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,
