and-death, huh? Knowing his sister, he’d won something really useless like a lifetime supply of jujubes or a raft trip down the Amazon in the hot season.
“You see, Ty.” Stacey was talking very quickly now, catching on that she was trying his patience. “Francis Cringle has been hired by the Fight Against Breast Cancer Fund to do their next fund-raiser.”
Breast cancer. How he hated that disease, the disease that had stolen the life from his mother, left a whole family shaken, marooned, like survivors of a shipwreck. Only their shipwreck had dragged on endlessly. Five years of hoping, being crushed, hoping again.
“Okay,” he said, not allowing one single memory to shade his voice, “And?”
“You remember my friend Harriet don’t you?”
“How could I forget?” Harriet Pendleton was a young woman his sister had met at college and brought home for a week one spring. What? Three years ago? Four?
Usually he couldn’t distinguish Stacey’s friends one from the other. But Harriet was the girl most likely to be mistaken for a giraffe. Nearly six feet tall, most of that legs and neck, she was covered in ginger-colored freckles and splotches that matched untamable hair. Her eyes, brown and worried looking, had been enlarged by thick glasses. Her quick, nervous smile had revealed extremely crooked teeth.
Totally forgettable in the looks department, not that Ty ever paid much attention to Stacey’s friends, Harriet had made herself memorable in other ways. Disaster had followed in the poor girl’s wake. She had broken nearly everything she touched, run the well dry by leaving a tap on and let the calves out by not securing a latch properly.
Somehow they’d gotten through the week before Harriet managed to stampede the cattle and burn down the barn, but they had sent her home with her arm encased in plaster.
He should have been glad to see them go, and yet even now he could feel a little smile tickle his lips when he thought of Harriet.
She had made him laugh. And even though he always felt lonely for a week or two after Stacey had been home for a visit, that time it had taken even longer to get back to normal.
“Lady Disaster,” Ty remembered. “I thought you told me she lived in Europe now.”
Stacey gave him that do-you-listen-to-a-word-I-say look. “She’s been back for months. She’s the one who had the photograph that won the contest.”
“And how do I fit into all this? Life-and-death, remember?” He had a feeling they were moving farther and farther from the point, as if he was being swept away in the current of his sister’s enthusiasm. Unwillingly.
“I’m getting to it,” she said, her tone reproaching his impatience. “The fund-raising idea is to do a calendar. Everybody does them. You know, the firefighters for the burn unit and the police for the orphan’s fund.”
“I don’t know. Haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.”
She actually looked annoyed with him, the same way she did when she’d still been at home and mentioned a film or a popular song or some celebrity that he knew nothing about. She would roll her eyes at him and say, “Oh, the famous blank look from my brother, the recluse from life.”
Today she just handed him a calendar, called “Red Hot,” which he presumed he was supposed to look at. He flipped through it, without much interest, feeling resentful that he had a ranch to run and was sitting in Calgary looking at pictures.
Very dull pictures of guys without their shirts, in firefighter’s pants with suspenders. They looked self-conscious, which he didn’t blame them for, and they held a variety of unlikely poses that made their muscles bulge. A few had artfully placed smudges of soot on their cheeks and chests.
“People buy this?” he muttered incredulously. He thought of his own calendar at home. Posted beside his fridge, it had nice pictures of plump Herefords on each month. The Ranch Hand Feed Store gave the calendars away free in December. The Farm Corp Insurance Company also handed out free calendars. Ty had no idea people bought calendars.
“Women buy them,” his sister said, and he realized it shouldn’t surprise him that a woman would buy something she could get free. Women liked to spend money, a lesson his sister had taught him.
“They’re especially willing to buy calendars like these if it’s in support of a good cause. Like breast cancer research.”
Something in her voice made him look up. He stopped flipping pages between March’s Bryan and April’s Kyle and closed the calendar firmly. He slid it onto the corner of Cringle’s desk, remembering, uneasily, all the looks he’d been getting all morning.
He had the awful feeling he had not won a lifetime supply of jujubes. Not even close.
“What have you done, Stacey?”
“I entered you in the contest!” she admitted, her smile not even faltering. “Harriet had the most incredible photo. Francis Cringle and Associates held a contest to find the perfect calendar guy. And you won!”
The perfect calendar guy? Me?
“You mean you set it up for me to win,” he said tightly.
“Oh, no, Mr. Jordan,” Mr. Cringle interjected with swift authority. “Absolutely not. All the entries were done in a double blind. Your sister was not one of the judges.”
“Who were the judges?” he asked reluctantly, not really caring. He slid a look at the door, planning his escape route.
Mr. Cringle answered. “We set up the entries at a local mall for a week. Over two thousand women voted. Do you want to hear the strangest thing? Ninety percent of them voted for you. Ninety percent!”
He felt a sick kind of embarrassment at the idea of that many women ogling a picture of him. And he felt more than a little angry at his sister.
“The concept we’re working with,” Mr. Cringle told him, “is a one-man calendar. Different photos illustrating different real-life scenarios that man finds himself in. I was thrilled to hear you are a rancher. The photo opportunities are mind-boggling.”
Ty felt he should have boggled Stacey’s mind—or maybe her behind—when she skipped school in the tenth grade. And when she snuck out her bedroom window in the eleventh. He should never have allowed her to be so mouthy and strong-willed. He should have definitely drawn the line with her when she had begun to date that hippie. If he had managed to control her in any one of those circumstances maybe he wouldn’t be sitting here now.
Now, it seemed it was too late to straighten his sister out. Ty would just have to try and save himself.
“Mr. Cringle,” he said carefully, “I’m sorry. My sister has wasted your time. I’m not a calendar model, and I never will be. I’m a rancher. Despite what women who buy calendars might want to believe, there is nothing even vaguely appealing about the kind of work I do. I’m usually up to my ears in mud and crap.”
“Oh, Ty,” Stacey said, “it’s not as if the calendars come in scratch and sniff. Women love those kind of pictures. Sweat. Mud. Rippling muscles. Jeans faded across the rear. You’re perfect for the job, Ty.”
Ty was staring at his sister with dismay. Women liked stuff like that? And how the hell did she know? He realized he hated that she was a full-fledged adult.
“So, hire a model,” Ty said, and heard the testiness in his voice. “If you need some mud, I’ll provide it.”
“Models are so—” Stacey searched for the word, beamed when she found it “—slick.”
Ty could only hope she didn’t know that from firsthand experience.
“Mr. Jordan, I’m sure there were male models among the entries that were posted at the mall. The result of the competition tells me women can tell the difference between someone posing as a rugged, raw, one hundred percent man and the actual man.” Cringle regarded him intently, then said softly, “Ninety per cent is a whole lot of calendars.”
“Yeah, well.” Ty glared at his sister.
“Mr. Cringle, you leave him to me,” Stacey said brightly, but Ty noticed her eyes had tears in them. She’d better not even think she was going to change his mind with the waterworks thing.
It had worked way too many times before. That was part of the problem. Stacey knew exactly how to tug at his heartstrings.
The rest of the world probably thought he didn’t have a heart.
But his little sister knew the truth about him.
When she was seven their mother had died of breast cancer. A year later their father had been killed in a single-car accident, though Ty still wondered how accidental it had been. His father had become a shell of a man since his wife had died.
Ty had been eighteen when the accident occurred. Way too young to be thrust into the responsibility of bringing up a little girl.
But what choice had he had?
Ship her off to an aunt and uncle he barely knew? Let her go to a foster home? Not while he lived and breathed. There had been absolutely no choice. None. His sister had needed him to grow up fast, and he had.
“Why don’t we go have lunch together?” she said to him sweetly. “And we’ll meet Mr. Cringle back here at, say, one o’clock?”
Ty decided not to lay down the law with her in front of her boss. He got up, extended his hand again. “Mr. Cringle,” he said with finality.
But the man looked from him to his sister and back with a twinkle in his eye.
“Until we meet again,” Cringle said.
“Which, hopefully, will be never,” Ty muttered under his breath as he herded his sister toward the door.
“I don’t have time for lunch,” he told her in the hallway. “Calves are hitting the ground as we speak. And I’m not changing my mind about the calendar thing. Get it out of your head. It’s never going to happen. Never.”
Her eyes were welling up with tears. “Ty, don’t be so stubborn.”
The tears reminded him how careful he had to be about using the word never with Stacey. Somehow it always came back to bite him.
He’d said never the first time he’d seen her in makeup, reacting to how the inexpertly applied gunk had stolen the fresh innocence from her face. And then he’d ended up paying for her to take a full day of instructions in makeup application at Face Up and buying all the products she needed. That had been about a whopper of a bill.
He’d said never to her choice of a prom dress, low cut, clinging, way too old for her, and ended up being dragged into places no man in his right mind wanted to go, for days, finding a dress they could both agree on.
And he’d said never to the hippie, which had made the hippie twice as attractive to her, and made him realize that it was no longer his job to say anything to Stacey. Somehow, with so many stumbles on his part and so many mistakes, she had grown up, anyway. Into a young woman who knew her own mind and made pretty reasonable decisions most of the time.
But not this time. “What were you thinking, entering my picture without asking me? Geez, Stacey!”
“It was just a lark. Harriet suggested it.”
Somehow he should have known Harriet was involved in this disaster. Harriet and disaster went together as naturally as peanut butter and jam, saddles and cow horses, trucks and tires.
“Besides,” his sister said blithely, “how did I know you were going to win?”
He sighed. Was she deliberately missing the point? She was wiping tears off her face with the back of her sweater, getting little black smudges all over the white sleeve. Hard to stop noticing stuff like that even though he didn’t buy her clothes anymore.
“Could you take me for lunch?” she said with a little hiccup. “You must need a break from Cookie’s meals by now. Besides, you hardly ever see me anymore.”
He looked at her. His little sister was all grown up. Becoming more a big-city woman every time he saw her. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to pass by these chances to be with her.
“Okay,” he said grudgingly. “Lunch. But cheap and fast.” He was thinking along the lines of the Burger in a Bag he had passed on the corner before this office building.
Of course she took him to a little French restaurant that wasn’t cheap and wasn’t even remotely fast.
Despite his annoyance with her, she made him laugh when she told him about how she was hiding a Saint Bernard that she had found, in her little apartment. So far no one had answered the ad she had put in the paper.
“The dog,” she said proudly, “knows how to open the fridge.”
A Saint Bernard who knew how to open the fridge? “That explains why the owners aren’t answering the ad,” Ty commented.
The food came. He’d refused wine—wine with lunch?—but Stacey had ignored him and was pouring him another glass from the carafe of house white that she had ordered.
“You know, Ty, Mom died of breast cancer.”
He took a long sip of wine, then set it down. Okay. Now that Stacey had fed him and lured him into drinking wine with lunch, she was going to try and sucker punch him.
“I hadn’t forgotten,” he said quietly.
“Don’t you think it’s our obligation to fight the disease that took our mother? Don’t you remember how awful it was?”
He suspected he remembered better than she did, since he had been older at the time. He glared at her, seeing the corner she was backing him into. He said nothing and against his better judgment took another sip of the wine.
“That calendar could make the research foundation a lot of money.” She made sure she had his full attention, laid her hand on his. She named a figure.
He nearly spit out the wine. “Are you serious?”
“Dead serious. It’s not very many people who have a chance to give that kind of money to the charity of their choice.”
“Just because I said I don’t want to do it doesn’t mean they aren’t going to go ahead with the calendar.”
“No. But ninety percent of the women who voted liked you—ninety percent. That’s huge, Ty, especially if it translates into them buying calendars. There are 750,000 people in Calgary alone. I estimate 200,000 of them are women. If only fifty percent of them bought calendars, that would be a huge amount of money! In this city alone!”
He could feel his head starting to swim, and not from the wine. “Stacey,” he said carefully, enunciating every word, “I’m not doing it.”
He avoided saying never.
