Cara Colter - 9 Out Of 10 Women Can't Be Wrong

Don’t ask, she ordered herself firmly. But a small voice, definitely hers, asked aloud. “Why doesn’t he see me as a red-blooded woman?”

As if she didn’t know. Harriet Pendleton was well aware she was too everything. Too tall, too skinny, too freckled. Add to that crooked teeth, and bottle-bottom eyeglasses. Too ugly.

“Harriet, he doesn’t see you as a red-blooded woman because you’re my friend. He thinks we’re both kids.”

“But I’m older than you!” Harriet protested. “Twenty-two is not a child.”

“So, tell him!” Stacey said grumpily. “And let me go to sleep.”

“Someday,” Harriet said, “I’m going to be a famous photographer and I’ll have enough money to get my teeth fixed and have laser surgery done on my eyes.”

“Harriet, don’t be so silly. You glow. Anyone who knows you, knows how beautiful you are.”

Except your brother.

Harriet and Stacey were roommates at the Alberta College of Art. Harriet was upgrading some photo courses, Stacey was taking commercial art. Stacey had invited Harriet to spend spring break on her brother’s ranch, the Bar ZZ, south of Calgary.

It had sounded like so much fun.

It would have been so much fun, except for him. A man like that made breathing in and out seem difficult. Words caught in Harriet’s throat. She was in such a constant state of blush that he thought her face was naturally beet red. He’d remarked they needed to keep her out of the sun! She was so self-conscious in his presence that she did everything wrong, tripped over her own feet. After she’d fallen and spooked the cattle, he’d remarked they needed to keep her away from the cattle, too.

“He calls me Lady Disaster,” she fretted, out loud.

“He’s teasing you, Harriet! Please go to sleep. Please?”

She willed herself to go to sleep. She promised herself that tomorrow everything would be different. And it was.

The next day Harriet fell off a horse and broke her arm.

Her trip to the Bar ZZ was over, ending in the emergency ward of the tiny High River Hospital. At least she had felt his arms! He had carried her, strong and sure, gently teased her out of her pain.

And then he’d said goodbye.

But when she developed the photographs she had taken, she realized she would never really say goodbye to him.

The photos of Ty shone, as if the man was lit from within. She had done on film what she had no hope of doing in real life. She had captured him.

On the basis of those pictures, she was offered a photo assignment overseas.

And on the basis of a badly bruised heart, she took it….

Tyler Jordan was aware he was being watched.

There it was again. The secretary, a woman old enough to be well beyond such nonsense, glanced up coyly from behind her work, looked at him longer than he considered strictly polite and then, with the flash of a secretive smile, looked back to her computer screen.

Ty pretended he hadn’t noticed her scrutiny and studied the room uncomfortably. The outer waiting area of Francis Cringle and Associates struck him as being more like the kind of office he’d seen in the rare movie he watched than like a real life office, or at least not any real life office he’d ever been in.

He couldn’t believe his sister—a girl born and raised on a ranch—worked in a place like this…actually fitted in here.

He was sitting on a sofa of butter-yellow leather. Another faced him. Huge deep-green plants were scattered throughout. He wasn’t sure how a real plant survived in an atmosphere with no natural light. The artificial lighting was muted; the rug, covering marble tiles, looked old and worn in a way that convinced him it had been picked up at an African bazaar.

He heard the quick tap of heels coming down the hallway outside this posh office and felt himself tensing.

If whoever it was went on by, then he knew he must be imagining all the unusual attention he was getting. But no, the tapping of the heels slowed, and then she came in. Tall and willowy, in a tight blue skirt and a short matching jacket, she glanced quickly his way, her confidence astounding, given the balancing act she must be doing on those high stiletto heels, then moved over to the desk and had a whispered conversation with the woman there. The conversation was punctuated with breathless giggles and sidelong looks.

At him.

The looks were loaded with secrets…and satisfaction. Looks not at all in keeping with the muted atmosphere of subdued professionalism that the well-known public relations firm’s office had achieved.

Ty frowned and picked up a magazine off the dark-walnut coffee table in front of him. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the highly polished surface, and it confirmed how out of place he was here. Cowboy hat, white denim shirt unbuttoned at the throat, jeans. He might have raised some of the cattle that provided the luxurious leather he was now sitting on.

A flurry of giggles and looks made him scowl at the magazine, flip it open and read the first paragraph of an article on office management.

He didn’t have an office, but looking at the article seemed preferable to pulling his cowboy hat even further over his eyes.

Another young woman flounced into the office, pudgy and cute, took a long look at him, then flung her blond hair over her shoulder, fluttered her eyelashes several times. If she was expecting a response, he didn’t give her one, and she hurried over to the desk and joined the other two in whispered conversation.

Which he heard snatches of. Something about being even better in person, something about people who should be sharing hot tubs and wine on starlit nights, something about crackers in her bed. He sent them a dark and withering look that had the unhappy result of eliciting sighs and a few more giggles.

He gave up pretending the article interested him, tossed down the magazine, stretched out his legs and crossed his cowboy boots at the ankles. He looked wistfully at the door.

His eyes drifted to the clock. Five more minutes and he was leaving. He didn’t care what kind of pickle Stacey had gotten herself into this time. At the moment he would be no help to his kid sister, anyway, since he felt as if he’d like to throttle her.

A one-and-a-half-hour drive into the center of Calgary. At calving time. Because she had an emergency. Life-and-death, she’d claimed on the phone.

So, if it was so life-and-death, where was she?

And if it was so life-and-death why had she asked him to not wear jeans with holes in them? And clean boots? What kind of person in a life-and-death situation thought of things like that?

Life-and-death meant the emergency ward at the hospital, not the outer office of Francis Cringle.

So here he was in pressed jeans and a clean shirt and his good boots and hat, being giggled at, and his sister was nowhere to be seen.

He resisted, barely, the impulse to send the secretaries into more conniptions by rubbing his back, hard, up against the wall behind him.

“Ladies, do you have business elsewhere?”

They scattered like frightened chickens in front of a fox, and his rescuer, a tall woman, distinguished, turned and looked him over, carefully. “Tyler Jordan?”

He practically leapt to his feet, took off his hat and rolled it uncomfortably between his fingers. “Ma’am?”

She smiled when he said that. That same damned smile he’d been seeing since he’d walked into this stuffy office!

“Will you come with me, sir?”

Sir. A phrase he’d heard rarely. Usually in restaurants where he was destined to use the wrong fork. He followed her down the hall, having to cut his long stride so that he didn’t walk on top of her.

She ushered him into an office, smiled again and shut the door behind him. The light pouring in the floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls blinded him momentarily after the dimness of the outer office.