A Cowboy's Wish Upon A Star
Caro Carson
From Hollywood . . .A cattle ranch is the perfect place for movie star Sophia Jackson to escape her scandalous past and the paparazzi hot on her trail. But foreman Travis Palmer makes it clear who’s running the ranch. When their constant clashing ignites unexpected attraction, Sophia takes on her greatest acting role: Pretending she isn’t falling for the sexy, domineering cowboy.…to MotherhoodOnce Travis sweeps her into his arms at her sister’s wedding, she knows the feeling’s mutual. But a precious secret followed Sophia west. And now a Hollywood hurricane is about to blow through Travis’s peaceful Texas town. Is the mother-to-be ready to fight for her future and see her most passionate Christmas wish granted: she and Travis vowing to love each other forever?
From Hollywood…
A cattle ranch is the perfect place for movie star Sophia Jackson to escape her scandalous past and the paparazzi hot on her trail. But foreman Travis Palmer makes it clear who’s running the ranch. When their constant clashing ignites unexpected attraction, Sophia takes on her greatest acting role: pretending she isn’t falling for the sexy, domineering cowboy.
…to Motherhood
Once Travis sweeps her into his arms at her sister’s wedding, she knows the feeling’s mutual. But a precious secret followed Sophia west. And now a Hollywood hurricane is about to blow through Travis’s peaceful Texas town. Is the mother-to-be ready to fight for her future and see her most passionate Christmas wish granted—she and Travis vowing to love each other forever?
“You have to get the groceries for me.”
“Nope. It’s May.” He stuck his hat on, so his hands were free to pick up his second boot and shake the cell phone out of it.
“It’s May? What kind of answer is that? Do you fast in May or do a colon cleanse or something?”
He looked up at her joke, but his grin died before it started. Judging by the look on her face, she wasn’t joking. “The River Mack rounds up in May.”
She looked at him, waiting. He realized a woman from Hollywood probably had no idea what that meant.
“We’re busy. We’re branding. We have to keep an eye on the late calving, the bulls—”
He stopped himself. He wasn’t going to explain the rest. Managing a herd was a constant, complex operation.
Sophia flapped one hand toward the kitchen behind her. “I have nothing to eat. You have to help me.”
He stomped into his second boot. “Not unless you’re a pregnant or nursing cow.”
At her gasp, he did laugh. “I keep every beast on this ranch fed, but you, ma’am, are not a beast. You’re a movie star, a woman who can take care of herself, and you’re not my problem.”
She looked absolutely stricken. Had he been so harsh? “Listen, if I’m going toward town, I don’t mind picking you up a gallon of milk. That’s just common courtesy. I expect you to do the same for me.”
“I can’t leave the ranch.”
“Neither can I. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a barn full of animals to feed before I can feed myself.”
* * *
TEXAS RESCUE: Rescuing hearts… one Texan at a time!
A Cowboy’s Wish Upon a Star
Caro Carson
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Despite a no-nonsense background as a West Point graduate and US Army officer, CARO CARSON has always treasured the happily-ever-after of a good romance novel. Now Caro is delighted to be living her own happily-ever-after with her husband and two children in the great state of Florida, a location that has saved the coaster-loving theme-park fanatic a fortune on plane tickets.
This book is dedicated to You,
the reader who
spent time to meet me at the book signing,
or spent time to send me the note to say
you love the love stories that
I spent time to write.
Thank you.
Contents
Cover (#u32b1c7c2-bd28-538f-aba0-caa50eadf0b0)
Back Cover Text (#u18d4a480-89fc-5e49-83ec-c3a8c4c29e89)
Introduction (#u4fc11743-b823-55d4-a754-422419840551)
Title Page (#ub5f49d1e-f073-5e11-998b-53c274d0e856)
About the Author (#u1a43d288-1a9c-52d3-8909-3aff035118ad)
Dedication (#u49b6c480-aa3e-5eb5-b08d-dc7e73498f03)
Chapter One (#udb7d3afe-d054-5617-9f80-ddb1fa7a17f9)
Chapter Two (#u715a4dc0-6b00-5505-9fdb-df585556a4e2)
Chapter Three (#u8467cc3f-d5d8-5e24-9ca6-4261fe76aadf)
Chapter Four (#u2a31cb70-3286-53e5-a913-1605564ae2a8)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#u22144fd9-9111-5272-83b3-d3ba8f12f47d)
It was the end of the world.