“Oh, Ty.” She sighed and looked at her fingernails. “You wouldn’t even have to come in to the city. You wouldn’t even have to miss an hour’s work.”
“I said no.”
“You wouldn’t even know the photographer was there. The photographer’s all lined up. World class.”
“No.”
“So, it won’t cost you anything, not even time, and you have a chance to contribute so much to a cause that is very meaningful to you, and you say no?”
“That’s right,” he said, and he hoped she didn’t hear the first little sliver of uncertainly in his voice.
“If the calendar was a huge success, I think I’d get a raise. I’d be able to buy a little house. With a backyard for Basil.”
“Basil is the Saint Bernard, I hope.”
She nodded sadly. “I think the landlord suspects I have him.”
“I’m not posing for calendars so you can keep a dog that’s bigger than my horse and has the dubious talent of opening a fridge.” At least, he thought, his sister was planning her life around a dog, and not the hippie. He noticed she hadn’t mentioned the beau today. Did he dare hope he was out of the picture? Or was it because Ty had lost his temper when she had mentioned the hippie and marriage in the same breath once? He decided he didn’t want to know.
She took a little sip of her wine and looked at her lap. She finally said, in a small voice, “You know my chances of getting it are high, don’t you?”
“What?” There. She’d managed to completely lose him with her conversational acrobatics.
“My chances of getting breast cancer are higher than other peoples. Because Mom died of it.”
“Aw, Stacey.”
“The only thing that will change that is research.”
He looked across the table at her and saw her fear was real. He felt his heart break in two when he thought of her in terms of that disease. Wouldn’t he have done anything to make his mother well?
Wouldn’t he do anything to keep his little sister from having to go down that same road? From diagnosis to surgery to chemo to years of struggle to a death that was immeasurably painful and without dignity?
If he was able to raise those kinds of dollars to research a disease that might affect his sister, did he really have any choice at all? If the stupid calendar raised only half as much, or a third as much as his sister’s idealistic estimate, did he have any choice?
Wasn’t this almost the very same feeling he’d had the day a social worker had looked at him and said, “She could go to your uncle Milton. Or to a foster home close to here. If you can’t take her.”
He glared at his sister. He saw the little smile working around the edges of her lips and realized they both knew she had won.
“Don’t even think I’m taking off my shirt,” he said, conceding with ill grace.
“I don’t know, Ty. If you took off your shirt, we might be able to sell a million copies of the calendar.” She correctly interpreted the look he gave her. “Okay, okay,” she said, laughing. “Thank you, Ty. Thank you. I owe my life to you.”
He hoped that would never be true.
She got up out of her chair, came around the table, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on his cheeks. About sixteen times.
Until everyone at the tables around them were looking over and smiling indulgently.
“This is my brother,” she announced, happily. “He’s my hero.”
Chapter Two
If Tyler Jordan was the most handsome man alive, being angry did not diminish that in the least. Maybe it even accentuated the rugged cut, the masculine perfection, of his sun- and wind-burned features.
And Harriet Pendleton Snow knew he was angry, even before he spoke. The energy bristled in the air around him.
“I was expecting a man,” he said, impatience flashing in his dark eyes. He looked down at a scrap of paper in his hand, and she caught a glimpse of bold, impatient handwriting. “Harry Winter.”
“Harrie Snow,” she corrected him. “That would be me.” He hadn’t recognized her. And she didn’t really know whether to be pleased or hurt by that.
A lot of things had changed in four years.
Outwardly. Inwardly she was doing the same slow melt she had done the first time she had met her best friend’s brother. She had been twenty-two years old when she had first met her best friend’s brother.
Standing right here in this same driveway, the little white frame house behind them, a larger barn behind that, the rolling hills of the Rocky Mountain foothills stretching into infinity on all sides of them, and all of that majesty fading to nothing when his eyes had met hers.
Dark and full of mystery.
Over the years she had tried to tell herself it was other things that had stolen her breath so completely that day.
The immensity of the land.
The romance of the ranch.
The fragrance of the air.
But standing before him now, she was not so sure.
“I find it hard to believe a woman like you is named Harry,” he snapped.
“Like me?” she said. “What does that mean?” Personally she found it even harder to believe that a perfectly rational woman like her mother had looked down at a squirming red-faced bundle of life and seen a Harriet. It was a name she hated and had been trying to lose for years.
He rolled a big shoulder, irritated, gestured. “Like you,” he said. “Polished, pretty—”
Polished. Which meant all the hours spent choosing just the right outfit, until her bed and her floor had been littered with discards, had been well spent. It meant that the new haircut had succeeded, for the time, in taming her wild curls. It meant her new hair color, copper, instead of plain old red, was as sophisticated as she’d hoped. It meant maybe it wasn’t so ridiculous to try to match your lip shade with your nail enamel.
Pretty. He’d called her pretty. For a girl who had grown up thinking of herself as plain at best, homely at worst, they were words she could never hear enough of.
But, before she had a chance to savor that too deeply, it sank in that he hadn’t exactly said pretty as if he thought it was a good thing.
“—an absolute pain around a ranch,” he was saying. “Were you going to ride a horse in a skirt, or is that supposed to put me in the right frame of mind to have my picture taken?”
Was he crankier than he had been back then? Stacey said he was perpetually cranky, but that was not what Harriet had seen in the week she’d been here four years ago.
She’d seen a young man who had shouldered a huge responsibility, defying the fact he probably was ill-prepared to act as anybody’s parent. She had seen he wore sternness like a tough outer skin so his sister wouldn’t see how easily she could have anything she wanted from him because he loved her so.
That love, despite his efforts to disguise it, had been just below the surface that whole week, in the tolerance he had shown both of them, even after the unfortunate accidents.
Accidents caused because Harriet wanted so badly to do everything right, was so nervous around him, so afraid she would say exactly the wrong thing, do exactly the wrong thing. She had wanted him to see her as grown-up and mature.
So of course he had seen her as a kid.
And of course she had spent the entire week doing things wrong, clumsily, self-consciously aware of the newfound feeling inside her.
She would have absolutely died if he’d thought of her as pretty back then.
Because she had fallen in love with him within minutes. Maybe even seconds.
She knew it to be ridiculous now. From the perspective of a woman who had had four years to think about it, to travel the world, to experience many adventures, to marry badly, she knew how ridiculous her younger and more naive self had been.
When she had seen the results of the vote conducted at the Sunny Peak Mall she had known how ridiculous her twenty-two-year-old self had been.
Ridiculous, but not alone.
Women loved him, pure and simple.
She had been given the rarest of things—a second chance. To prove she could be competent, that she was not in the least clumsy or accident prone.
And she had a second chance for him to see her as attractive, the thick bottle-bottom glasses no longer a necessity because of the miracle of laser surgery.
Her teeth as straight and white as money and time and steel could make them.
She knew how to dress now in a way that made her height and slenderness an asset. He might not like the skirt, but she hadn’t missed how his eyes had touched on the length of her legs. Her tendency to freckle was becoming less with each year, revealing a startling, lovely complexion underneath. She had learned how to use makeup to show off her eyes and her cheekbones. Some days, like today, she could almost tame the wild mop of her hair.
But most of all she had been give a second chance to prove she was not in love with him.
Not even close. She had been a gauche and unworldly young woman the first time she had met Tyler Jordan. Male influences had been somewhat lacking in her life, as her mother had been a single parent. She had one sister. Despite her height, or maybe because of it, Harriet had always been invisible to the boys in high school and then, disappointingly, in college.
No wonder she had been so completely bowled over by Ty Jordan. In his form-hugging jeans, with those arm muscles rippling, his straight teeth flashing, he’d exuded a male potency, completely without thought on his part, against which she had been defenseless. Even his silences, to her, had seemed to be charged with some male magic that was both foreign and exciting.
But she was not a naive young girl anymore, and she had a secret agenda here. To take back a heart she had given when she hadn’t known better. To take back her power.
A deep, muffled woof reminded her of the surprise she had for him. Not a good start in proving herself, but not her fault.
“Stacey asked me to bring Basil out. Her landlord is on to him, and she’s going to get evicted.”
“Basil?” Tyler was peering over her shoulder. She glanced back. The dog had his big nose pressed mournfully against the window of her small car and was looking at them with pleading, red-rimmed eyes.
“The Saint Bernard?” he asked, incredulous. “My sister sent me the Saint Bernard that knows how to open a fridge? I don’t believe this.”
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” she said, leaning in carefully and hooking up the leash. The interior of her car had a slightly raunchy odor to it, which she could only hope was not also clinging to her.
“Don’t tempt me,” he said sourly.
Should she just tell him who she was? But then he would be expecting the worst from her from the very beginning. How could it be a real second chance if he had preconceived notions? If he thought of her as the Harriet who blushed every time she spoke and choked on her food at dinner because he even made her self-conscious about chewing?
The dog barreled out of the car as soon as she flipped the seat forward, loped to the end of its lead, reared up and placed its saucer-size paws on Tyler’s chest and licked his face.
She wondered if Basil was female. The man was irresistible.
Except Harrie planned to resist him. This time everything was going according to her plan. She was a professional photographer. She’d been in war zones. She’d traveled the world. She knew how to stay calm while under fire.
Under fire. How about on fire?
She’d worked with some of the world’s most attractive men and made the mistake of marrying one of them. She should be immune to their charms.
And she was!
But much of Ty Jordan’s charm was in the fact he was unaware he possessed it. If he had any idea that he was infinitely appealing, he shrugged it off as unimportant, not an asset that helped him produce cattle or run a ranch or raise a younger sister.
And he was more than good-looking. Eighteen hundred women had seen that right away, and placed their one precious checkmark, their vote for the perfect calendar guy, beside his name and picture.
He was tall, at least two inches taller than Harriet’s embarrassing five foot ten. His shoulders were enormous and mirrored the strength that had allowed him to stand firm even when the beluga-size dog launched itself at him.
And his shoulders weren’t enormous because of four days a week power lifting at the gym, either.
They were enormous from throwing bales and breaking green colts and wrestling cattle.
“Get down,” he ordered the dog, and backed up the firmness of the command by removing the paws from his chest and shoving on the dog’s huge head. With the other arm he swiped his face where the dog had slurped on him.
The simple movement made the sun gleam off the dark hairs on arms that rippled with sinewy muscle. Harrie noticed how the short sleeves of the T-shirt stretched over the bulge of his biceps, molding them. His arms were sun browned, even this early in the year, and his forearms were corded with muscle, his wrists big and square.
The shirt, decorated now with two large paw prints and a splotch of drool, hugged the mounds of deep pectoral muscles, then tapered over broad, hard ribs to a flat waist. The T-shirt was tucked into faded jeans, belted with a scarred brown leather belt. The buckle was worn casually, but it winked solid silver, and Harriet saw it depicted a horse, head down and back arched, trying to get rid of a rider.
Black lettering proclaimed: Wind River Saddle Bronc Champion.
It suddenly occurred to her that her interest in the buckle had put her eyes in the wrong vicinity for too long.
She looked up swiftly.
He had folded his arms over his chest and was looking at her sardonically.
“Do you ride broncs?” she asked, just to let him know she had read the buckle in its entirety.
“No,” he replied curtly.
“That’s too bad,” she said, flashing him what she hoped was a professionally indifferent smile. “It would have made a great photograph.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Get this straight right now. We are not organizing my life for your photo ops. You’re going to follow me around, snap a few pictures, and go home.”
She was thinking of the belt buckle. Stacey had told her he went to rodeos before his parents had died, leaving him with Stacey. Before a boy had to become a man. Facts, she reminded herself, that she was not supposed to know.
And yet facts that would help her capture the essence of him on film, an essence he seemed particularly eager not to reveal as he stood there glowering at her.
But it was the essence of him that made him so teeth-grindingly sexy.
She reminded herself she was a photographer now. Not a starstruck kid. He wanted her to be intimidated by him and she could not allow herself that luxury. She was entitled to look at his face. To study it. To know it.
