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
