Christmas with a Billionaire. Кэрол Мортимер
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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 drool, hugged the mounds of deep pectoral muscles, then tapered over broad, hard ribs to a flat waist. The T-shirt was tucked into faded jeans, belted with a scarred brown leather belt. The buckle was worn casually, but it winked solid silver, and Harriet saw it depicted a horse, head down and back arched, trying to get rid of a rider.
Black lettering proclaimed: Wind River Saddle Bronc Champion.
It suddenly occurred to her that her interest in the buckle had put her eyes in the wrong vicinity for too long.
She looked up swiftly.
He had folded his arms over his chest and was looking at her sardonically.
“Do you ride broncs?” she asked, just to let him know she had read the buckle in its entirety.
“No,” he replied curtly.
“That’s too bad,” she said, flashing him what she hoped was a professionally indifferent smile. “It would have made a great photograph.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Get this straight right now. We are not organizing my life for your photo ops. You’re going to follow me around, snap a few pictures, and go home.”
She was thinking of the belt buckle. Stacey had told her he went to rodeos before his parents had died, leaving him with Stacey. Before a boy had to become a man. Facts, she reminded herself, that she was not supposed to know.
And yet facts that would help her capture the essence of him on film, an essence he seemed particularly eager not to reveal as he stood there glowering at her.
But it was the essence of him that made him so teeth-grindingly sexy.
She reminded herself she was a photographer now. Not a starstruck kid. He wanted her to be intimidated by him and she could not allow herself that luxury. She was entitled to look at his face. To study it. To know it.
And so she did.
He had dark hair, the midnight black of a summer sky just before the storm. His hair was close-cropped, sticking up a touch in the front. His face was perfection, and she knew, because she had photographed the faces of some of the world’s most perfect men. Or men who were considered perfect in the looks department, anyway.
She looked at his face and tried to dissect the appeal of it. It had strong lines, particularly the line from his jawbone to his chin. His chin was square, the cleft so faint it could almost be overlooked. A good photograph would show it, though.
His cheekbones were high, and the hollow from the edge of his mouth to the line of his jaw was pronounced. His lips were full and firm and were bracketed by faint lines, stern and down turned. His nose was strong and straight. The faint white ridge of a scar at the bridge of it only underscored his rugged masculine appeal.
But she knew, finally, it was his eyes that took him over the edge, from a nice-looking guy to something beyond. His eyes were almond shaped, fringed with a spiky abundance of black lash. The eyes themselves were the dark rich brown of melted chocolate, but it was the look in them that defined him.
Unflinching. Steady. Calm. Strong. Deep.
And yet some mystery resided there, too. It was not exactly wariness, but a certain aloofness. His eyes told his story: that he was a man who chose to walk alone, who knew his own strength completely and relied on it without thought or hesitation.
A lot to know perhaps from one glance at a man.
Except she had had so much more than that. A week that shone in her memory, a few photographs she had taken that had become worn over the years from handling.
A memory of the way those eyes changed when the laughter sparked deep in their depths.
The dog caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and flung his great head, drool flying as he did so. Harrie leaped back to avoid her suit being splattered by dog spit.
It was a nice suit. Extremely professional, gray silk, tight enough to be feminine. She had worn it to travel in, with flat-heeled loafers.
Okay, the skirt was a little shorter than it should have been, and she could have done up one more blouse button, and it would have made more sense to show up in slacks, but still—
The dog let out a sudden deep bay. She was completely unprepared for the power of the beast as he leaped to his feet and charged toward a cow and calf that had come out from behind a shelter and were now nosing the new spring grass in the pasture adjoining the driveway.
Harrie felt her shoulder jerk and the leash burn through her hand. She caught the loop of the leash at the end of it and held on for dear life.
Stacey had told her, laughing, after their visit to the ranch, Ty was amazed you didn’t stampede the cattle.
Playfully he had called her Lady Disaster. She was not going to have this stupid dog stampede the cattle within minutes of her arriving this time—this time when everything was going to be so different.
Off balance, as the powerful dog charged toward the cattle pen, baying with excitement, she lost her footing and fell forward. Undeterred, but slowed down, the huge animal continued forward grinding her knees and face, not to mention her beautiful silk suit, into the dirt and grass.
Ty leaped, grabbed the lead, planted his heels and jerked back hard.
The dog came to an instant halt, glanced back and hung his head remorsefully.
“Are you all right?” Ty asked with irritation, rather than compassion. He was at her elbow now, yanking her to her feet.
“I’m fine,” she snapped, jerking her arm away from him, looking down at her ruined suit.
“You’re hurt.”
He was crouched down in front of her, but nothing prepared her for the touch of his hand on her knee. A knee now devoid of nylon.
He looked up at her.
And she sighed. This was an omen. Five minutes in his presence, and catastrophe had already struck. Never mind that she had him exactly where she wanted him—on bended knee.
It was for the wrong reasons. He was looking at her knee with about the same expression she was sure he would use on an injured cow. Detached. Competent.
“I’m fine,” she said tersely. “It’s a scratch. I have a Band-Aid in my bag.”
“The problem with a cut out here,” he said, putting his hands on his knees and rising to his feet, giving the dog a quick jerk on the lead to let him know he was still there, “is that we have a lot of livestock around. We can have all kinds of nasty little things wriggling around in the soil. I’ll have to put antiseptic on it.”
No. No. No.
This was not how she had planned things. At all. “It’s fine,” she said.
“Humor me.” Still controlling the dog, he opened the passenger side of her car and settled the straps of her carry bag over one shoulder, the strap of her huge camera bag over the other.
“I can take that,” she said.
He stepped away from her easily. “I’ll get it.” It was said with a certain firmness that set her teeth on edge. How had Stacey become so independent in the presence