And so she did.
He had dark hair, the midnight black of a summer sky just before the storm. His hair was close-cropped, sticking up a touch in the front. His face was perfection, and she knew, because she had photographed the faces of some of the world’s most perfect men. Or men who were considered perfect in the looks department, anyway.
She looked at his face and tried to dissect the appeal of it. It had strong lines, particularly the line from his jawbone to his chin. His chin was square, the cleft so faint it could almost be overlooked. A good photograph would show it, though.
His cheekbones were high, and the hollow from the edge of his mouth to the line of his jaw was pronounced. His lips were full and firm and were bracketed by faint lines, stern and down turned. His nose was strong and straight. The faint white ridge of a scar at the bridge of it only underscored his rugged masculine appeal.
But she knew, finally, it was his eyes that took him over the edge, from a nice-looking guy to something beyond. His eyes were almond shaped, fringed with a spiky abundance of black lash. The eyes themselves were the dark rich brown of melted chocolate, but it was the look in them that defined him.
Unflinching. Steady. Calm. Strong. Deep.
And yet some mystery resided there, too. It was not exactly wariness, but a certain aloofness. His eyes told his story: that he was a man who chose to walk alone, who knew his own strength completely and relied on it without thought or hesitation.
A lot to know perhaps from one glance at a man.
Except she had had so much more than that. A week that shone in her memory, a few photographs she had taken that had become worn over the years from handling.
A memory of the way those eyes changed when the laughter sparked deep in their depths.
The dog caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and flung his great head, drool flying as he did so. Harrie leaped back to avoid her suit being splattered by dog spit.
It was a nice suit. Extremely professional, gray silk, tight enough to be feminine. She had worn it to travel in, with flat-heeled loafers.
Okay, the skirt was a little shorter than it should have been, and she could have done up one more blouse button, and it would have made more sense to show up in slacks, but still—
The dog let out a sudden deep bay. She was completely unprepared for the power of the beast as he leaped to his feet and charged toward a cow and calf that had come out from behind a shelter and were now nosing the new spring grass in the pasture adjoining the driveway.
Harrie felt her shoulder jerk and the leash burn through her hand. She caught the loop of the leash at the end of it and held on for dear life.
Stacey had told her, laughing, after their visit to the ranch, Ty was amazed you didn’t stampede the cattle.
Playfully he had called her Lady Disaster. She was not going to have this stupid dog stampede the cattle within minutes of her arriving this time—this time when everything was going to be so different.
Off balance, as the powerful dog charged toward the cattle pen, baying with excitement, she lost her footing and fell forward. Undeterred, but slowed down, the huge animal continued forward grinding her knees and face, not to mention her beautiful silk suit, into the dirt and grass.
Ty leaped, grabbed the lead, planted his heels and jerked back hard.
The dog came to an instant halt, glanced back and hung his head remorsefully.
“Are you all right?” Ty asked with irritation, rather than compassion. He was at her elbow now, yanking her to her feet.
“I’m fine,” she snapped, jerking her arm away from him, looking down at her ruined suit.
“You’re hurt.”
He was crouched down in front of her, but nothing prepared her for the touch of his hand on her knee. A knee now devoid of nylon.
He looked up at her.
And she sighed. This was an omen. Five minutes in his presence, and catastrophe had already struck. Never mind that she had him exactly where she wanted him—on bended knee.
It was for the wrong reasons. He was looking at her knee with about the same expression she was sure he would use on an injured cow. Detached. Competent.
“I’m fine,” she said tersely. “It’s a scratch. I have a Band-Aid in my bag.”
“The problem with a cut out here,” he said, putting his hands on his knees and rising to his feet, giving the dog a quick jerk on the lead to let him know he was still there, “is that we have a lot of livestock around. We can have all kinds of nasty little things wriggling around in the soil. I’ll have to put antiseptic on it.”
No. No. No.
This was not how she had planned things. At all. “It’s fine,” she said.
“Humor me.” Still controlling the dog, he opened the passenger side of her car and settled the straps of her carry bag over one shoulder, the strap of her huge camera bag over the other.
“I can take that,” she said.
He stepped away from her easily. “I’ll get it.” It was said with a certain firmness that set her teeth on edge. How had Stacey become so independent in the presence of such old-fashioned male arrogance? Maybe Stacey rebelled against his arrogance. Her boyfriend appeared to be Ty’s polar opposite: long-haired, liberal, artistic, sweet-tempered.
He led the way up to the house, giving the dog’s leash a snap every time it lunged forward.
The walk gave Harriet an unfortunate view of the back of him. Broad back, a certain angry stiffness in the set of his shoulders, his fanny gorgeous nonetheless in those faded jeans, his legs long and lean and strong. By the time they arrived at the back door, she felt as if she was practically panting, and not entirely because of the length of Ty’s powerful stride.
The dog was walking quietly at his side, sending him upward glances as though longing for his approval.
“I was going to put you in the bunkhouse,” he said, opening the door and standing back from it. “But I can see that won’t work. Cringle said you’d be here a week. Would you say that’s a fair estimate?”
“I don’t mind the bunkhouse,” she said tersely. “A week maximum. If everything goes right.”
Why did she feel so unsure of that, suddenly? Everything on her photo shoots always went right. Because of her news photography background she had become adept at getting wonderful pictures without great lighting, without a huge team, without makeup artists.
She could just imagine what Ty Jordan would have to say about a makeup artist.
“And the guys surely wouldn’t mind you sharing the bunkhouse, either, but you can have my little sister’s room.” This was said with the quiet authority of a man who didn’t expect to be questioned.
She was sorely tempted to insist on the bunkhouse. She could tell him she had bunked with guys before. That war zones had a way of blurring lines and stripping modesty. But something about the tiny chink in his armor when he said “little sister” stopped her.
This was the side of him she wanted to capture on camera. The personal side. And she would have far more chance of doing that if she was camped out under the same roof as him.
He tied the dog to the outside of the door handle before he followed her into the house.
“Bathroom’s through here,” he said, dropping her bag on the floor. “If you want to slip off those things, I’ll get the first-aid kit.”
She said thank-you when what she really wanted to say was “go to hell.” She retrieved her bag, went into the bathroom and closed the door. She took off the ruined pantyhose, looked down at the ragged scrape across her knee.
She’d been a war correspondent for two years with nary a scratch.
She looked in the mirror. Her suit was ruined. Her face was smudged. Her hair was standing on end. She took off the suit and opened her suitcase. The all-important first impression had been made. Hopefully the first thirty seconds of it had more impact than the second thirty, but she doubted it. She put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. If she was taking her power back, she certainly wasn’t going to fix her hair, or refresh her make-up for him.
She did remove the smudge from her face before marching back out of the bathroom.
When she came out he was in the kitchen, rummaging through a white metal box with a red cross on the side of it. He didn’t even glance up at her.
The kitchen was unchanged, she thought looking around. Plain, a utilitarian room that served a function.
But it held memories, too—her and Stacey making a mess creating homemade pizza, him coming in, dirty from work, sexy as sin, and giving them hell. Then he’d softened the blow by saying how good it smelled, and he couldn’t wait to try it. She remembered playing cards at that scarred kitchen table with Stacey. He’d been tired, physical weariness bowing his shoulders, but when Stacey had pleaded, he had joined them, reluctantly, and ended up showing them how to play poker. Losing his reluctance a little later, he’d showed them a game called Blind Baseball.
She could not remember the rules or the point of the game, only that they had held the cards up on their foreheads where the other players could see them but they couldn’t see their own.
She could remember the laughter that had filled that room, that had chased that faint weariness from his face. His laughter had made him seem younger and more human. Incredibly, it had made him even more handsome than he had seemed before, and that had been plenty handsome. The moment had shone with a light almost iridescent, had stolen her breath from her lungs, and the joy of other good moments in her life had paled before the perfection of that one.
“Are you all right?”
He was looking at her closely.
“Yes,” she said. “I told you it was just a scratch.”
But she knew what a scratch could do. Four years ago he had scratched the surface of an uninitiated heart.
And that scratch had festered and grown to a wound.
“Have a seat over here, Miss Snow.”
“Call me Harrie.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Pardon?” She sat down at the chair he’d pulled out for her.
“I just can’t look at you and call you Harry.” He knelt down in front of her, completely unself-conscious, the medical kit on the ground beside him. He rolled up the leg of her jeans, without apparently noticing she had changed outfits. She found herself holding the side of the chair as if she was getting ready for takeoff.
“Fine by me, Mr. Jordan. Do you think you could make that Ms. Snow?”
He shrugged, indifferent, and didn’t invite her to call him Tyler, or Ty, as she had called him last time she was here. Looking at the top of his head, his dark hair shiny as silk, she wondered if there was any of that laughter-filled boy left in him.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, his eyes flicking over the white of her knuckles on the edge of her chair.
“Thank you. I know.” He hadn’t even touched her yet, for God’s sake.
The touch, when it came, was everything she had feared, everything she had braced herself for.
It was strong, infinitely competent, as he carefully cleaned the area around the scrape on her knee. The skin of his palm brushed her lower knee as he swabbed her cut, and it was leather tough, the hand of man who worked outdoors in extreme weather and handled shovels and reins and newborn calves. The hand of a man who drove big trucks and chopped wood and fixed fences.
And yet there was none of that toughness in his touch. He was careful and extremely gentle, a man, she reminded herself, who had looked after scraped knees before. And broken arms.
“There, I think I’ve got the grit out,” he said, inspecting it carefully. His breath whispered across the dampness of the skin surrounding her scrape, and she had to close her eyes against the sensation that tingled through her tummy, the insane desire to lean forward and ask him to kiss it better.
He dabbed iodine on with a cotton swab on a wand that came out of the bottle. Thankfully the application required no direct contact, and allowed her to marshal her defenses.
But then he carefully cut a square of gauze, held that over the scrape, the warmth of his hand encircling her kneecap. With his other hand he juggled the medical tape, cutting off pieces, then pressing them firmly into place, his fingertips trailing liquid fire down skin she had not really been aware was so sensitive until now.
“All done,” he announced, and Harrie wasn’t sure if she was safe or sorry. He rolled her pant leg down and got to his feet.
It was about the sexiest thing that had ever happened to her, which probably summed up her pathetic luck with the opposite sex, including her ex-husband, quite nicely.
“Thank you,” she said, and clambered to her feet, wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans. “I’m fine. That was completely unnecessary. Nice. But unnecessary.”
She could feel herself getting red. Why had she said nice? “I meant kind,” she stammered, “not nice.”
She could tell he found her making the distinction amusing. Harrie could feel herself becoming exactly the same bumpkin she had been four years ago. She had to get this situation under control.
“I was just looking out for myself, Ms. Snow. I’m not real anxious to have you getting sick on the place. I don’t want to be doing any baby-sitting.”
It had been about him. She had the sudden feeling that coming back here had not been a great idea after all. He was going out of his way to make himself unlikable.
“Well, then let’s get to work, Mr. Jordan. As you know, my challenge will be to create the illusion of four seasons over the next week. I was hoping we could use the fireplace for the December shot. Hang a few stockings.”
“How do you know I have a fireplace?” he asked.
She should have known this would happen sometime. That she would let it slip that she was more familiar with him and this house than she should be.
“Your sister told me,” she lied brightly. “We tossed around the idea of how to create the seasons a little bit at the office.”
Wasn’t that just the problem with little white lies? She saw the faintest flicker in his eyes. He didn’t like that he had been discussed at the office.
Harriet had always been an absolutely terrible liar, and she could see by the long look he gave her she had not improved in that department. “I’ll just follow you around with the camera,” she said brightly. “Whatever you normally do, go ahead and do it. You won’t even know I’m there.”
“I usually have a shower right now,” he drawled, watching her.
She stared at him and gulped. She could feel a horrible wave of heat moving up her neck to her face.
