Mail-Order Cinderella

Tensing again at the thought of complications a wife and family would inflict upon his well-ordered bachelor life, Tyler viciously jammed his thumb down on the eject button. Out popped the fifth videotape. He shoved in a new one, returned to his seat. Lifted rangy blue-jeaned legs to prop his boot heels on the edge of the blueprint-cluttered desk and slouched in his chair, muttering to himself. A sprinkle of dry red clay sifted over the tooled-leather desk blotter. He ignored it and tried to focus on the task at hand, protecting his position as heir to the vice presidency of Fortune Construction Company.

Tyler aimed steel-gray eyes at the woman being interviewed. There was a too-eager sparkle in her eyes. Carmine-red lipstick slashed across her full lips. A wave of blond hair swept seductively over one eye. Okay—this one was pretty. Stretching it, maybe even beautiful. She was young, energetic, quick with her answers and claimed she was willing to “have children after a while.”

An alarm sounded in his subconscious. After a while. Female code words for I don’t want to ruin my figure until I’m too old to care. He chuckled. Dear Kate would have a serious problem with this one. His sprightly octogenarian grandmother made no secret of the fact she wanted great-grandkids by the truckload, ASAP! Smiling and shaking his head, he hit the eject button.

“Last one of the batch. You’d better be a winner, sweetheart,” Tyler muttered as he slid in the final cartridge and hit play.

“I really hope this isn’t what I think it is,” a low voice stated from the open doorway.

Tyler looked around with a laconic smile at his brother Jason. “I don’t waste my time on those kinds of flicks. The real thing is so much more satisfying.”

Wearing an amused grin, Jason leaned against the doorjamb, just as tall, sinewy and muscled as his younger brother, but with a touch more red in his dark hair, and amber instead of gray eyes. Nevertheless, they shared the proud heritage of their father’s mother, Natasha Lightfoot, a full-blooded Papago Indian. Both brothers’ features bore the brand of their Native American ancestry—sharply angled cheek bones, strong aquiline noses, jaws that might have been carved from the hard red sandstone of the sacred plateau north of town.

Jason observed the image flickering on the screen with mock solemnity. “Doesn’t seem to have much of a plot.”

“Not s’posed to,” Tyler drawled, turning back to find a pale oval face on the TV screen. He stared, surprised by what he saw. This one was…different.

The young woman spoke quietly, almost as if afraid someone might hear her. She wasn’t trying to sell herself or flirt with the camera as the others had before her. She appeared not to have worn any makeup at all, but the harsh studio lights might have washed out a light application. No jewelry of any kind was evident at her throat, earlobes, or wrists. If one word described her, it was plain.

Nevertheless, something about the woman pulled at Tyler, held his gaze, captured his attention just as strongly as the others hadn’t.

Jason scowled. “Is this a new technique for interviewing receptionists?”

“Brides.”

His brother’s sudden laughter rocked the room. “Yeah, right.” Jason gasped to catch his breath and wiped at his eyes. “Brides.”

“I’m serious. If I have to marry in less than a year, I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anyone pick out a wife for me.”

“Do you really think Dad’s serious about this?” Jason asked.

“He made clear just how serious over lunch today. Luckily, I had a backup plan ready.”

Jason shook his head. “This isn’t a backup plan—it’s a disaster. You can’t find a wife this way, Ty!”

“Why not?” Tyler demanded stubbornly. He resented anyone telling him how he should live his life, and he made no exception for his brother or cousins, all of whom helped in the family business. “Who makes the rules for wife-choosing? Hell, they wanted you to marry Cara when you got her pregnant, back when you were only twenty years old! I don’t want to end up like—”

Too late, he stopped himself. The final word, you, hung as a silent rebuke in the air between them. He wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t meant to sound so critical, or remind Jason of his ill-fated first marriage.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

Jason waved off his apology.

“Look, I tried to tell Dad I’m not cut out for marriage, but he won’t listen. And I just don’t have time to do this any other way.”

There were many things Tyler felt capable of handling well. He knew how to set a half-ton I-beam ten floors above the desert, how to pour a foundation that wouldn’t crack even in the unforgiving Arizona heat, how to drive a rivet with the best of his crew and how to kiss a woman crazy. But marriage?