Sophia Jackson strained to see something, anything that looked like civilization, but the desolate landscape was no more than brown dirt and scrubby bits of green plants that stretched all the way to the horizon.
She might have been in one of her own movies.
The one that had garnered an Academy Award nomination for her role as a dying frontier woman had been filmed in Mexico, but this part of Texas looked close enough. The one that had made her an overnight success as a Golden Globe winner for her portrayal of a doomed woman in a faraway galaxy had been filmed in Italy, but again, this landscape was eerily similar.
Doomed. Dying. Isolated.
She’d channeled those emotions before. This time, however, no one was going to yell cut. No one was going to hand her a gold statue.
“Are we there yet?” She sounded demanding, just like the junior officer thrust into a leadership role on a space colony.
Well, not really. She had the ear of an actor; she could catch nuance in tone and delivery, even in—or especially in—her own voice. She didn’t sound like a commander. She sounded like a diva.
I have the right to be a diva. I’ve got the gold statue to prove it.
She tossed her hair back with a jingle of her chandelier earrings, queen of the backseat of the car.
In the front bucket seats, her sister’s fiancé continued to drive down the endless road in silence, but Sophia caught the quick glance he shared with her sister. The two of them didn’t think she was a young military officer. They didn’t even think of her as a diva.
She was an annoying, spoiled brat who was going to be dropped off in the middle of abso-freaking-lutely nowhere.
Her sister, Grace, reached back between the seats to pat her on the knee. “I haven’t been here before, either, but it can’t be too much farther. Isn’t it perfect, though? The paparazzi will never find you out here. This is just what we were hoping for.”
Sophia looked at Grace’s hand as it patted the black leather which covered her knee. Grace’s engagement ring was impossible to miss. Her sister had been her rock, her constant companion, until very recently. Now, wearing a different kind of rock on her left hand, Grace was giddy at the prospect of marrying the man who’d encouraged her to dump her own sister.
Sophia mentally stuck out her tongue at the back of the man’s head. Her future brother-in-law was a stupid doctor named Alex, and he’d never once been impressed with Sophia Jackson, movie star. Since the day Sophia and Grace had arrived in Texas, he’d only paid attention to Grace.
Grace’s hand moved from Sophia’s knee to Alex’s shoulder. Then to the back of his neck. The diamond played peek-a-boo as her sister slid her hand through her fiancé’s dark hair.
Sophia looked away, out the side window to the desolate horizon. The nausea was rising, so she chomped on her chewing gum. Loudly. With no class. No elegance. None of the grace that the world had once expected of the talented Sophia Jackson.
Pun intended. I have no Grace, not anymore.
Grace didn’t correct her gum-smacking. Grace no longer cared enough to correct her.
Sophia was on her own. She’d have to survive the rest of her nine-month sentence all by herself, hiding from the world. In the end, all she’d have to show for it would be a flabby stomach and stretch marks. Like a teenager in the last century, she was pregnant and ashamed, terrified of being exposed. She had to be sent to the country to hide until she could have the baby, give it up for adoption, and then return to the world and spend the rest of her life pretending nothing had ever happened.
If she had a world to return to. That was a very big if.
No one in Hollywood would work with her. It had nothing to do with the pregnancy. No one knew about that, and she wasn’t far enough along to even begin to show. No, the world of movie stardom was boxing her out solely because of her reputation.
A box office giant, an actor whom Sophia had always dreamed of working with, had recently informed a major studio he would not do the picture if she were cast opposite him. Her reputation had sunk that low. They said there was no such thing as bad publicity, but the publicity she’d been generating had hurt her. Her publicist and her agent had each informed her that she was unmarketable as is.
Ex-publicist. Ex-agent. They both left me.
Panic crawled up the back of her throat. They were all leaving her. Publicist, agent, that louse of a slimy boyfriend she’d been stupid enough to run away with. And worst of all, within the next few minutes, her sister. She was losing the best personal assistant in the world, right when she needed a personal assistant the most.
There was no such thing as loyalty in Hollywood. Not even her closest blood relative was standing by her side. Nausea turned to knots.