“In the middle of the day?” she managed to challenge him, her voice a squeak.
“Just making sure your limits are the same as mine,” he said. “I’m a private man, Ms. Snow. I’ll let you know when it’s okay to take pictures.”
She begged herself to challenge him, to not let him back her down. She lifted her chin and said, “I don’t know, Mr. Jordan, a nice steamy shower shot would probably sell a whole pile of calendars.”
Then she spoiled the effect entirely by blushing. She gulped and looked at her feet.
She saw his booted feet move into her range of vision. She refused to look up, and then she felt that hand, so familiar to her after the knee episode, touch her chin ever so lightly.
She lifted her face to him and didn’t look away when he scanned her quizzically.
“Don’t play with fire, Ms. Snow.”
What could be more embarrassing than a full-grown mature woman being embarrassed by something so innocuous?
Something changed in his eyes. A puzzled look came into them.
She was almost sure he recognized her, or if he didn’t, something had tickled his memory, troubled him.
“They should have sent the man,” he said.
She bristled. “I happen to be very good at my job. And for your information, I’ve been a war correspondent. I’ve lived in close quarters with men in very rough conditions.”
“Really?” he said, his eyes narrowed as if he didn’t believe a word of it.
“Really,” she said coolly. “Besides, women get better shots of men, for obvious reasons.”
“I don’t find them obvious. Could you explain?”
“It’s the male preening thing. ‘Little lady, let me show you how big and strong I am.”’
He stared at her, and a muscle jumped in his jaw. He gave his head a shake. “Is there any chance we could have you out of here in less than a week?”
“Cooperating would help.”
“Can you ride a horse?”
Now this was the question she’d been dreading. She’d fallen off a horse last time she’d been here. It had been the first time she had ever ridden, and it hadn’t been the horse’s fault at all.
Ty had been riding in the lead, Stacey behind him.
And Harrie, last in line, had been leaning way too far out, mesmerized by the way he looked in the saddle, her first cheap 35 mm raised to her eye, wanting that photograph so badly.
She’d fallen and broken her arm, ending her visit.
The humiliation had led her to take riding lessons the following year while on assignment in England. She had never really got the feel for it. She could manage walk, trot, canter, stop, but the instructor had told her what she already knew.
She repeated it to him. “I can manage the basics, but I don’t have a good seat.”
She saw his eyes flick to the area in question, and she saw the comeback flash through his eyes, knew she had left herself wide open to it.
But apparently he had decided making her blush was not that amusing, because he said nothing for a moment. He was still watching her, puzzled, and she had a feeling he was a breath away from figuring that puzzle out when a loud noise ripped through the house, a banshee wail of nails being pulled from wood, of hinges parting. The noise was followed by a crash and a splinter.
Ty raced to the kitchen window, and she followed.
Basil was racing across the yard, straight toward the cattle pen that had intrigued him before. Ty’s back door, still attached to the leash, skidded along behind him.
Ty said three words in a row that would have made a sailor blush, then hurtled toward the door. She picked up her camera, but had to stop and put her shoes on. Then she went in hot pursuit. This was more like it. The war zone she could handle.
Chapter Three
If there was a feeling that Ty Jordan hated more than any other in the world it was this one: he did not like being out of control. He was aware of that dislike bubbling away briskly inside of him as he bolted after the dog.
A dog she had brought with her.
The she who should have been a he.
Male preening. As if he was some peacock put here for her entertainment.
She had better figure this out real quick: the Bar ZZ was Ty Jordan’s property, his domain, and he had already decided he wasn’t rearranging anything about his lifestyle to accommodate the stupid calendar.
He had been made a promise—by Cringle himself and by his sister—that his life would not be disturbed or disrupted in any way.
That blinking dog was heading right for the cow and calf pen. With a burst of speed Ty caught up to the door that was twisting and turning and flopping on the lead behind the dog. He threw himself on top of it, hoping at least to slow the dog down.
Ms. Snow, whom he could not think of as Harry, even in his mind, yelled something at him, but he didn’t quite catch what it was.
Two hundred and three pounds landing on the door did slow the dog down—minutely. Ty was now bouncing along behind the dog, riding the door on his stomach, like a surfer on a board. He found the door handle and unraveled the leash where it was tied to it.
“Watch your face,” she yelled, and he realized that was what she had yelled the first time.
He cast her one brief scornful look before he managed to unknot the leash from the door handle. He pulled it free, rolled from the door, got to his feet and hauled in Basil, who came to him happily, his big tongue lolling out of his mouth, his tail flagging.
“Kiss me and your days are numbered,” he warned.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I wasn’t talking to you.” He bent over at the waist, breathing hard. He became aware of the click and whir of a camera, straightened and glared at her.
She lowered the camera, studied him and then nodded, satisfied. “I was worried about your face,” she said. “A black eye or a bruise could make things complicated.”
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Cara Colter
There was some innocence in that kiss Ty could barely fathom.
Once he broke it off, she stared at him, her eyes huge. He could see she was trembling. She actually took her fist to her mouth, and bit on it, as if to stop the shaking.
The gesture stopped him cold. “Harriet,” he growled. “Harriet Pendleton.”
She laughed nervously. “All grown up,” she said, as if that in some way made what had happened between them all right.
Ha. She was a friend of his sister’s. A kid.
Off-limits to him.
He had to get through the remaining four days without looking at her lips again. Because those were not the lips of a kid. Actually, hers wasn’t the body of a kid, either.
Yes, Harriet Pendleton was a woman now. And Ty Jordan wanted her like the red-blooded man he was….
Dear Reader,
Summer is over and it’s time to kick back into high gear. Just be sure to treat yourself with a luxuriant read or two (or, hey, all six) from Silhouette Romance. Remember—work hard, play harder!
Although October is officially Breast Cancer Awareness month, we’d like to invite you to start thinking about it now. In a wonderful, uplifting story, a rancher reluctantly agrees to model for a charity calendar to earn money for cancer research. At the back of that book, we’ve also included a guide for self-exams. Don’t miss Cara Colter’s must-read 9 Out of 10 Women Can’t Be Wrong (#1615).
Indulge yourself with megapopular author Karen Rose Smith and her CROWN AND GLORY series installment, Searching for Her Prince (#1612). A missing heir puts love on the line when he hides his identity from the woman assigned to track him down. The royal, brooding hero in Sandra Paul’s stormy Caught by Surprise (#1614), the latest in the A TALE OF THE SEA adventure, also has secrets—and intends to make his beautiful captor pay…by making her his wife!
Jesse Colton is a special agent forced to play pretend boyfriend to uncover dangerous truths in the fourth of THE COLTONS: COMANCHE BLOOD spinoff, The Raven’s Assignment (#1613), by bestselling author Kasey Michaels. And in Cathie Linz’s MEN OF HONOR title, Married to a Marine (#1616), combat-hardened Justice Wilder had shut himself away from the world—until his ex-wife’s younger sister comes knocking…. Finally, in Laurey Bright’s tender and true Life with Riley (#1617), free-spirited Riley Morrisset may not be the perfect society wife, but she’s exactly what her stiff-collared boss needs!
Happy reading—and please keep in touch.
Mary-Theresa Hussey
Senior Editor
9 Out of 10 Women Can’t Be Wrong
Cara Colter
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To my nephew, Mathew, (Sarvis the Silent) with love
Books by Cara Colter
Silhouette Romance
Dare To Dream #491
Baby in Blue #1161
Husband in Red #1243
The Cowboy, the Baby and the Bride-to-Be #1319
Truly Daddy #1363
A Bride Worth Waiting For #1388
Weddings Do Come True #1406
A Babe in the Woods #1424
A Royal Marriage #1440
First Time, Forever #1464
* (#litres_trial_promo)Husband by Inheritance #1532
* (#litres_trial_promo)The Heiress Takes a Husband #1538
Wed by a Will #1544
What Child Is This? #1585
Her Royal Husband #1600
9 Out of 10 Women Can’t Be Wrong #1615
The Coltons
A Hasty Wedding
CARA COLTER
shares ten acres in the wild Kootenay region of British Columbia with the man of her dreams, three children, two horses, a cat with no tail and a golden retriever who answers best to “bad dog.” She loves reading, writing and the woods in winter (no bears). She says life’s delights include an automatic garage door opener and the skylight over the bed that allows her to see the stars at night.
She also says, “I have not lived a neat and tidy life, and used to envy those who did. Now I see my struggles as having given me a deep appreciation of life, and of love, which I hope I succeed in passing on through the stories that I tell.”
Dear Reader,
There is someone I would like you to know. She was my favorite heroine. Ruth Caron was petite and pretty. She had china-blue eyes and sandy brown hair. Her front teeth were a little crooked. She was a playful spirit who loved to dance. She was afraid of water and was always a little self-conscious about her lack of education. She quit school when she was seventeen, got married and started having babies. One of whom was me.
Many of my heroines are ordinary women who reach inside themselves to find the extraordinary depths of their spirits. My mom was like that. Just one example was her terror of water. Instead of surrendering to that fear and passing it on, she made sure my sisters and I had swimming lessons. My mom baby-sat kids to make money, and I think of the sacrifice she made to ensure I would know only joy in the water. In her later years, she even took up swimming herself! (Shallow end only!)
When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990, her courage was monumental, far beyond what anyone would have ever expected of such an ordinary and humble woman. She died in August of 1995 at the age of 57. The hole in my heart will never be filled.
I wanted you, the reader, to at least have a glimpse of this remarkable woman. I wanted you to know, right this instant, someone feels the great love for you that I felt and feel for my mom. Please do breast self-exams and have mammograms regularly. Donate to breast cancer research. Do it for your mother, your daughters, your sisters, your friends. Do it for yourself.
With all my best wishes,
Contents
Prologue (#u96d1c467-bc8b-5e55-b6ef-fd9d8d33dabe)
Chapter One (#ud85e7f12-6eec-5dc6-85fe-06ef18f57c2b)
Chapter Two (#uca452895-4267-5dd8-9c7e-03266c42d64d)
Chapter Three (#u3a2f8866-65a9-5f2b-bf68-9a39e3d907ce)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
“Your brother is a photographer’s dream. And a red-blooded woman’s nightmare.”
“Harriet,” Stacey said sleepily, from the other side of the bed, “Ty doesn’t see you as a red-blooded woman. Go to sleep. He’s going to have us up at five in the morning, because you said you wanted to see them bring in the cattle from the upper pasture. Your enthusiasm for the ranch is beginning to make me very sorry I invited you. I thought we were going to sleep in, watch videos and make pizzas.”
“You can do those things in Calgary,” Harriet said, as if her mind wasn’t solidly locked on the words Ty doesn’t see you as a red-blooded woman.
Why would he? Stacey Jordan’s older brother, Ty, was the most astonishing man Harriet Pendleton had ever seen. He was tall, broad-shouldered, lean and hard-muscled from years of ranch work. His face passed attractive and went straight to sinful. When his eyes rested on her, dark as melted chocolate, Harriet felt the shiver of pure male energy in the air.
Don’t ask, she ordered herself firmly. But a small voice, definitely hers, asked aloud. “Why doesn’t he see me as a red-blooded woman?”
As if she didn’t know. Harriet Pendleton was well aware she was too everything. Too tall, too skinny, too freckled. Add to that crooked teeth, and bottle-bottom eyeglasses. Too ugly.
“Harriet, he doesn’t see you as a red-blooded woman because you’re my friend. He thinks we’re both kids.”
“But I’m older than you!” Harriet protested. “Twenty-two is not a child.”
“So, tell him!” Stacey said grumpily. “And let me go to sleep.”
“Someday,” Harriet said, “I’m going to be a famous photographer and I’ll have enough money to get my teeth fixed and have laser surgery done on my eyes.”
“Harriet, don’t be so silly. You glow. Anyone who knows you, knows how beautiful you are.”
Except your brother.
