Chapter One

      In most situations, twenty-nine-year-old Claire Olander had no problem standing her ground.

      The only two Texans who could weaken her resolve ambled to a halt in front of her. In perfect synchronization, the “negotiators” turned their faces upward.

      Her niece, Heidi, pushed the halo of short, baby-fine blond curls from her face and tucked her favorite baby doll under her arm, football-style, so the head faced front. “How come we have to clean up our toys now, Aunt Claire?” the preschooler demanded.

      Her twin brother, Henry, adjusted his plastic yellow hard hat with one hand, then gave the small wooden bench he was “fixing” another twist with his toy wrench. His amber eyes darkened in protest as he pointed out with customary logic, “It’s not dinnertime!”

      Claire wished it was. Then the business meeting she had been dreading ever since the bank auditors left to tally their results, six weeks ago, would be history. Aware there was no use worrying her nearly four-year-old charges, she smiled and tidied the stacks of papers on her desk one last time.

      Everything was going to be all right. She had to keep remembering that. Just like her late sister, Liz-Beth, she was more than capable of mothering the twins and managing the family business they’d started. “We are cleaning up early, kiddos, because we have company coming this afternoon,” she announced cheerfully. In fact, the Big Bad Wolf should be here at two o’clock.

      Heidi sat down cross-legged on the floor, placed her doll, Sissy, carefully across her lap, and began stuffing building blocks ever so slowly into a plastic storage bin. “Who?”

      Claire knelt down next to her, and began to help, albeit at a much quicker pace. “A man from the bank.”

      “Can he hammer stuff?” Henry demanded.

      Claire surveyed the two children who were now hers to bring up, and shrugged. “I have no idea.”

      Heidi paused. “What can he do?” she asked, curiously.

      “Manage a trust.” Destroy my hopes and dreams…

      Henry carefully fitted his wrench in the tool belt snapped around his waist, and sat down beside Heidi. “What’s a trust?”

      “The fund that’s going to pay for your college education one day.”

      “Oh.” He looked disappointed that it wasn’t something he could “repair” with his tools.

      “Is he our friend?” Heidi asked.

      Claire fastened the lid on the building blocks bin, and put it on the shelf in her office reserved for the twins’ playthings. “I’ve never met him, honey. He just moved here a couple of weeks ago.” She’d heard a lot about him, though. The newest member of the Summit, Texas, business community was supposed to be thirty-three years old, to-die-for handsome and single, a fact that had the marriage-minded females in the community buzzing. Fortunately for Claire, she was not one of the group jockeying for attention. She had her hands full with her fledgling business and the twins she had inherited from her late sister and brother-in-law.

      “Is he going to have good manners?” Henry, who’d lately become obsessed with what to do and what not to do, inquired.

      “I’m sure Mr. H. R. McPherson is very polite,” Claire said. Most bankers were.

      Heidi put Sissy on her shoulder and gently patted her back, as if burping her. Her brow furrowed. “What’s H. R. McDonald’s?”

      “H. R. McPherson, honey, and those are initials that stand for his first and middle names.” Claire could not blame him for using them on business correspondence, even if it did make him sound a little like a human-resources department. “Although,” she observed wryly, shelving the last of the toy train cars scattered about, “who would name their son Heathcliff and Rhett in this day and age, I don’t know.”

      “As it happens,” a low male voice drawled from the open doorway behind her, “the hopeless romantic who came up with that idea was my mother.”

      As the sexy voice filled the room, it was all Claire could do to suppress her embarrassment. Talk about bad timing! She’d just mouthed off about the man she could least afford to insult.

      Slowly, she turned to face the interloper.

      The ladies in town were right, she noted with an inward sigh. Tall, dark and handsome did not begin to do this man justice. He had to be at least six foot