9 Out Of 10 Women Can't Be Wrong

There was some innocence in that kiss Ty could barely fathom.

Once he broke it off, she stared at him, her eyes huge. He could see she was trembling. She actually took her fist to her mouth, and bit on it, as if to stop the shaking.

The gesture stopped him cold. “Harriet,” he growled. “Harriet Pendleton.”

She laughed nervously. “All grown up,” she said, as if that in some way made what had happened between them all right.

Ha. She was a friend of his sister’s. A kid.

Off-limits to him.

He had to get through the remaining four days without looking at her lips again. Because those were not the lips of a kid. Actually, hers wasn’t the body of a kid, either.

Yes, Harriet Pendleton was a woman now. And Ty Jordan wanted her like the red-blooded man he was….

Dear Reader,

Summer is over and it’s time to kick back into high gear. Just be sure to treat yourself with a luxuriant read or two (or, hey, all six) from Silhouette Romance. Remember—work hard, play harder!

Although October is officially Breast Cancer Awareness month, we’d like to invite you to start thinking about it now. In a wonderful, uplifting story, a rancher reluctantly agrees to model for a charity calendar to earn money for cancer research. At the back of that book, we’ve also included a guide for self-exams. Don’t miss Cara Colter’s must-read 9 Out of 10 Women Can’t Be Wrong (#1615).

Indulge yourself with megapopular author Karen Rose Smith and her CROWN AND GLORY series installment, Searching for Her Prince (#1612). A missing heir puts love on the line when he hides his identity from the woman assigned to track him down. The royal, brooding hero in Sandra Paul’s stormy Caught by Surprise (#1614), the latest in the A TALE OF THE SEA adventure, also has secrets—and intends to make his beautiful captor pay…by making her his wife!

Jesse Colton is a special agent forced to play pretend boyfriend to uncover dangerous truths in the fourth of THE COLTONS: COMANCHE BLOOD spinoff, The Raven’s Assignment (#1613), by bestselling author Kasey Michaels. And in Cathie Linz’s MEN OF HONOR title, Married to a Marine (#1616), combat-hardened Justice Wilder had shut himself away from the world—until his ex-wife’s younger sister comes knocking…. Finally, in Laurey Bright’s tender and true Life with Riley (#1617), free-spirited Riley Morrisset may not be the perfect society wife, but she’s exactly what her stiff-collared boss needs!

Happy reading—and please keep in touch.

Mary-Theresa Hussey

Senior Editor

9 Out of 10 Women Can’t Be Wrong

Cara Colter

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my nephew, Mathew, (Sarvis the Silent) with love

Books by Cara Colter

Silhouette Romance

Dare To Dream #491

Baby in Blue #1161

Husband in Red #1243

The Cowboy, the Baby and the Bride-to-Be #1319

Truly Daddy #1363

A Bride Worth Waiting For #1388

Weddings Do Come True #1406

A Babe in the Woods #1424

A Royal Marriage #1440

First Time, Forever #1464

*Husband by Inheritance #1532

*The Heiress Takes a Husband #1538

Wed by a Will #1544

What Child Is This? #1585

Her Royal Husband #1600

9 Out of 10 Women Can’t Be Wrong #1615

The Coltons

A Hasty Wedding

CARA COLTER

shares ten acres in the wild Kootenay region of British Columbia with the man of her dreams, three children, two horses, a cat with no tail and a golden retriever who answers best to “bad dog.” She loves reading, writing and the woods in winter (no bears). She says life’s delights include an automatic garage door opener and the skylight over the bed that allows her to see the stars at night.

She also says, “I have not lived a neat and tidy life, and used to envy those who did. Now I see my struggles as having given me a deep appreciation of life, and of love, which I hope I succeed in passing on through the stories that I tell.”

Dear Reader,

There is someone I would like you to know. She was my favorite heroine. Ruth Caron was petite and pretty. She had china-blue eyes and sandy brown hair. Her front teeth were a little crooked. She was a playful spirit who loved to dance. She was afraid of water and was always a little self-conscious about her lack of education. She quit school when she was seventeen, got married and started having babies. One of whom was me.

Many of my heroines are ordinary women who reach inside themselves to find the extraordinary depths of their spirits. My mom was like that. Just one example was her terror of water. Instead of surrendering to that fear and passing it on, she made sure my sisters and I had swimming lessons. My mom baby-sat kids to make money, and I think of the sacrifice she made to ensure I would know only joy in the water. In her later years, she even took up swimming herself! (Shallow end only!)

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990, her courage was monumental, far beyond what anyone would have ever expected of such an ordinary and humble woman. She died in August of 1995 at the age of 57. The hole in my heart will never be filled.

I wanted you, the reader, to at least have a glimpse of this remarkable woman. I wanted you to know, right this instant, someone feels the great love for you that I felt and feel for my mom. Please do breast self-exams and have mammograms regularly. Donate to breast cancer research. Do it for your mother, your daughters, your sisters, your friends. Do it for yourself.

With all my best wishes,

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Epilogue

Prologue

“Your brother is a photographer’s dream. And a red-blooded woman’s nightmare.”

“Harriet,” Stacey said sleepily, from the other side of the bed, “Ty doesn’t see you as a red-blooded woman. Go to sleep. He’s going to have us up at five in the morning, because you said you wanted to see them bring in the cattle from the upper pasture. Your enthusiasm for the ranch is beginning to make me very sorry I invited you. I thought we were going to sleep in, watch videos and make pizzas.”

“You can do those things in Calgary,” Harriet said, as if her mind wasn’t solidly locked on the words Ty doesn’t see you as a red-blooded woman.

Why would he? Stacey Jordan’s older brother, Ty, was the most astonishing man Harriet Pendleton had ever seen. He was tall, broad-shouldered, lean and hard-muscled from years of ranch work. His face passed attractive and went straight to sinful. When his eyes rested on her, dark as melted chocolate, Harriet felt the shiver of pure male energy in the air.

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….

Chapter One

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.

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 of Cringle’s desk, remembering, uneasily, all the looks he’d been getting all morning.

He had the awful feeling he had not won a lifetime supply of jujubes. Not even close.

“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.”