“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,