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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.”