“Oh, my goodness,” her sister laughed. The tone was one of happy, happy surprise.
Alex’s laugh was masculine, amused. “Just in case you needed a reminder that you’re in the middle of a genuine Texas cattle ranch...”
He brought their car to a stop—as if he had a choice. The view through the windshield was now the bulky brown back of a giant steer. A thousand pounds of animal blocked their way, just standing there on the road they needed to use, the road that would lead them to an empty ranch house where Sophia would be abandoned, alone, left behind.
Knots turned to panic. She needed to get this over with. Her world was going to end, and she couldn’t drag this out one second longer.
Let’s rip this bandage off.
“Move, you stupid cow!” she hollered from the backseat.
“Sophia, that’s not going to help.”
But Sophia had already half vaulted over Alex’s shoulder and slammed her palm on the car horn. “Get out of the road.”
The cow stared at her through the glass, unmoving. God above, she was tired of being stared at. Everyone was always waiting for her to do something, to be crazy or brilliant, to act out every emotion while they watched passively. Grace was staring at her now, shaking her head.
“Move!” Sophia laid on the horn again.
“Stop it.” Alex firmly took her arm and pushed her toward the backseat. His stare was more of a glare.
He and Grace both turned back toward the front. Sophia had spoiled their little delight at a cow in the road, at this unexpected interlude in their sweet, shared day.
I can’t stand it, I can’t stand myself, I can’t stand this one more minute.
She yanked on the door handle and shoved the door open.
“Sophia! Stay in the car.” Grace sounded equal parts exasperated and fearful.
Sophia was beyond fear. Panic, nausea, knots—a terrible need to get this over with. Once the ax fell, once she was cut off from the last remnants of her life, she could fall apart. She wanted nothing more than to fall apart, and this stupid cow was preventing it.
She slammed the car door and waved her arms over her head, advancing on the cow. Or maybe it was a bull. It had short horns. Whatever it was, it flinched.
Emboldened—or just plain crazy, like they all said—Sophia waved her arms over her head some more and advanced toward the stupid, stationary cow. The May weather was warm on the bare skin of her midriff as her crop top rose higher with each wave of her arms. On her second step, she nearly went down as her ankle twisted, the spike heel of her over-the-knee boot threatening to sink into the brown Texas dirt.
“Move, do you hear me? Move.” She gestured wide to the vast land all around them. “Anywhere. Anywhere but right here.”
The cow snorted at her. Chewed something. Didn’t care about her, didn’t care about her at all.
Tears were spilling over her cheeks, Sophia realized suddenly. Her ankle hurt, her heart hurt, her stomach hurt. The cow looked away, not interested in the least. Being ignored was worse than being stared at. The beast was massive, far stockier than the horses she’d worked with on the set as a dying frontier woman. She shoved at the beast’s shoulder anyway.
“Just move!” Its hide was coarse and dusty. She shoved harder, accomplishing nothing, feeling her own insignificance. She might as well not exist. No career, no sister, no friends, no life.
She collapsed on the thick, warm neck of the uncaring cow, and let the tears flow.
* * *
Someone on the ranch was in trouble.
Travis Chalmers tossed his pliers into the leather saddlebag and gave the barb wire one last tug. Fixed.
He scooped up his horse’s trailing reins in one hand, smashed his cowboy hat more firmly over his brow, and swung into the saddle. That car horn meant something else needed fixing, and now. He only hoped one of his men hadn’t been injured.
The car horn sounded again. Travis kicked the horse into a gallop, heading in the direction of the sound. It didn’t sound like one of the ranch trucks’ horns. A visitor, then, who could be lost, out of gas, stranded by a flat tire—simple fixes.
He kept his seat easily and let the horse have her head. Whatever the situation was, he’d handle it. He was young for a foreman, just past thirty, but he’d been ranching since the day he was born, seemed like. Nothing that happened on a cattle operation came as a surprise to him.
He rode up the low rise toward the road, and the cause of the commotion came into view. A heifer was standing in the road, blocking the path of a sports car that clearly wouldn’t be able to handle any off-road terrain, so it couldn’t go around the animal. That the animal was on the road wasn’t a surprise; Travis had just repaired a gap in the barb wire fence. But leaning on the heifer, her back to him, was a woman.