Harriet and Stacey were roommates at the Alberta College of Art. Harriet was upgrading some photo courses, Stacey was taking commercial art. Stacey had invited Harriet to spend spring break on her brother’s ranch, the Bar ZZ, south of Calgary.
It had sounded like so much fun.
It would have been so much fun, except for him. A man like that made breathing in and out seem difficult. Words caught in Harriet’s throat. She was in such a constant state of blush that he thought her face was naturally beet red. He’d remarked they needed to keep her out of the sun! She was so self-conscious in his presence that she did everything wrong, tripped over her own feet. After she’d fallen and spooked the cattle, he’d remarked they needed to keep her away from the cattle, too.
“He calls me Lady Disaster,” she fretted, out loud.
“He’s teasing you, Harriet! Please go to sleep. Please?”
She willed herself to go to sleep. She promised herself that tomorrow everything would be different. And it was.
The next day Harriet fell off a horse and broke her arm.
Her trip to the Bar ZZ was over, ending in the emergency ward of the tiny High River Hospital. At least she had felt his arms! He had carried her, strong and sure, gently teased her out of her pain.
And then he’d said goodbye.
But when she developed the photographs she had taken, she realized she would never really say goodbye to him.
The photos of Ty shone, as if the man was lit from within. She had done on film what she had no hope of doing in real life. She had captured him.
On the basis of those pictures, she was offered a photo assignment overseas.
And on the basis of a badly bruised heart, she took it….
Chapter One
Tyler Jordan was aware he was being watched.
There it was again. The secretary, a woman old enough to be well beyond such nonsense, glanced up coyly from behind her work, looked at him longer than he considered strictly polite and then, with the flash of a secretive smile, looked back to her computer screen.
Ty pretended he hadn’t noticed her scrutiny and studied the room uncomfortably. The outer waiting area of Francis Cringle and Associates struck him as being more like the kind of office he’d seen in the rare movie he watched than like a real life office, or at least not any real life office he’d ever been in.
He couldn’t believe his sister—a girl born and raised on a ranch—worked in a place like this…actually fitted in here.
He was sitting on a sofa of butter-yellow leather. Another faced him. Huge deep-green plants were scattered throughout. He wasn’t sure how a real plant survived in an atmosphere with no natural light. The artificial lighting was muted; the rug, covering marble tiles, looked old and worn in a way that convinced him it had been picked up at an African bazaar.
He heard the quick tap of heels coming down the hallway outside this posh office and felt himself tensing.
If whoever it was went on by, then he knew he must be imagining all the unusual attention he was getting. But no, the tapping of the heels slowed, and then she came in. Tall and willowy, in a tight blue skirt and a short matching jacket, she glanced quickly his way, her confidence astounding, given the balancing act she must be doing on those high stiletto heels, then moved over to the desk and had a whispered conversation with the woman there. The conversation was punctuated with breathless giggles and sidelong looks.
At him.
The looks were loaded with secrets…and satisfaction. Looks not at all in keeping with the muted atmosphere of subdued professionalism that the well-known public relations firm’s office had achieved.
Ty frowned and picked up a magazine off the dark-walnut coffee table in front of him. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the highly polished surface, and it confirmed how out of place he was here. Cowboy hat, white denim shirt unbuttoned at the throat, jeans. He might have raised some of the cattle that provided the luxurious leather he was now sitting on.
A flurry of giggles and looks made him scowl at the magazine, flip it open and read the first paragraph of an article on office management.
He didn’t have an office, but looking at the article seemed preferable to pulling his cowboy hat even further over his eyes.
Another young woman flounced into the office, pudgy and cute, took a long look at him, then flung her blond hair over her shoulder, fluttered her eyelashes several times. If she was expecting a response, he didn’t give her one, and she hurried over to the desk and joined the other two in whispered conversation.
Which he heard snatches of. Something about being even better in person, something about people who should be sharing hot tubs and wine on starlit nights, something about crackers in her bed. He sent them a dark and withering look that had the unhappy result of eliciting sighs and a few more giggles.
He gave up pretending the article interested him, tossed down the magazine, stretched out his legs and crossed his cowboy boots at the ankles. He looked wistfully at the door.
His eyes drifted to the clock. Five more minutes and he was leaving. He didn’t care what kind of pickle Stacey had gotten herself into this time. At the moment he would be no help to his kid sister, anyway, since he felt as if he’d like to throttle her.
A one-and-a-half-hour drive into the center of Calgary. At calving time. Because she had an emergency. Life-and-death, she’d claimed on the phone.
So, if it was so life-and-death, where was she?
And if it was so life-and-death why had she asked him to not wear jeans with holes in them? And clean boots? What kind of person in a life-and-death situation thought of things like that?
Life-and-death meant the emergency ward at the hospital, not the outer office of Francis Cringle.
So here he was in pressed jeans and a clean shirt and his good boots and hat, being giggled at, and his sister was nowhere to be seen.
He resisted, barely, the impulse to send the secretaries into more conniptions by rubbing his back, hard, up against the wall behind him.
“Ladies, do you have business elsewhere?”
They scattered like frightened chickens in front of a fox, and his rescuer, a tall woman, distinguished, turned and looked him over, carefully. “Tyler Jordan?”
He practically leapt to his feet, took off his hat and rolled it uncomfortably between his fingers. “Ma’am?”
She smiled when he said that. That same damned smile he’d been seeing since he’d walked into this stuffy office!
“Will you come with me, sir?”
Sir. A phrase he’d heard rarely. Usually in restaurants where he was destined to use the wrong fork. He followed her down the hall, having to cut his long stride so that he didn’t walk on top of her.
She ushered him into an office, smiled again and shut the door behind him. The light pouring in the floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls blinded him momentarily after the dimness of the outer office.
But when his eyes adjusted, he registered more opulence, and Stacey. She was sitting in a chair on this side of a huge desk that looked as if it was made of solid granite.
“Hi, Ty,” she said with a big smile, and patted the seat of the empty chair next to her. “How’s my big brother today?”
If they didn’t have an audience, a wizened old gnome of a man sitting behind the desk, Ty would have given her the complete and unvarnished truth. He was irritated as hell today.
Life-and-death, indeed.
His little sister had never looked healthier! Her mischievous eyes sparkling, her dark hair all piled up on her head making her look quite sophisticated, wearing a suit and shoes just like all the other women he’d seen today.
“I’ve had better days,” he answered her gruffly, and reluctantly took the chair beside her. More leather. His boots sank about two inches into the carpet.
“I suppose you’re wondering what’s going on?” she asked brightly.
“Life-and-death,” he reminded her.
“Ty, this is my boss, Francis Cringle. Mr. Cringle, my brother, Ty.”
Ty rose halfway out of his chair, took Cringle’s hand and was a little surprised by the strength of the grip.
“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Jordan,” the voice was warm and friendly, the voice of a man who had spent a lifetime promoting items people had no idea they needed. “Thanks for coming. Stacey tells me you’re a busy man. She also mentioned you have no idea why you’re here?”
“None.”
“Your sister entered you in a contest. And you won.”
A contest. Ty shot his sister a menacing look. Life-and-death, huh? Knowing his sister, he’d won something really useless like a lifetime supply of jujubes or a raft trip down the Amazon in the hot season.
“You see, Ty.” Stacey was talking very quickly now, catching on that she was trying his patience. “Francis Cringle has been hired by the Fight Against Breast Cancer Fund to do their next fund-raiser.”
Breast cancer. How he hated that disease, the disease that had stolen the life from his mother, left a whole family shaken, marooned, like survivors of a shipwreck. Only their shipwreck had dragged on endlessly. Five years of hoping, being crushed, hoping again.
“Okay,” he said, not allowing one single memory to shade his voice, “And?”
“You remember my friend Harriet don’t you?”
“How could I forget?” Harriet Pendleton was a young woman his sister had met at college and brought home for a week one spring. What? Three years ago? Four?
Usually he couldn’t distinguish Stacey’s friends one from the other. But Harriet was the girl most likely to be mistaken for a giraffe. Nearly six feet tall, most of that legs and neck, she was covered in ginger-colored freckles and splotches that matched untamable hair. Her eyes, brown and worried looking, had been enlarged by thick glasses. Her quick, nervous smile had revealed extremely crooked teeth.
Totally forgettable in the looks department, not that Ty ever paid much attention to Stacey’s friends, Harriet had made herself memorable in other ways. Disaster had followed in the poor girl’s wake. She had broken nearly everything she touched, run the well dry by leaving a tap on and let the calves out by not securing a latch properly.
Somehow they’d gotten through the week before Harriet managed to stampede the cattle and burn down the barn, but they had sent her home with her arm encased in plaster.
He should have been glad to see them go, and yet even now he could feel a little smile tickle his lips when he thought of Harriet.
She had made him laugh. And even though he always felt lonely for a week or two after Stacey had been home for a visit, that time it had taken even longer to get back to normal.
“Lady Disaster,” Ty remembered. “I thought you told me she lived in Europe now.”
Stacey gave him that do-you-listen-to-a-word-I-say look. “She’s been back for months. She’s the one who had the photograph that won the contest.”
“And how do I fit into all this? Life-and-death, remember?” He had a feeling they were moving farther and farther from the point, as if he was being swept away in the current of his sister’s enthusiasm. Unwillingly.
“I’m getting to it,” she said, her tone reproaching his impatience. “The fund-raising idea is to do a calendar. Everybody does them. You know, the firefighters for the burn unit and the police for the orphan’s fund.”
“I don’t know. Haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.”
She actually looked annoyed with him, the same way she did when she’d still been at home and mentioned a film or a popular song or some celebrity that he knew nothing about. She would roll her eyes at him and say, “Oh, the famous blank look from my brother, the recluse from life.”
Today she just handed him a calendar, called “Red Hot,” which he presumed he was supposed to look at. He flipped through it, without much interest, feeling resentful that he had a ranch to run and was sitting in Calgary looking at pictures.
Very dull pictures of guys without their shirts, in firefighter’s pants with suspenders. They looked self-conscious, which he didn’t blame them for, and they held a variety of unlikely poses that made their muscles bulge. A few had artfully placed smudges of soot on their cheeks and chests.
“People buy this?” he muttered incredulously. He thought of his own calendar at home. Posted beside his fridge, it had nice pictures of plump Herefords on each month. The Ranch Hand Feed Store gave the calendars away free in December. The Farm Corp Insurance Company also handed out free calendars. Ty had no idea people bought calendars.
“Women buy them,” his sister said, and he realized it shouldn’t surprise him that a woman would buy something she could get free. Women liked to spend money, a lesson his sister had taught him.
“They’re especially willing to buy calendars like these if it’s in support of a good cause. Like breast cancer research.”
Something in her voice made him look up. He stopped flipping pages between March’s Bryan and April’s Kyle and closed the calendar firmly. He slid it onto the corner of Cringle’s desk, remembering, uneasily, all the looks he’d been getting all morning.
He had the awful feeling he had not won a lifetime supply of jujubes. Not even close.
“What have you done, Stacey?”
“I entered you in the contest!” she admitted, her smile not even faltering. “Harriet had the most incredible photo. Francis Cringle and Associates held a contest to find the perfect calendar guy. And you won!”
The perfect calendar guy? Me?
“You mean you set it up for me to win,” he said tightly.
“Oh, no, Mr. Jordan,” Mr. Cringle interjected with swift authority. “Absolutely not. All the entries were done in a double blind. Your sister was not one of the judges.”
“Who were the judges?” he asked reluctantly, not really caring. He slid a look at the door, planning his escape route.
Mr. Cringle answered. “We set up the entries at a local mall for a week. Over two thousand women voted. Do you want to hear the strangest thing? Ninety percent of them voted for you. Ninety percent!”
He felt a sick kind of embarrassment at the idea of that many women ogling a picture of him. And he felt more than a little angry at his sister.