Jason seemed less interested in his sibling’s explanations than he was in the petite, nervous creature on the widescreen TV. “Look at her. You’d think the interviewer was a lion about to devour her.”

“She does look about to jump out of her skin,” Tyler admitted. Her eyes were huge and blinked, blinked, blinked…like those of a wild animal startled by headlights. She repeatedly moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. For once the gesture didn’t look contrived or seductive. Nevertheless, Tyler found it appealing, innocently tantalizing. He’d have settled for seeing her jump out of her clothes.

Jason sighed. “I don’t understand why people put themselves through this sort of meat-market inspection. It’s as bad as hanging out in a singles bar.”

“Who knows. Loneliness? A desire to be part of something? A couple…a family.”

But Tyler already had a family—all he’d ever wanted anyway. His brother, niece, parents, grandmother and cousins formed one rowdy, hardworking, competitive, proud clan. He loved them all fiercely. He wasn’t interested in bringing an intruder into their midst, and he didn’t see why his parents had become so insistent that he should.

Amazingly, he still couldn’t take his eyes from the timid woman’s face. “Julie,” he heard the off-screen interviewer ask her, “why did you apply to Soulmate Search?”

She straightened her spine, hitched back her narrow shoulders and lifted her chin to look directly into the camera for the first time. Tyler was certain the effort to make the simple postural adjustments was enormous.

“I want a baby,” she said crisply.

“Oh boy, kiss of death,” Jason muttered.

Tyler slowly shook his head. Someone ought to tell her honesty wouldn’t get her very far in the dating world. She was just making herself sound needy. Needy didn’t turn guys on.

“You mean,” the interviewer suggested, trying to steer her toward a more appealing reply, “you’d like to find your soul mate, someone to share your interests like gourmet cooking and love of children?”

“No,” Julie said slowly, emphasizing each subsequent word as if it contained a message of its own, “all…I…want…is…a…child. Children actually. Three, four…more if my husband wants them. I adore children.”

Tyler wondered if therein lay a hidden meaning. Children were great, but she wasn’t too crazy about grown men?

“I see,” mumbled the interviewer. In the background, pages were being noisily shuffled. She’d put him off his rhythm.

Julie…what was her last name? Tyler glanced at the letter that had accompanied the tapes. Parker. Yes, Julie Ann Parker was just too earnest for this sophisticated matchmaking service with its nationwide offices.

Tyler felt embarrassed for her. He pushed the eject button on the remote. The tape smoothly slid out of the VCR.

“Nice girl,” Jason commented. “Doesn’t have a clue, does she?”

“Huh? Oh, no…” Tyler was still thinking about Julie Parker’s eyes. He couldn’t remember their color—hazel, he thought. A subtle hue not terribly distinctive or memorable. But they displayed a nebulous quality he would very much like to explore in person. And that flick of soft pink tongue every now and then…lordy, what that did to his lower regions.

Maybe he should run the tape again. Just for the heck of it.

“Well, good luck, Romeo,” Jason said cheerfully. “Personally, I think if you stuck with one girlfriend for more than three months, you might find one with long-term potential.”

“It’s not their staying power I worry about.”

Man to man—the universal question. Will one woman ever be enough for me…for the rest of my life?

“Yeah, well.” Jason shrugged. “You never know until the right one comes along. When she’s meant for you, everything falls into place. Look at how Adele has changed my view of marriage.” He broke out in a boyish grin that Tyler envied. What he wouldn’t give to feel that carefree in the middle of all they had been going through in recent weeks.

Tyler changed the subject. “So, what brought you down here this late in the day?” His brother was VP in charge of marketing, and had relatively little to do with the construction end of the business.

Jason’s smile slid away as he moved farther inside his brother’s office and closed the door behind him. “Something you ought to know about before the press catches wind. Link Templeton thinks he’s found evidence that Mike Dodd was…well, that elevator he was on might not have crashed fifteen floors without a little help.”

Only a few weeks ago, a fatal accident at the building site of the Fortune Memorial Children’s Hospital had taken the life of their foreman. When the police didn’t immediately declare Dodd’s death accidental, the Fortunes called in a private investigator to help get to the bottom of the incident quickly and reassure investors.