What a woman, with long hair flowing perfectly down her back, her body lean and toned, her backside curvy—all easy to see because any skin that wasn’t bared to the sun and sky was encased in tight black clothing. But it was her long legs in thigh-high boots that made him slow his horse in a moment of stunned confusion.
She had to be a mirage. No woman actually wore thigh-high leather boots with heels that high. Those boots sent sexual signals that triggered every adolescent memory of a comic book heroine. Half-naked, high-heeled—a character drawn to appeal to the most primal part of a man’s mind.
Not much on a cattle ranch could surprise him, except seeing that in the middle of the road.
The horse continued toward the heifer, its focus absolute. So was Travis’s. He couldn’t take his eyes off the woman as he rode toward her.
She lifted her head and turned his way. With a dash of her cheek against her black-clad shoulder, she turned all the way around and leaned against the animal, stretching her arms along its back like it was her sofa. As the wind blew her hair back from her face, silver and gold shining in the sun, she held her pose and watched him come for her.
Boots, bare skin, black leather—they messed with his brain, until the car door opened and the driver began to get out, a man. Then the passenger door opened, too, and the heifer swung her head, catching the smell of horse and humans on the wind. The rancher in him pushed aside the adolescent male, and he returned his horse to a quicker lope with a tch and a press of his thigh.
That heifer wasn’t harmless. Let her get nervous, and a half ton of beef on the hoof could do real harm to the humans crowding her, including the sex goddess in boots.
“Afternoon, folks.” Travis took in the other two at a glance. Worried woman, irritated man. He didn’t look at the goddess as he stopped near the strange little grouping. His heart had kicked into a higher gear at the sight of her, something the sound of the horn and the short gallop had not done. It was damned disconcerting. Everything about her was disconcerting. “Stay behind those doors, if you don’t mind.”
“Sophia, it’s time to get back in the car now,” the man said, exaggeratedly patient and concerned, as if he were talking a jumper off a ledge.
“No.”
“Oh, Sophie.” The woman gave the smallest shake of her head, her eyes sad. Apparently, this Sophie had disappointed her before.
Sophie. Sophia. He looked at her again. Sophia Jackson, of course. Unmistakable. A movie star on his ranch, resting against his heifer, a scenario so bizarre his brain had to work to believe his eyes.
She hadn’t taken her blue eyes off him, but she’d raised her chin in challenge. The no was meant for him, was it?
“Walk away,” he said mildly, keeping his voice even for the heifer’s benefit—and hers. “I’ll get this heifer on her way so you can get on yours.”
“No. She likes me.” Sophia’s long, elegant fingers stroked the roan hide of the cattle.
“Is that right?” He reached back to grab his lasso and held the loops in one hand.
“My cow doesn’t want to leave me. She’s loyal and true.”
It was an absurd thing to say. Travis didn’t have time for absurd.
“Watch your toes.” He rode forward, crowding the heifer, crowding Sophia Jackson, and slapped the heifer on the hindquarters with the coiled rope. She briskly left the road.
Sophia Jackson looked a little smaller and a lot sillier, standing in the road by herself. He looked down at her famous face as she watched the heifer leave. She actually looked sad, like she didn’t want the heifer to go, which was as absurd as everything else about the situation.
Travis wheeled his horse away from Sophia in order to talk to the driver.
“Where are you heading?”
“Thanks for moving that animal. I’m Alex Gregory. This is my fiancée, Grace.”
Travis waited, but the man didn’t introduce the woman in boots. He guessed he was supposed to recognize her. He did. Still, it seemed rude to leave her out.
“Travis Chalmers.” He touched the brim of his hat and nodded at the worried woman, then twisted halfway around in his saddle to touch his hat and nod again at the movie star in their midst.
“Chalmers, the foreman?” asked the man, Alex. “Good to meet you. The MacDowells told me they’d explained the situation to you.”
Not exactly.
Travis hooked his lasso onto the saddle horn. “You’re the one who’s gonna live in Marion MacDowell’s house for a few months?”
“No, not us. Her. Sophia is my fiancée’s sister. She needs a place to hide.”
He raised a brow at the word. “Hide from what?”
“Paparazzi,” Grace answered. “It’s been a real issue after the whole debacle with the—well, it’s always an issue. But Sophie needs some time to...to...” She smiled with kindness and pity at her sister. “She needs some time.”
