Chapter One Chapter One

"I've decided to get married."

Julia McCarver looked at her roommate over the heavy black rims of her reading glasses. Liz Costa sat in an overstuffed smoke-blue chair, her tiny feet propped on the bleached-pine coffee table as she painted her toenails an alarming shade of red. She looked as unconcerned as if she had just announced she had decided to eat toast for breakfast.

Absently Julia licked a fingertip and turned the page of her medical journal without looking at it. After a long moment of puzzled silence she said, "But you're not dating anyone."

"A mere formality."

"Kind of a major formality, I'd say."
Liz shook her head, sending her fashionable black bob swinging artfully around the circle of her face.
"There are plenty of men out there. I just have to apply myself." she said, a hint of a Puerto Rican accent flavoring her words like a dash of hot pepper. "The time is right. If I send out the proper signals, the man of my destiny will be drawn to me. I read that in Vogue."

"Yeah, that's where I get all my life's wisdom," Julia drawled, rearranging her long legs on the couch.

"Is that what brought on this sudden change of heart? An article in a fashion magazine? What happened to Liz Costa, liberated independent businesswoman?"

Liz waved a dainty, elegantly manicured hand. "That was in the eighties, the Me Decade. Get with the program, Julia. This is the nineties, the age of New Traditionalism. Romance is in."

"Well, that settles it. We wouldn't want you to be unfashionable."

Liz sat back and wiggled her toes as the doorbell rang. "My polish is wet," she said as Julia unfolded herself from the sofa and headed for the foyer. "I won't come to the door unless it's Kevin Costner."

"It's probably the man of your destiny being drawn to you."

"Could be. I've been sending out signals since Thursday."

Julia trudged up the three steps to the entrance hall and swung the door open. Her heart stopped dead. She stood on the threshold, stunned, clutching the doorknob for support as she stared at the man who had first captured her heart as a teenager, the man who had broken her heart on three separate occasions, the man she had vowed never to let anywhere near her heart again: S. T. Dalton.

She had told herself she would never see him again, that she never wanted to see him again. But there he was, in the flesh, six feet two inches of lean, muscular cowboy with shoulders as wide as the Parthenon. Despite the fact that he had probably made more money than God during his years in football, he still dressed like a ranch hand—battered boots, faded jeans that molded every masculine inch of his lower body, a chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled back. He held a dusty, disreputable-looking black Stetson in one hand as he stood before her, his face set in uncharacteristically stern lines of concentration.

He had aged a bit since she'd last seen him, although he wore the lines beside his eyes and mouth as comfortably as a model wears an Armani suit. At thirty-six he looked as if he was just coming into the prime of desirability. Then again, S.T. had always looked that way—ripe for trouble, impossibly sexy, handsome in a way that had nothing to do with the arrangement of his features. In fact, his cheekbones were a little too high, his chin a little too long, and his nose had been broken at least once, but none of that mattered because he radiated magnetism. He was a natural generator of sex appeal. It thrummed in the air around...