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, but not alone.
Women loved him, pure and simple.
She had been given the rarest of things—a second chance. To prove she could be competent, that she was not in the least clumsy or accident prone.
And she had a second chance for him to see her as attractive, the thick bottle-bottom glasses no longer a necessity because of the miracle of laser surgery.
Her teeth as straight and white as money and time and steel could make them.
She knew how to dress now in a way that made her height and slenderness an asset. He might not like the skirt, but she hadn’t missed how his eyes had touched on the length of her legs. Her tendency to freckle was becoming less with each year, revealing a startling, lovely complexion underneath. She had learned how to use makeup to show off her eyes and her cheekbones. Some days, like today, she could almost tame the wild mop of her hair.
But most of all she had been give a second chance to prove she was not in love with him.
Not even close. She had been a gauche and unworldly young woman the first time she had met Tyler Jordan. Male influences had been somewhat lacking in her life, as her mother had been a single parent. She had one sister. Despite her height, or maybe because of it, Harriet had always been invisible to the boys in high school and then, disappointingly, in college.
No wonder she had been so completely bowled over by Ty Jordan. In his form-hugging jeans, with those arm muscles rippling, his straight teeth flashing, he’d exuded a male potency, completely without thought on his part, against which she had been defenseless. Even his silences, to her, had seemed to be charged with some male magic that was both foreign and exciting.
But she was not a naive young girl anymore, and she had a secret agenda here. To take back a heart she had given when she hadn’t known better. To take back her power.
A deep, muffled woof reminded her of the surprise she had for him. Not a good start in proving herself, but not her fault.
“Stacey asked me to bring Basil out. Her landlord is on to him, and she’s going to get evicted.”
“Basil?” Tyler was peering over her shoulder. She glanced back. The dog had his big nose pressed mournfully against the window of her small car and was looking at them with pleading, red-rimmed eyes.
“The Saint Bernard?” he asked, incredulous. “My sister sent me the Saint Bernard that knows how to open a fridge? I don’t believe this.”
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” she said, leaning in carefully and hooking up the leash. The interior of her car had a slightly raunchy odor to it, which she could only hope was not also clinging to her.
“Don’t tempt me,” he said sourly.
Should she just tell him who she was? But then he would be expecting the worst from her from the very beginning. How could it be a real second chance if he had preconceived notions? If he thought of her as the Harriet who blushed every time she spoke and choked on her food at dinner because he even made her self-conscious about chewing?
The dog barreled out of the car as soon as she flipped the seat forward, loped to the end of its lead, reared up and placed its saucer-size paws on Tyler’s chest and licked his face.
She wondered if Basil was female. The man was irresistible.
Except Harrie planned to resist him. This time everything was going according to her plan. She was a professional photographer. She’d been in war zones. She’d traveled the world. She knew how to stay calm while under fire.
Under fire. How about on fire?
She’d worked with some of the world’s most attractive men and made the mistake of marrying one of them. She should be immune to their charms.
And she was!
But much of Ty Jordan’s charm was in the fact he was unaware he possessed it. If he had any idea that he was infinitely appealing, he shrugged it off as unimportant, not an asset that helped him produce cattle or run a ranch or raise a younger sister.
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