Sophie stalked around the car on spiked heels, looking like a warrior queen who could kick some serious butt, but instead she got in the backseat and slammed the door.
“Time and privacy,” Alex added. “The MacDowells assured us your discretion wouldn’t be an issue.”
His mare shifted under him and blew an impatient breath through her nose.
“Should we go to the house and have this discussion there?” Grace asked.
Travis kept an eye on the heifer that was ambling away. “I’m gonna have to round up that heifer and put her back on the right side of the fence. Got to check on the branding after that, but I’ll be back at sundown. I go past the main house on the way to my place. I’ll stop in.”
“We weren’t planning to stay all day.” The woman threw a look of dismay to her fiancé.
They couldn’t expect him to quit working in the middle of the day and go sit in a house to chat. He ran the River Mack ranch, and that meant he worked even longer hours than he expected from his ranch hands.
Heifers that wandered through broken fences couldn’t be put off until tomorrow. May was one of the busiest months of the year, between the last of the calving and the bulk of the branding. Travis hadn’t planned on spending any time whatsoever talking to whomever the MacDowells were loaning their house, but obviously, there was more to the situation than the average houseguest.
“All right, then. Let’s talk.” He swung himself off the horse, a concession to let them know they had his time and attention. Besides, if he stayed on horseback, he couldn’t see Sophia in the car. It felt like he needed to keep an eye on her, the same as he needed to do with the wandering heifer.
On the ground, he still couldn’t see much through the windshield. He caught a glimpse of black leather, her hands resting on her knees. Her hands were clenched into fists.
Travis shook his head. She was a woman on edge.
“Sophia just needs to be left alone,” her sister said.
“I can do that.” He had no intention of staying in the vicinity of someone as disturbing to his peace of mind as that woman.
“If men with cameras start snooping around, please, tell them nothing. Don’t even deny she’s here.”
“Ma’am, if men with cameras come snooping around this ranch, I will be escorting them off the property.”
“Oh, really? You can do that?” She seemed relieved—amazed and relieved.
What did these people expect? He took his hat off and ran his hand through his hair before shoving the hat right back on again. His hair was getting too long, but no cowboy had time in May to go into town and see a barber.
“We don’t tolerate trespassers,” he explained to the people who clearly lived in town. “I’m not in the business of distinguishing between cameramen and cattle thieves. If you don’t belong here, you will be escorted off the land.”
“The paparazzi will offer you money, though. Thousands.”
Before Travis could set her straight on this insinuation that he could be bribed to betray a guest of the MacDowells, Alex cut in. “That’s only if they find her. We’ve gone to great lengths to arrange this location. We took away her cell phone so that she wouldn’t accidentally store a photo in the cloud with a location stamp. Hackers get paid to look for things like that. That’s how extreme the hunting for her can be.”
“She’s got a burner phone for emergencies,” Grace said. “But if you could check on her...?”
Travis was aware that the front doors to the car were wide open, man and woman each standing beside one. Surely, the subject of this conversation could hear every word. It seemed rude to talk about her as if she weren’t there.
“If she wants me to check on her, I will. If she wants me to leave her alone, I will.”
He looked through the windshield again. The fists had disappeared. One leather-clad knee was being bounced, jittery, impatient.
“How many other people work on this ranch?” the man asked.
“Will they leave my sister alone?” the woman asked.
Travis was feeling impatient himself. This whole conversation was moving as far from his realm of normal as the woman hiding in the car was.
That was what she was doing in there. Rather than being part of a conversation about herself, she was hiding. This was all a lot of nonsense in the middle of branding season, but from long habit developed by working with animals, Travis forced himself to stand calmly, keep the reins loose in his hands, and not show his irritation. These people were strangers in the middle of the road, and Travis owed them nothing.
“I’m not in the habit of discussing the ranch’s staffing requirements with strangers.”
The man nodded once. He got it. The woman bit her lip, and Travis understood she was worried about more than herself.
“But since this is your sister, I’ll tell you the amount of ranch hands living in the bunkhouse varies depending on the season. None of us are in the habit of going to the main house to introduce ourselves to Mrs. MacDowell’s houseguests.” Travis spoke clearly, to be sure the woman in the car heard him. “If your sister doesn’t want to be seen, then I suggest she stop standing in the middle of an open pasture and hugging my livestock.”