“The concept we’re working with,” Mr. Cringle told him, “is a one-man calendar. Different photos illustrating different real-life scenarios that man finds himself in. I was thrilled to hear you are a rancher. The photo opportunities are mind-boggling.”
Ty felt he should have boggled Stacey’s mind—or maybe her behind—when she skipped school in the tenth grade. And when she snuck out her bedroom window in the eleventh. He should never have allowed her to be so mouthy and strong-willed. He should have definitely drawn the line with her when she had begun to date that hippie. If he had managed to control her in any one of those circumstances maybe he wouldn’t be sitting here now.
Now, it seemed it was too late to straighten his sister out. Ty would just have to try and save himself.
“Mr. Cringle,” he said carefully, “I’m sorry. My sister has wasted your time. I’m not a calendar model, and I never will be. I’m a rancher. Despite what women who buy calendars might want to believe, there is nothing even vaguely appealing about the kind of work I do. I’m usually up to my ears in mud and crap.”
“Oh, Ty,” Stacey said, “it’s not as if the calendars come in scratch and sniff. Women love those kind of pictures. Sweat. Mud. Rippling muscles. Jeans faded across the rear. You’re perfect for the job, Ty.”
Ty was staring at his sister with dismay. Women liked stuff like that? And how the hell did she know? He realized he hated that she was a full-fledged adult.
“So, hire a model,” Ty said, and heard the testiness in his voice. “If you need some mud, I’ll provide it.”
“Models are so—” Stacey searched for the word, beamed when she found it “—slick.”
Ty could only hope she didn’t know that from firsthand experience.
“Mr. Jordan, I’m sure there were male models among the entries that were posted at the mall. The result of the competition tells me women can tell the difference between someone posing as a rugged, raw, one hundred percent man and the actual man.” Cringle regarded him intently, then said softly, “Ninety per cent is a whole lot of calendars.”
“Yeah, well.” Ty glared at his sister.
“Mr. Cringle, you leave him to me,” Stacey said brightly, but Ty noticed her eyes had tears in them. She’d better not even think she was going to change his mind with the waterworks thing.
It had worked way too many times before. That was part of the problem. Stacey knew exactly how to tug at his heartstrings.
The rest of the world probably thought he didn’t have a heart.
But his little sister knew the truth about him.
When she was seven their mother had died of breast cancer. A year later their father had been killed in a single-car accident, though Ty still wondered how accidental it had been. His father had become a shell of a man since his wife had died.
Ty had been eighteen when the accident occurred. Way too young to be thrust into the responsibility of bringing up a little girl.
But what choice had he had?
Ship her off to an aunt and uncle he barely knew? Let her go to a foster home? Not while he lived and breathed. There had been absolutely no choice. None. His sister had needed him to grow up fast, and he had.
“Why don’t we go have lunch together?” she said to him sweetly. “And we’ll meet Mr. Cringle back here at, say, one o’clock?”
Ty decided not to lay down the law with her in front of her boss. He got up, extended his hand again. “Mr. Cringle,” he said with finality.
But the man looked from him to his sister and back with a twinkle in his eye.
“Until we meet again,” Cringle said.
“Which, hopefully, will be never,” Ty muttered under his breath as he herded his sister toward the door.
“I don’t have time for lunch,” he told her in the hallway. “Calves are hitting the ground as we speak. And I’m not changing my mind about the calendar thing. Get it out of your head. It’s never going to happen. Never.”
Her eyes were welling up with tears. “Ty, don’t be so stubborn.”
The tears reminded him how careful he had to be about using the word never with Stacey. Somehow it always came back to bite him.
He’d said never the first time he’d seen her in makeup, reacting to how the inexpertly applied gunk had stolen the fresh innocence from her face. And then he’d ended up paying for her to take a full day of instructions in makeup application at Face Up and buying all the products she needed. That had been about a whopper of a bill.
He’d said never to her choice of a prom dress, low cut, clinging, way too old for her, and ended up being dragged into places no man in his right mind wanted to go, for days, finding a dress they could both agree on.
And he’d said never to the hippie, which had made the hippie twice as attractive to her, and made him realize that it was no longer his job to say anything to Stacey. Somehow, with so many stumbles on his part and so many mistakes, she had grown up, anyway. Into a young woman who knew her own mind and made pretty reasonable decisions most of the time.
But not this time. “What were you thinking, entering my picture without asking me? Geez, Stacey!”
“It was just a lark. Harriet suggested it.”
Somehow he should have known Harriet was involved in this disaster. Harriet and disaster went together as naturally as peanut butter and jam, saddles and cow horses, trucks and tires.
“Besides,” his sister said blithely, “how did I know you were going to win?”
He sighed. Was she deliberately missing the point? She was wiping tears off her face with the back of her sweater, getting little black smudges all over the white sleeve. Hard to stop noticing stuff like that even though he didn’t buy her clothes anymore.
“Could you take me for lunch?” she said with a little hiccup. “You must need a break from Cookie’s meals by now. Besides, you hardly ever see me anymore.”
He looked at her. His little sister was all grown up. Becoming more a big-city woman every time he saw her. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to pass by these chances to be with her.
“Okay,” he said grudgingly. “Lunch. But cheap and fast.” He was thinking along the lines of the Burger in a Bag he had passed on the corner before this office building.
Of course she took him to a little French restaurant that wasn’t cheap and wasn’t even remotely fast.
Despite his annoyance with her, she made him laugh when she told him about how she was hiding a Saint Bernard that she had found, in her little apartment. So far no one had answered the ad she had put in the paper.
“The dog,” she said proudly, “knows how to open the fridge.”
A Saint Bernard who knew how to open the fridge? “That explains why the owners aren’t answering the ad,” Ty commented.
The food came. He’d refused wine—wine with lunch?—but Stacey had ignored him and was pouring him another glass from the carafe of house white that she had ordered.
“You know, Ty, Mom died of breast cancer.”
He took a long sip of wine, then set it down. Okay. Now that Stacey had fed him and lured him into drinking wine with lunch, she was going to try and sucker punch him.
“I hadn’t forgotten,” he said quietly.
“Don’t you think it’s our obligation to fight the disease that took our mother? Don’t you remember how awful it was?”
He suspected he remembered better than she did, since he had been older at the time. He glared at her, seeing the corner she was backing him into. He said nothing and against his better judgment took another sip of the wine.
“That calendar could make the research foundation a lot of money.” She made sure she had his full attention, laid her hand on his. She named a figure.
He nearly spit out the wine. “Are you serious?”
“Dead serious. It’s not very many people who have a chance to give that kind of money to the charity of their choice.”
“Just because I said I don’t want to do it doesn’t mean they aren’t going to go ahead with the calendar.”
“No. But ninety percent of the women who voted liked you—ninety percent. That’s huge, Ty, especially if it translates into them buying calendars. There are 750,000 people in Calgary alone. I estimate 200,000 of them are women. If only fifty percent of them bought calendars, that would be a huge amount of money! In this city alone!”
He could feel his head starting to swim, and not from the wine. “Stacey,” he said carefully, enunciating every word, “I’m not doing it.”
He avoided saying never.
“Oh, Ty.” She sighed and looked at her fingernails. “You wouldn’t even have to come in to the city. You wouldn’t even have to miss an hour’s work.”
“I said no.”
“You wouldn’t even know the photographer was there. The photographer’s all lined up. World class.”
“No.”
“So, it won’t cost you anything, not even time, and you have a chance to contribute so much to a cause that is very meaningful to you, and you say no?”
“That’s right,” he said, and he hoped she didn’t hear the first little sliver of uncertainly in his voice.
“If the calendar was a huge success, I think I’d get a raise. I’d be able to buy a little house. With a backyard for Basil.”
“Basil is the Saint Bernard, I hope.”
She nodded sadly. “I think the landlord suspects I have him.”
“I’m not posing for calendars so you can keep a dog that’s bigger than my horse and has the dubious talent of opening a fridge.” At least, he thought, his sister was planning her life around a dog, and not the hippie. He noticed she hadn’t mentioned the beau today. Did he dare hope he was out of the picture? Or was it because Ty had lost his temper when she had mentioned the hippie and marriage in the same breath once? He decided he didn’t want to know.
She took a little sip of her wine and looked at her lap. She finally said, in a small voice, “You know my chances of getting it are high, don’t you?”
“What?” There. She’d managed to completely lose him with her conversational acrobatics.
“My chances of getting breast cancer are higher than other peoples. Because Mom died of it.”
“Aw, Stacey.”
“The only thing that will change that is research.”
He looked across the table at her and saw her fear was real. He felt his heart break in two when he thought of her in terms of that disease. Wouldn’t he have done anything to make his mother well?
Wouldn’t he do anything to keep his little sister from having to go down that same road? From diagnosis to surgery to chemo to years of struggle to a death that was immeasurably painful and without dignity?
If he was able to raise those kinds of dollars to research a disease that might affect his sister, did he really have any choice at all? If the stupid calendar raised only half as much, or a third as much as his sister’s idealistic estimate, did he have any choice?
Wasn’t this almost the very same feeling he’d had the day a social worker had looked at him and said, “She could go to your uncle Milton. Or to a foster home close to here. If you can’t take her.”
He glared at his sister. He saw the little smile working around the edges of her lips and realized they both knew she had won.
“Don’t even think I’m taking off my shirt,” he said, conceding with ill grace.
“I don’t know, Ty. If you took off your shirt, we might be able to sell a million copies of the calendar.” She correctly interpreted the look he gave her. “Okay, okay,” she said, laughing. “Thank you, Ty. Thank you. I owe my life to you.”
He hoped that would never be true.
She got up out of her chair, came around the table, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on his cheeks. About sixteen times.
Until everyone at the tables around them were looking over and smiling indulgently.
“This is my brother,” she announced, happily. “He’s my hero.”
Chapter Two
If Tyler Jordan was the most handsome man alive, being angry did not diminish that in the least. Maybe it even accentuated the rugged cut, the masculine perfection, of his sun- and wind-burned features.
And Harriet Pendleton Snow knew he was angry, even before he spoke. The energy bristled in the air around him.
“I was expecting a man,” he said, impatience flashing in his dark eyes. He looked down at a scrap of paper in his hand, and she caught a glimpse of bold, impatient handwriting. “Harry Winter.”
“Harrie Snow,” she corrected him. “That would be me.” He hadn’t recognized her. And she didn’t really know whether to be pleased or hurt by that.
A lot of things had changed in four years.
Outwardly. Inwardly she was doing the same slow melt she had done the first time she had met her best friend’s brother. She had been twenty-two years old when she had first met her best friend’s brother.
Standing right here in this same driveway, the little white frame house behind them, a larger barn behind that, the rolling hills of the Rocky Mountain foothills stretching into infinity on all sides of them, and all of that majesty fading to nothing when his eyes had met hers.
Dark and full of mystery.
Over the years she had tried to tell herself it was other things that had stolen her breath so completely that day.
The immensity of the land.
The romance of the ranch.
The fragrance of the air.
But standing before him now, she was not so sure.
“I find it hard to believe a woman like you is named Harry,” he snapped.
“Like me?” she said. “What does that mean?” Personally she found it even harder to believe that a perfectly rational woman like her mother had looked down at a squirming red-faced bundle of life and seen a Harriet. It was a name she hated and had been trying to lose for years.
He rolled a big shoulder, irritated, gestured. “Like you,” he said. “Polished, pretty—”
Polished. Which meant all the hours spent choosing just the right outfit, until her bed and her floor had been littered with discards, had been well spent. It meant that the new haircut had succeeded, for the time, in taming her wild curls. It meant her new hair color, copper, instead of plain old red, was as sophisticated as she’d hoped. It meant maybe it wasn’t so ridiculous to try to match your lip shade with your nail enamel.
Pretty. He’d called her pretty. For a girl who had grown up thinking of herself as plain at best, homely at worst, they were words she could never hear enough of.
But, before she had a chance to savor that too deeply, it sank in that he hadn’t exactly said pretty as if he thought it was a good thing.
