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LATER
     
     
    Ty had nearly forgotten what summer was like in Regret. Hot and dry or pouring rain — there didn’t seem to be any happy medium between the two conditions. He stood on the front porch of the house where he’d grown up and looked down the hill at the tidy streets of Regret, Iowa.
    It was, he admitted grudgingly, a pretty view. One he’d even missed occasionally over the last few years. But just because he’d missed it didn’t mean that he was looking forward to spending his summer looking at it.
    Sighing, he moved down the steps, favoring his left leg. He’d learned the hard way that airplanes and trees were a bad combination. The plane had been repaired inside a week. Unfortunately, his leg was taking a good bit longer than that. Be patient, the doctor had told him. The bones needed time to knit. Plain in the doctor’s tone had been the thought that he was lucky it hadn’t been his neck that was broken.
    Well, he was going to have plenty of time to practice being patient, iy thought sourly. He leaned over the door to put his fishing pole and the basket that held his lunch in the passenger seat of his car. The car, like the fishing, was another consolation for the weeks of boredom that undoubtedly lay ahead.
    His father had presented it to him, saying that he’d need a way to get around. He knew, firsthand, just how hard it was to say no to Helen McKendrick once she had her mind made up. And she’d made up her mind that Ty — her only remaining son, she’d said, her voice breaking — would spend the summer recuperating at home. Otherwise she wouldn’t be able to rest, wondering if he was talcing care of himself. And he’d given in, cursing his weakness even as he heard himself agreeing to stay for the summer.
    The opportunity to have Tyler firmly under her thumb had been so enticing that she’d even decided to cancel their trip to Europe. Which was when his father — God bless him — in a rare display of husbandly authority, had put his foot down. They’d planned to go to Europe and he’d already paid for the their crossing. Tyler was recovering from a broken leg, not a broken back. He didn’t need full-time nursing.
    So it could have been worse, Tyler told himself as he pulled open the driver’s door and stepped up on the running board. He could have been facing the next couple of months with his mother hovering over him. As it was, she was safely — and he hoped happily — on her way across the Atlantic, and he was the owner of a snappy little roadster, courtesy of his father.
    The car wasn’t new but it was a honey. And even if it had been nothing more than a rattletrap, it would still have represented a certain freedom, the illusion that he could leave whenever he wanted, instead of staying out the summer as he knew he would. Not because his leg would take that long to recover, but because he’d promised his mother he would stay.
    He drove past the Vanderbilts‘ — no relation to the Vanderbilts, Edwina Vanderbilt liked to say, giving a coy smile to suggest that there might be a relation but she wasn’t the sort to boast. Edwina and his mother were at once bosom chums and heated competitors in everything from gardening to hairstyles. No doubt Edwina would be keeping a discreet eye on his comings and goings, happy if she could report to his mother that he’d behaved just as he should, even happier if there were a few indiscretions she could pass on.
    Ty was just considering the likelihood of finding an indiscretion to commit and coming to the sad conclusion that, in Regret, indiscretions weren’t as easy to come by as he might have liked, when he saw the girl.
    She was walking down the sidewalk, doing absolutely nothing to draw attention to herself. But with a figure like that, she didn’t have to do anything but just breathe, Ty thought. He whistled softly under his breath, taking in the slender waist and gentle curve of her hips. Her dress was navy with white polka dots. The