The black boot stopped bouncing.
Grace dipped her chin to hide her smile, looking as pretty as her movie star sister—minus the blatant sexuality.
“Now if you folks would like to head on to the house, I’ve got to be going.”
“Thank you,” Grace said, but the worry returned to her expression. “If you could check on her, though, yourself? She’s more fragile than she looks. She’s got a lot of decisions weighing her down. This is a very delicate situa—”
The car horn ripped through the air. Travis nearly lost the reins as his mare instinctively made to bolt without him. Goddammit.
No sooner had he gotten his horse’s head under control than the horn blasted again. He whipped his own head around toward the car, glaring at the two adults who were still standing there. For God’s sake, did they have to be told to shut her up?
“Tell her to stop.”
“Like that’ll do any good.” But the man bent to look into the car. “Enough, Sophie.”
“Sophie, please...”
One more short honk. Thank God his horse trusted him, because the mare barely flinched this time, but it was the last straw for Travis. Reins in hand, he stalked past the man and yanked open the rear door.
Since she’d been leaning forward to reach the car horn, Sophia’s black-clad backside was the first thing he saw, but she quickly turned toward him, keeping her arm stretched toward the steering wheel.
“Don’t do that again.”
“Quit standing around talking about me. This is a waste of time. I want to get to the house. Now.” She honked the horn again, staring right at him as she did it.
“What the hell is wrong with you? I just said don’t do that.”
“Or else what?”
She glared at him like a warrior, but she had the attitude of a kindergartner.
“Every time you honk that horn, another cowboy on this ranch drops what he’s doing to come and see if you need help. It’s not a game. It’s a call for help.”
She blinked. Clearly, she hadn’t thought of that, but then she narrowed her eyes and reached once more for the steering wheel.
“You honk that horn again, and you will very shortly find the road blocked by men on horses, and we will not move until you turn the car around and take yourself right back to wherever it is you came from.”
Her hand hovered over the steering wheel.
“Do it,” he said. “Frighten my horse one more time. You will never set foot on this ranch again.”
Her hand hovered. He stared her down, waiting, almost willing her to test him. He would welcome a chance to remove her from the ranch, and he wasn’t a man to make empty threats.
“I don’t want to be here, anyway,” she said.
He jerked his head toward the steering wheel. “You know how to drive, don’t you? Turn the car around then, instead of honking that damned horn.”
The silence stretched between them.
Her sister had leaned into the car, so she spoke very softly. “Sophie, you’ve got nowhere else to go. You cannot live with me and Alex.”
Travis saw it then. Saw the way the light in Sophia’s eyes died a little, saw the way her breath left her lips. He saw her pain, and he was sorry for it.
She sagged back into her seat, burying her backside along with the rest of her body in the corner. She crossed her arms over her middle, not looking at her sister, not looking at him. “Well, God forbid I should piss off a horse.”
Travis stood and shut the door. He scanned the pasture, spotted the heifer twice as far away as she’d been a minute ago. Those young ones had a sixth sense about getting rounded up, sometimes. If they didn’t want to be penned in, they were twice as hard to catch.
Didn’t matter. Travis hadn’t met one yet that could outsmart or outrun him.
He had a heifer to catch, branding to oversee, a ranch to run. By the time the sun went down, he’d want nothing more than a hot shower and a flat surface to sleep on.
But tonight, he’d stop by the main house and check on a movie star—a sad, angry movie star who had nowhere else to go, no other family to take her in. Nowhere except his ranch.
With a nod at the sister and her fiancé, Travis swung himself back into the saddle. The heifer had given up all pretense at grazing and was determinedly trotting toward the horizon, putting distance between herself and the humans.
Travis would have sighed, if cowboys sighed. Instead, he spoke to his horse under his breath. “You ready for this?”
He pointed the mare toward the heifer and sent her into motion with a squeeze of his thigh. They had a long, hard ride ahead.
Chapter Two (#u22144fd9-9111-5272-83b3-d3ba8f12f47d)
She was alone.