“—an absolute pain around a ranch,” he was saying. “Were you going to ride a horse in a skirt, or is that supposed to put me in the right frame of mind to have my picture taken?”
Was he crankier than he had been back then? Stacey said he was perpetually cranky, but that was not what Harriet had seen in the week she’d been here four years ago.
She’d seen a young man who had shouldered a huge responsibility, defying the fact he probably was ill-prepared to act as anybody’s parent. She had seen he wore sternness like a tough outer skin so his sister wouldn’t see how easily she could have anything she wanted from him because he loved her so.
That love, despite his efforts to disguise it, had been just below the surface that whole week, in the tolerance he had shown both of them, even after the unfortunate accidents.
Accidents caused because Harriet wanted so badly to do everything right, was so nervous around him, so afraid she would say exactly the wrong thing, do exactly the wrong thing. She had wanted him to see her as grown-up and mature.
So of course he had seen her as a kid.
And of course she had spent the entire week doing things wrong, clumsily, self-consciously aware of the newfound feeling inside her.
She would have absolutely died if he’d thought of her as pretty back then.
Because she had fallen in love with him within minutes. Maybe even seconds.
She knew it to be ridiculous now. From the perspective of a woman who had had four years to think about it, to travel the world, to experience many adventures, to marry badly, she knew how ridiculous her younger and more naive self had been.
When she had seen the results of the vote conducted at the Sunny Peak Mall she had known how ridiculous her twenty-two-year-old self had been.
Ridiculous, but not alone.
Women loved him, pure and simple.
She had been given the rarest of things—a second chance. To prove she could be competent, that she was not in the least clumsy or accident prone.
And she had a second chance for him to see her as attractive, the thick bottle-bottom glasses no longer a necessity because of the miracle of laser surgery.
Her teeth as straight and white as money and time and steel could make them.
She knew how to dress now in a way that made her height and slenderness an asset. He might not like the skirt, but she hadn’t missed how his eyes had touched on the length of her legs. Her tendency to freckle was becoming less with each year, revealing a startling, lovely complexion underneath. She had learned how to use makeup to show off her eyes and her cheekbones. Some days, like today, she could almost tame the wild mop of her hair.
But most of all she had been give a second chance to prove she was not in love with him.
Not even close. She had been a gauche and unworldly young woman the first time she had met Tyler Jordan. Male influences had been somewhat lacking in her life, as her mother had been a single parent. She had one sister. Despite her height, or maybe because of it, Harriet had always been invisible to the boys in high school and then, disappointingly, in college.
No wonder she had been so completely bowled over by Ty Jordan. In his form-hugging jeans, with those arm muscles rippling, his straight teeth flashing, he’d exuded a male potency, completely without thought on his part, against which she had been defenseless. Even his silences, to her, had seemed to be charged with some male magic that was both foreign and exciting.
But she was not a naive young girl anymore, and she had a secret agenda here. To take back a heart she had given when she hadn’t known better. To take back her power.
A deep, muffled woof reminded her of the surprise she had for him. Not a good start in proving herself, but not her fault.
“Stacey asked me to bring Basil out. Her landlord is on to him, and she’s going to get evicted.”
“Basil?” Tyler was peering over her shoulder. She glanced back. The dog had his big nose pressed mournfully against the window of her small car and was looking at them with pleading, red-rimmed eyes.
“The Saint Bernard?” he asked, incredulous. “My sister sent me the Saint Bernard that knows how to open a fridge? I don’t believe this.”
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” she said, leaning in carefully and hooking up the leash. The interior of her car had a slightly raunchy odor to it, which she could only hope was not also clinging to her.
“Don’t tempt me,” he said sourly.
Should she just tell him who she was? But then he would be expecting the worst from her from the very beginning. How could it be a real second chance if he had preconceived notions? If he thought of her as the Harriet who blushed every time she spoke and choked on her food at dinner because he even made her self-conscious about chewing?
The dog barreled out of the car as soon as she flipped the seat forward, loped to the end of its lead, reared up and placed its saucer-size paws on Tyler’s chest and licked his face.
She wondered if Basil was female. The man was irresistible.
Except Harrie planned to resist him. This time everything was going according to her plan. She was a professional photographer. She’d been in war zones. She’d traveled the world. She knew how to stay calm while under fire.
Under fire. How about on fire?
She’d worked with some of the world’s most attractive men and made the mistake of marrying one of them. She should be immune to their charms.
And she was!
But much of Ty Jordan’s charm was in the fact he was unaware he possessed it. If he had any idea that he was infinitely appealing, he shrugged it off as unimportant, not an asset that helped him produce cattle or run a ranch or raise a younger sister.
And he was more than good-looking. Eighteen hundred women had seen that right away, and placed their one precious checkmark, their vote for the perfect calendar guy, beside his name and picture.
He was tall, at least two inches taller than Harriet’s embarrassing five foot ten. His shoulders were enormous and mirrored the strength that had allowed him to stand firm even when the beluga-size dog launched itself at him.
And his shoulders weren’t enormous because of four days a week power lifting at the gym, either.
They were enormous from throwing bales and breaking green colts and wrestling cattle.
“Get down,” he ordered the dog, and backed up the firmness of the command by removing the paws from his chest and shoving on the dog’s huge head. With the other arm he swiped his face where the dog had slurped on him.
The simple movement made the sun gleam off the dark hairs on arms that rippled with sinewy muscle. Harrie noticed how the short sleeves of the T-shirt stretched over the bulge of his biceps, molding them. His arms were sun browned, even this early in the year, and his forearms were corded with muscle, his wrists big and square.
The shirt, decorated now with two large paw prints and a splotch of drool, hugged the mounds of deep pectoral muscles, then tapered over broad, hard ribs to a flat waist. The T-shirt was tucked into faded jeans, belted with a scarred brown leather belt. The buckle was worn casually, but it winked solid silver, and Harriet saw it depicted a horse, head down and back arched, trying to get rid of a rider.
Black lettering proclaimed: Wind River Saddle Bronc Champion.
It suddenly occurred to her that her interest in the buckle had put her eyes in the wrong vicinity for too long.
She looked up swiftly.
He had folded his arms over his chest and was looking at her sardonically.
“Do you ride broncs?” she asked, just to let him know she had read the buckle in its entirety.
“No,” he replied curtly.
“That’s too bad,” she said, flashing him what she hoped was a professionally indifferent smile. “It would have made a great photograph.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Get this straight right now. We are not organizing my life for your photo ops. You’re going to follow me around, snap a few pictures, and go home.”
She was thinking of the belt buckle. Stacey had told her he went to rodeos before his parents had died, leaving him with Stacey. Before a boy had to become a man. Facts, she reminded herself, that she was not supposed to know.
And yet facts that would help her capture the essence of him on film, an essence he seemed particularly eager not to reveal as he stood there glowering at her.
But it was the essence of him that made him so teeth-grindingly sexy.
She reminded herself she was a photographer now. Not a starstruck kid. He wanted her to be intimidated by him and she could not allow herself that luxury. She was entitled to look at his face. To study it. To know it.
And so she did.
He had dark hair, the midnight black of a summer sky just before the storm. His hair was close-cropped, sticking up a touch in the front. His face was perfection, and she knew, because she had photographed the faces of some of the world’s most perfect men. Or men who were considered perfect in the looks department, anyway.
She looked at his face and tried to dissect the appeal of it. It had strong lines, particularly the line from his jawbone to his chin. His chin was square, the cleft so faint it could almost be overlooked. A good photograph would show it, though.
His cheekbones were high, and the hollow from the edge of his mouth to the line of his jaw was pronounced. His lips were full and firm and were bracketed by faint lines, stern and down turned. His nose was strong and straight. The faint white ridge of a scar at the bridge of it only underscored his rugged masculine appeal.
But she knew, finally, it was his eyes that took him over the edge, from a nice-looking guy to something beyond. His eyes were almond shaped, fringed with a spiky abundance of black lash. The eyes themselves were the dark rich brown of melted chocolate, but it was the look in them that defined him.
Unflinching. Steady. Calm. Strong. Deep.
And yet some mystery resided there, too. It was not exactly wariness, but a certain aloofness. His eyes told his story: that he was a man who chose to walk alone, who knew his own strength completely and relied on it without thought or hesitation.
A lot to know perhaps from one glance at a man.
Except she had had so much more than that. A week that shone in her memory, a few photographs she had taken that had become worn over the years from handling.
A memory of the way those eyes changed when the laughter sparked deep in their depths.
The dog caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and flung his great head, drool flying as he did so. Harrie leaped back to avoid her suit being splattered by dog spit.
It was a nice suit. Extremely professional, gray silk, tight enough to be feminine. She had worn it to travel in, with flat-heeled loafers.
Okay, the skirt was a little shorter than it should have been, and she could have done up one more blouse button, and it would have made more sense to show up in slacks, but still—
The dog let out a sudden deep bay. She was completely unprepared for the power of the beast as he leaped to his feet and charged toward a cow and calf that had come out from behind a shelter and were now nosing the new spring grass in the pasture adjoining the driveway.
Harrie felt her shoulder jerk and the leash burn through her hand. She caught the loop of the leash at the end of it and held on for dear life.
Stacey had told her, laughing, after their visit to the ranch, Ty was amazed you didn’t stampede the cattle.
Playfully he had called her Lady Disaster. She was not going to have this stupid dog stampede the cattle within minutes of her arriving this time—this time when everything was going to be so different.
Off balance, as the powerful dog charged toward the cattle pen, baying with excitement, she lost her footing and fell forward. Undeterred, but slowed down, the huge animal continued forward grinding her knees and face, not to mention her beautiful silk suit, into the dirt and grass.
Ty leaped, grabbed the lead, planted his heels and jerked back hard.
The dog came to an instant halt, glanced back and hung his head remorsefully.
“Are you all right?” Ty asked with irritation, rather than compassion. He was at her elbow now, yanking her to her feet.
“I’m fine,” she snapped, jerking her arm away from him, looking down at her ruined suit.
“You’re hurt.”
He was crouched down in front of her, but nothing prepared her for the touch of his hand on her knee. A knee now devoid of nylon.
He looked up at her.
And she sighed. This was an omen. Five minutes in his presence, and catastrophe had already struck. Never mind that she had him exactly where she wanted him—on bended knee.
It was for the wrong reasons. He was looking at her knee with about the same expression she was sure he would use on an injured cow. Detached. Competent.
“I’m fine,” she said tersely. “It’s a scratch. I have a Band-Aid in my bag.”
“The problem with a cut out here,” he said, putting his hands on his knees and rising to his feet, giving the dog a quick jerk on the lead to let him know he was still there, “is that we have a lot of livestock around. We can have all kinds of nasty little things wriggling around in the soil. I’ll have to put antiseptic on it.”
No. No. No.
This was not how she had planned things. At all. “It’s fine,” she said.
“Humor me.” Still controlling the dog, he opened the passenger side of her car and settled the straps of her carry bag over one shoulder, the strap of her huge camera bag over the other.
“I can take that,” she said.
He stepped away from her easily. “I’ll get it.” It was said with a certain firmness that set her teeth on edge. How had Stacey become so independent in the presence of such old-fashioned male arrogance? Maybe Stacey rebelled against his arrogance. Her boyfriend appeared to be Ty’s polar opposite: long-haired, liberal, artistic, sweet-tempered.
He led the way up to the house, giving the dog’s leash a snap every time it lunged forward.
The walk gave Harriet an unfortunate view of the back of him. Broad back, a certain angry stiffness in the set of his shoulders, his fanny gorgeous nonetheless in those faded jeans, his legs long and lean and strong. By the time they arrived at the back door, she felt as if she was practically panting, and not entirely because of the length of Ty’s powerful stride.
The dog was walking quietly at his side, sending him upward glances as though longing for his approval.
