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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.
