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looking around.
    “Your head.” Gabe carried the duffel bag through a frameless opening that had once held a door. “I did the plumbing and electrical first, so there’s hot water and lights. The bathroom’s almost done, and I’ve been working on the kitchen. I figured everything else could wait.”
    “Hot water and food pretty much cover the bases,” Matt agreed. He followed his brother into a small room, which held a narrow bed and a chest of drawers that had definitely seen better days. There were no curtains on the windows, but there was a faded rag rug next to the bed. It was scruffy and probably none too clean. Matt thought he’d never seen anything that looked better.
    “Thanks, Gabe.” Emotion made his voice tight, and he cleared his throat self-consciously. “It looks great.”
    “Don’t thank me. I plan on working your ass off.” Gabe reached out to squeeze his shoulder as he left the room.
    Matt stood in the middle of the dusty, run-down room and let the feeling wash over him. He was home.

Chapter Two
    D ana McKinnon had always known what was expected of her. Her earliest memories were of her mother telling her to smile pretty for the camera. By the time she was ten, she’d lost count of the number of times she’d heard that command. There had been others. Don’t get dirty. Don’t muss your pretty hair. Don’t frown. Don’t run, because you might fall down and scrape your knees. It wasn’t until she was an adult that she’d realized how many “don’ts” there had been in her life. She’d obeyed them all.
    Her mother had been a woman of limited talent and unlimited ambition. In her youngest daughter, she found the means to indulge the latter. Roxanne Andrews was a pleasantly pretty woman, her husband average, and they had two reasonably attractive children. Then, like a genetic miracle, there was Dana, a child of such exquisite beauty that people literally caught their breath when they saw her for the first time.
    Roxanne recognized opportunity when it knocked, and by the time Dana was six months old, her smile wasgracing the label of a new line of baby food. At two she was a print model for an exclusive and very expensive line of children’s clothing. Roxanne’s ambition suffered its first check when it became apparent that no amount of lessons was going to turn Dana into the next Jodie Foster. Abandoning visions of herself wearing Vera Wang and Tiffany while she watched her daughter accept her first Oscar, she turned her ambitions toward more attainable goals—beauty pageants.
    While other little girls were making mud pies and friends, Dana had been learning deportment and modern dance. She was never allowed to run and play for fear a fall might result in a disfiguring scar. Hours were spent sitting in front of a mirror, perfecting a smile that showed just the right amount of teeth. Her life centered around her beauty and her mother’s ambitions.
    She’d known, with the instinctive wisdom of the young, that her mother loved her because she was beautiful, and that Roxanne loved her most when she won a pageant, so Dana worked hard to see that she won every time. She barely knew her siblings, and her father was little more than an indulgent smile and occasional pat on the head. Everything depended on pleasing her mother. And the key to her mother’s love was always looking her best so she could win the ribbons and crowns that meant so much to Roxanne.
    She knew—had always known—that her looks were the one thing she had to offer, so when Reilly McKinnon asked her to marry him, she knew why. He was handsome, successful and charming—the kind of man who could have had any woman. If he’d chosen her, it was because of her looks. She’d accepted that without resentment, because she’d fallen head over heels in love withhim. And, for the first time in her life, her beauty was going to get her something she wanted.
    Wasn’t there some irritating Oriental proverb about being careful