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