“I was going to put you in the bunkhouse,” he said, opening the door and standing back from it. “But I can see that won’t work. Cringle said you’d be here a week. Would you say that’s a fair estimate?”
“I don’t mind the bunkhouse,” she said tersely. “A week maximum. If everything goes right.”
Why did she feel so unsure of that, suddenly? Everything on her photo shoots always went right. Because of her news photography background she had become adept at getting wonderful pictures without great lighting, without a huge team, without makeup artists.
She could just imagine what Ty Jordan would have to say about a makeup artist.
“And the guys surely wouldn’t mind you sharing the bunkhouse, either, but you can have my little sister’s room.” This was said with the quiet authority of a man who didn’t expect to be questioned.
She was sorely tempted to insist on the bunkhouse. She could tell him she had bunked with guys before. That war zones had a way of blurring lines and stripping modesty. But something about the tiny chink in his armor when he said “little sister” stopped her.
This was the side of him she wanted to capture on camera. The personal side. And she would have far more chance of doing that if she was camped out under the same roof as him.
He tied the dog to the outside of the door handle before he followed her into the house.
“Bathroom’s through here,” he said, dropping her bag on the floor. “If you want to slip off those things, I’ll get the first-aid kit.”
She said thank-you when what she really wanted to say was “go to hell.” She retrieved her bag, went into the bathroom and closed the door. She took off the ruined pantyhose, looked down at the ragged scrape across her knee.
She’d been a war correspondent for two years with nary a scratch.
She looked in the mirror. Her suit was ruined. Her face was smudged. Her hair was standing on end. She took off the suit and opened her suitcase. The all-important first impression had been made. Hopefully the first thirty seconds of it had more impact than the second thirty, but she doubted it. She put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. If she was taking her power back, she certainly wasn’t going to fix her hair, or refresh her make-up for him.
She did remove the smudge from her face before marching back out of the bathroom.
When she came out he was in the kitchen, rummaging through a white metal box with a red cross on the side of it. He didn’t even glance up at her.
The kitchen was unchanged, she thought looking around. Plain, a utilitarian room that served a function.
But it held memories, too—her and Stacey making a mess creating homemade pizza, him coming in, dirty from work, sexy as sin, and giving them hell. Then he’d softened the blow by saying how good it smelled, and he couldn’t wait to try it. She remembered playing cards at that scarred kitchen table with Stacey. He’d been tired, physical weariness bowing his shoulders, but when Stacey had pleaded, he had joined them, reluctantly, and ended up showing them how to play poker. Losing his reluctance a little later, he’d showed them a game called Blind Baseball.
She could not remember the rules or the point of the game, only that they had held the cards up on their foreheads where the other players could see them but they couldn’t see their own.
She could remember the laughter that had filled that room, that had chased that faint weariness from his face. His laughter had made him seem younger and more human. Incredibly, it had made him even more handsome than he had seemed before, and that had been plenty handsome. The moment had shone with a light almost iridescent, had stolen her breath from her lungs, and the joy of other good moments in her life had paled before the perfection of that one.
“Are you all right?”
He was looking at her closely.
“Yes,” she said. “I told you it was just a scratch.”
But she knew what a scratch could do. Four years ago he had scratched the surface of an uninitiated heart.
And that scratch had festered and grown to a wound.
“Have a seat over here, Miss Snow.”
“Call me Harrie.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Pardon?” She sat down at the chair he’d pulled out for her.
“I just can’t look at you and call you Harry.” He knelt down in front of her, completely unself-conscious, the medical kit on the ground beside him. He rolled up the leg of her jeans, without apparently noticing she had changed outfits. She found herself holding the side of the chair as if she was getting ready for takeoff.
“Fine by me, Mr. Jordan. Do you think you could make that Ms. Snow?”
He shrugged, indifferent, and didn’t invite her to call him Tyler, or Ty, as she had called him last time she was here. Looking at the top of his head, his dark hair shiny as silk, she wondered if there was any of that laughter-filled boy left in him.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, his eyes flicking over the white of her knuckles on the edge of her chair.
“Thank you. I know.” He hadn’t even touched her yet, for God’s sake.
The touch, when it came, was everything she had feared, everything she had braced herself for.
It was strong, infinitely competent, as he carefully cleaned the area around the scrape on her knee. The skin of his palm brushed her lower knee as he swabbed her cut, and it was leather tough, the hand of man who worked outdoors in extreme weather and handled shovels and reins and newborn calves. The hand of a man who drove big trucks and chopped wood and fixed fences.
And yet there was none of that toughness in his touch. He was careful and extremely gentle, a man, she reminded herself, who had looked after scraped knees before. And broken arms.
“There, I think I’ve got the grit out,” he said, inspecting it carefully. His breath whispered across the dampness of the skin surrounding her scrape, and she had to close her eyes against the sensation that tingled through her tummy, the insane desire to lean forward and ask him to kiss it better.
He dabbed iodine on with a cotton swab on a wand that came out of the bottle. Thankfully the application required no direct contact, and allowed her to marshal her defenses.
But then he carefully cut a square of gauze, held that over the scrape, the warmth of his hand encircling her kneecap. With his other hand he juggled the medical tape, cutting off pieces, then pressing them firmly into place, his fingertips trailing liquid fire down skin she had not really been aware was so sensitive until now.
“All done,” he announced, and Harrie wasn’t sure if she was safe or sorry. He rolled her pant leg down and got to his feet.
It was about the sexiest thing that had ever happened to her, which probably summed up her pathetic luck with the opposite sex, including her ex-husband, quite nicely.
“Thank you,” she said, and clambered to her feet, wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans. “I’m fine. That was completely unnecessary. Nice. But unnecessary.”
She could feel herself getting red. Why had she said nice? “I meant kind,” she stammered, “not nice.”
She could tell he found her making the distinction amusing. Harrie could feel herself becoming exactly the same bumpkin she had been four years ago. She had to get this situation under control.
“I was just looking out for myself, Ms. Snow. I’m not real anxious to have you getting sick on the place. I don’t want to be doing any baby-sitting.”
It had been about him. She had the sudden feeling that coming back here had not been a great idea after all. He was going out of his way to make himself unlikable.
“Well, then let’s get to work, Mr. Jordan. As you know, my challenge will be to create the illusion of four seasons over the next week. I was hoping we could use the fireplace for the December shot. Hang a few stockings.”
“How do you know I have a fireplace?” he asked.
She should have known this would happen sometime. That she would let it slip that she was more familiar with him and this house than she should be.
“Your sister told me,” she lied brightly. “We tossed around the idea of how to create the seasons a little bit at the office.”
Wasn’t that just the problem with little white lies? She saw the faintest flicker in his eyes. He didn’t like that he had been discussed at the office.
Harriet had always been an absolutely terrible liar, and she could see by the long look he gave her she had not improved in that department. “I’ll just follow you around with the camera,” she said brightly. “Whatever you normally do, go ahead and do it. You won’t even know I’m there.”
“I usually have a shower right now,” he drawled, watching her.
She stared at him and gulped. She could feel a horrible wave of heat moving up her neck to her face.
“In the middle of the day?” she managed to challenge him, her voice a squeak.
“Just making sure your limits are the same as mine,” he said. “I’m a private man, Ms. Snow. I’ll let you know when it’s okay to take pictures.”
She begged herself to challenge him, to not let him back her down. She lifted her chin and said, “I don’t know, Mr. Jordan, a nice steamy shower shot would probably sell a whole pile of calendars.”
Then she spoiled the effect entirely by blushing. She gulped and looked at her feet.
She saw his booted feet move into her range of vision. She refused to look up, and then she felt that hand, so familiar to her after the knee episode, touch her chin ever so lightly.
She lifted her face to him and didn’t look away when he scanned her quizzically.
“Don’t play with fire, Ms. Snow.”
What could be more embarrassing than a full-grown mature woman being embarrassed by something so innocuous?
Something changed in his eyes. A puzzled look came into them.
She was almost sure he recognized her, or if he didn’t, something had tickled his memory, troubled him.
“They should have sent the man,” he said.
She bristled. “I happen to be very good at my job. And for your information, I’ve been a war correspondent. I’ve lived in close quarters with men in very rough conditions.”
“Really?” he said, his eyes narrowed as if he didn’t believe a word of it.
“Really,” she said coolly. “Besides, women get better shots of men, for obvious reasons.”
“I don’t find them obvious. Could you explain?”
“It’s the male preening thing. ‘Little lady, let me show you how big and strong I am.”’
He stared at her, and a muscle jumped in his jaw. He gave his head a shake. “Is there any chance we could have you out of here in less than a week?”
“Cooperating would help.”
“Can you ride a horse?”
Now this was the question she’d been dreading. She’d fallen off a horse last time she’d been here. It had been the first time she had ever ridden, and it hadn’t been the horse’s fault at all.
Ty had been riding in the lead, Stacey behind him.
And Harrie, last in line, had been leaning way too far out, mesmerized by the way he looked in the saddle, her first cheap 35 mm raised to her eye, wanting that photograph so badly.
She’d fallen and broken her arm, ending her visit.
The humiliation had led her to take riding lessons the following year while on assignment in England. She had never really got the feel for it. She could manage walk, trot, canter, stop, but the instructor had told her what she already knew.
She repeated it to him. “I can manage the basics, but I don’t have a good seat.”
She saw his eyes flick to the area in question, and she saw the comeback flash through his eyes, knew she had left herself wide open to it.
But apparently he had decided making her blush was not that amusing, because he said nothing for a moment. He was still watching her, puzzled, and she had a feeling he was a breath away from figuring that puzzle out when a loud noise ripped through the house, a banshee wail of nails being pulled from wood, of hinges parting. The noise was followed by a crash and a splinter.
Ty raced to the kitchen window, and she followed.
Basil was racing across the yard, straight toward the cattle pen that had intrigued him before. Ty’s back door, still attached to the leash, skidded along behind him.
Ty said three words in a row that would have made a sailor blush, then hurtled toward the door. She picked up her camera, but had to stop and put her shoes on. Then she went in hot pursuit. This was more like it. The war zone she could handle.
Chapter Three
If there was a feeling that Ty Jordan hated more than any other in the world it was this one: he did not like being out of control. He was aware of that dislike bubbling away briskly inside of him as he bolted after the dog.
A dog she had brought with her.
The she who should have been a he.
Male preening. As if he was some peacock put here for her entertainment.
She had better figure this out real quick: the Bar ZZ was Ty Jordan’s property, his domain, and he had already decided he wasn’t rearranging anything about his lifestyle to accommodate the stupid calendar.
He had been made a promise—by Cringle himself and by his sister—that his life would not be disturbed or disrupted in any way.
That blinking dog was heading right for the cow and calf pen. With a burst of speed Ty caught up to the door that was twisting and turning and flopping on the lead behind the dog. He threw himself on top of it, hoping at least to slow the dog down.
Ms. Snow, whom he could not think of as Harry, even in his mind, yelled something at him, but he didn’t quite catch what it was.
Two hundred and three pounds landing on the door did slow the dog down—minutely. Ty was now bouncing along behind the dog, riding the door on his stomach, like a surfer on a board. He found the door handle and unraveled the leash where it was tied to it.
“Watch your face,” she yelled, and he realized that was what she had yelled the first time.
He cast her one brief scornful look before he managed to unknot the leash from the door handle. He pulled it free, rolled from the door, got to his feet and hauled in Basil, who came to him happily, his big tongue lolling out of his mouth, his tail flagging.
“Kiss me and your days are numbered,” he warned.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I wasn’t talking to you.” He bent over at the waist, breathing hard. He became aware of the click and whir of a camera, straightened and glared at her.
She lowered the camera, studied him and then nodded, satisfied. “I was worried about your face,” she said. “A black eye or a bruise could make things complicated.”
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Cara Colter
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: 9 Out Of 10 Women Can′t Be Wrong, электронная книга автора Cara Colter на английском языке, в жанре современные любовные романы