She was alone, and she was going to die, because Grace and Alex had left her, and even though Alex had flipped a bunch of fuses and turned on the electricity, and even though Grace had carried in two bags of groceries from the car and set them on the blue-tiled kitchen counter, Sophia’s only family had abandoned her before anyone realized the refrigerator was broken, and now the food was going to spoil and they wouldn’t be back to check on her for a week and by then she’d be dead from starvation, her body on the kitchen floor, her eyes staring sightlessly at the wallpaper border with its white geese repeated ad nauseam on a dull blue background.
Last year, she’d worn Givenchy as she made her acceptance speech.
I hate my life.
Sophia sat at the kitchen table in a hard chair and cried. No one yelled cut, so she continued the scene, putting her elbows on the table and dropping her head in her hands.
I hate myself for letting this become my life.
Was that what Grace and Alex wanted her to come to grips with? That she’d messed up her own life?
Well, duh, I’m not a moron. I know exactly why my career is circling the drain in a slow death spiral.
Because no one wanted to work with her. And no one wanted to work with her because no one liked her ex, DJ Deezee Kalm.
Kalm was something of an ironic name for the jerk. Deezee had brought nothing but chaos into her life since she’d met him...wow, only five months ago?
Five months ago, Sophia Jackson had been the Next Big Thing. No longer had she needed to beg for a chance to audition for secondary characters. Scripts from the biggest and the best were being delivered to her door by courier, with affectionate little notes suggesting the main character would fit her perfectly.
Sophia and her sister—her loyal, faithful assistant—had deserved a chance to celebrate. After ten long years of hard work, Sophia’s dreams were coming true, but if she was being honest with herself—and isn’t that what this time alone is supposed to be about? Being honest with myself?—well, to be honest, she might have acted elated, but she’d been exhausted.
A week in Telluride, a tiny mining town that was now a millionaires’ playground in the Rocky Mountains, had seemed like a great escape. For one little week, she wouldn’t worry about the future impact of her every decision. Sophia would be seen, but maybe she wouldn’t be stared at among the rich and famous.
But DJ Deezee Kalm had noticed her. Sophia had been a sucker for his lies, and now she couldn’t be seen by anyone at all for the next nine months. Here she was, alone with her thoughts and some rapidly thawing organic frozen meals, the kind decorated with chia seeds and labeled with exotic names from India.
There you go. I fell for a jerk, and now I hate my life. Reflection complete.
She couldn’t dwell on Deezee, not without wanting to throw something. If she chucked the goose-shaped salt shaker against the wall, she’d probably never be able to replace the 1980s ceramic. That was the last thing she needed: the guilt of destroying some widow’s hideous salt shaker.
She stood with the vague idea that she ought to do something about the paper bags lined up on the counter, but her painful ankle made fresh tears sting her eyes. She’d twisted it pretty hard in the dirt road when she’d confronted that cow, although she’d told Alex the Stupid Doctor that she hadn’t. She sat down again and began unzipping the boots to free her toes from their spike-heeled torture.
That cow in the road...she hoped it had given that cowboy a run for his money. She hoped it was still outrunning him right this second, Mr. Don’t-Honk-That-Horn-or-Else. Now that she thought about it, he’d had perfect control of his horse as he’d galloped away from them like friggin’ Indiana Jones in a Spielberg film, so he’d lied to her about the horn upsetting his horse. Liar, liar. Typical man.
Don’t trust men. Lesson learned. Can I go back to LA now?
But no. She couldn’t. She was stuck here in Texas, where Grace had dragged her to make an appearance on behalf of the Texas Rescue and Relief organization. Her sister had hoped charity work and good deeds could repair the damage Sophia had done to her reputation. Instead, in the middle of just such a big charity event, Deezee had shown up and publicly begged Sophia to take him back. Sophia had been a sucker again. With cameras dogging their every move, she’d run away to a Caribbean island with him, an elopement that had turned out to be a big joke.
Ha, ha, ha.
Here’s something funny, Deezee. When I peed on a plastic stick, a little plus sign showed up.
Sophia had returned from St. Barth to find her sister engaged to a doctor with Texas Rescue, a man who, unlike Deezee, seemed to take that engagement seriously. Now her sister never wanted to go back to LA with her, because Alex had her totally believing in fairy tale love. Grace believed Texas would be good for Sophia, too. Living here would give her a chance to rest and relax.
