LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      But when his eyes adjusted, he registered more opulence, and Stacey. She was sitting in a chair on this side of a huge desk that looked as if it was made of solid granite.

      “Hi, Ty,” she said with a big smile, and patted the seat of the empty chair next to her. “How’s my big brother today?”

      If they didn’t have an audience, a wizened old gnome of a man sitting behind the desk, Ty would have given her the complete and unvarnished truth. He was irritated as hell today.

      Life-and-death, indeed.

      His little sister had never looked healthier! Her mischievous eyes sparkling, her dark hair all piled up on her head making her look quite sophisticated, wearing a suit and shoes just like all the other women he’d seen today.

      “I’ve had better days,” he answered her gruffly, and reluctantly took the chair beside her. More leather. His boots sank about two inches into the carpet.

      “I suppose you’re wondering what’s going on?” she asked brightly.

      “Life-and-death,” he reminded her.

      “Ty, this is my boss, Francis Cringle. Mr. Cringle, my brother, Ty.”

      Ty rose halfway out of his chair, took Cringle’s hand and was a little surprised by the strength of the grip.

      “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Jordan,” the voice was warm and friendly, the voice of a man who had spent a lifetime promoting items people had no idea they needed. “Thanks for coming. Stacey tells me you’re a busy man. She also mentioned you have no idea why you’re here?”

      “None.”

      “Your sister entered you in a contest. And you won.”

      A contest. Ty shot his sister a menacing look. Life-and-death, huh? Knowing his sister, he’d won something really useless like a lifetime supply of jujubes or a raft trip down the Amazon in the hot season.

      “You see, Ty.” Stacey was talking very quickly now, catching on that she was trying his patience. “Francis Cringle has been hired by the Fight Against Breast Cancer Fund to do their next fund-raiser.”

      Breast cancer. How he hated that disease, the disease that had stolen the life from his mother, left a whole family shaken, marooned, like survivors of a shipwreck. Only their shipwreck had dragged on endlessly. Five years of hoping, being crushed, hoping again.

      “Okay,” he said, not allowing one single memory to shade his voice, “And?”

      “You remember my friend Harriet don’t you?”

      “How could I forget?” Harriet Pendleton was a young woman his sister had met at college and brought home for a week one spring. What? Three years ago? Four?

      Usually he couldn’t distinguish Stacey’s friends one from the other. But Harriet was the girl most likely to be mistaken for a giraffe. Nearly six feet tall, most of that legs and neck, she was covered in ginger-colored freckles and splotches that matched untamable hair. Her eyes, brown and worried looking, had been enlarged by thick glasses. Her quick, nervous smile had revealed extremely crooked teeth.

      Totally forgettable in the looks department, not that Ty ever paid much attention to Stacey’s friends, Harriet had made herself memorable in other ways. Disaster had followed in the poor girl’s wake. She had broken nearly everything she touched, run the well dry by leaving a tap on and let the calves out by not securing a latch properly.

      Somehow they’d gotten through the week before Harriet managed to stampede the cattle and burn down the barn, but they had sent her home with her arm encased in plaster.

      He should have been glad to see them go, and yet even now he could feel a little smile tickle his lips when he thought of Harriet.

      She had made him laugh. And even though he always felt lonely for a week or two after Stacey had been home for a visit, that time it had taken even longer to get back to normal.

      “Lady Disaster,” Ty remembered. “I thought you told me she lived in Europe now.”

      Stacey gave him that do-you-listen-to-a-word-I-say look. “She’s been back for months. She’s the one who had the photograph that won the contest.”

      “And how do I fit into all this? Life-and-death, remember?” He had a feeling they were moving farther and farther from the point, as if he was being swept away in the current of his sister’s enthusiasm. Unwillingly.

      “I’m getting to it,” she said, her tone reproaching his impatience. “The fund-raising idea is to do a calendar. Everybody does them. You know, the firefighters for the burn unit and the police for the orphan’s fund.”

      “I don’t know. Haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.”

      She actually looked annoyed with him, the same way she did when she’d still been at home and mentioned a film or a popular song or some celebrity that he knew nothing about. She would roll her eyes at him and say, “Oh, the famous blank look from my brother, the recluse from life.”

      Today she just handed him a calendar, called “Red Hot,” which he presumed he was supposed to look at. He flipped through it, without much interest, feeling resentful that he had a ranch to run and was sitting in Calgary looking at pictures.

      Very dull pictures of guys without their shirts, in firefighter’s pants with suspenders. They looked self-conscious, which he didn’t blame them for, and they held a variety of unlikely poses that made their muscles bulge. A few had artfully placed smudges of soot on their cheeks and chests.

      “People buy this?” he muttered incredulously. He thought of his own calendar at home. Posted beside his fridge, it had nice pictures of plump Herefords on each month. The Ranch Hand Feed Store gave the calendars away free in December. The Farm Corp Insurance Company also handed out free calendars. Ty had no idea people bought calendars.

      “Women buy them,” his sister said, and he realized it shouldn’t surprise him that a woman would buy something she could get free. Women liked to spend money, a lesson his sister had taught him.

      “They’re especially willing to buy calendars like these if it’s in support of a good cause. Like breast cancer research.”

      Something in her voice made him look up. He stopped flipping pages between March’s Bryan and April’s Kyle and closed the calendar firmly. He slid it onto the corner

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