Right. Because of that little plus sign, Grace thought Sophia needed some stress-free alone time to decide what she wanted to do with her future, as if Sophia had done anything except worry about both of their futures for the past ten years. Didn’t Grace know Sophia was sick of worrying about the future?
Barefooted, Sophia went to the paper bags and pulled out all the cold and wet items and stuck them in the sink. They’d already started sweating on the tiled countertop. She dried her cheek on her shoulder and faced the fridge.
It had been deliberately turned off by the owner, a woman who didn’t want to stay in Texas and relax in her own home now that her kids were grown and married. Before abandoning her house to spend a year volunteering for a medical mission in Africa, Mrs. MacDowell had inserted little plastic wedges to keep the doors open so the refrigerator wouldn’t get moldy and funky while it was unused.
Sophia was going to be moldy and funky by the time they found her starved body next week. She had a phone for emergencies; she used it.
“Grace? It’s me. Alex didn’t turn the refrigerator on.” Sophia felt betrayed. Her voice only sounded bitchy.
“Sophie, sweetie, that’s not an emergency.” Grace spoke gently, like someone chiding a child and trying to encourage her at the same time. “You can handle that. You know how to flip a switch in a fuse box.”
“I don’t even know where the fuse box is.”
Grace sighed, and Sophia heard her exchange a few words with Alex. “It’s in the hall closet. I’ve gotta run now. Bye.”
“Wait! Just hang on the line with me while I find the fuse box. What if the fuse doesn’t fix it?”
“I don’t know. Then you’ll have to call a repairman, I guess.”
“Call a repairman?” Sophia was aghast. “Where would I even find a repairman?”
“There’s a phone on the wall in the kitchen. Mrs. MacDowell has a phone book sitting on the little stand underneath it.”
Sophia looked around the 1980s time capsule of a kitchen. Sure enough, mounted on the wall was a phone, one with a handset and a curly cord hanging down. It was not decorated with a goose, but it was white, to fit in the decor.
“Ohmigod, that’s an antique.”
“I made sure it works. It’s a lot harder for paparazzi to tap an actual phone line than it would be for them to use a scanner to listen in to this phone call. You can call a repairman.”
Sophia clenched her jaw against that lecturing tone. From the day her little sister had graduated from high school, Sophia had paid her to take care of details like this, treating her like a star’s personal assistant long before Sophia had been a star. Now Grace had decided to dump her.
“And how am I supposed to pay for a repairman?”
“You have a credit card. We put it in my name, but it’s yours.” Grace sounded almost sad. Pitying her, actually, with just a touch of impatience in her tone.
Sophia felt her sister slipping away. “I can say my name is Grace, but I can’t change my face. How am I supposed to stay anonymous if a repairman shows up at the door?”
“I don’t know, Sophie. Throw a dish towel over your head or something.”
“You don’t care about me anymore.” Her voice should have broken in the middle of that sentence, because her heart was breaking, but the actor inside knew the line had been delivered in a continuous whine.
“I love you, Sophie. You’ll figure something out. You’re super smart. You took care of me for years. This will be a piece of cake for you.”
A piece of cake. That tone of voice...
Oh, God, her sister sounded just like their mother. Ten years ago, Mom and Dad had been yanked away from them forever, killed in a pointless car accident. At nineteen, Sophia had become the legal guardian of Grace, who’d still had two years of high school left to go.
Nothing had been a piece of cake. Sophia had quit college and moved back home so that Grace could finish high school in their hometown. Sophia had needed to make the life insurance last, paying the mortgage with it during Grace’s junior and senior years. She’d tried to supplement it with modeling jobs, but anything local only paid a pittance. For fifty dollars, she’d spent six hours gesturing toward a mattress with a smile on her face.
It had really been her first acting job, because during the entire photo shoot, she’d had to act like she wasn’t mourning the theater scholarship at UCLA that she’d sacrificed. With a little sister to raise, making a mattress look desirable was as close as Sophia could come to show business.
That first modeling job had been a success, eventually used nationwide, but Sophia hadn’t been paid one penny more. Her flat fifty-dollar fee had been spent on gas and groceries that same day. Grace had to be driven to school. Grace had to eat lunch in the cafeteria.
Now Grace was embarking on her own happy life and leaving Sophia behind. It just seemed extra cruel that Grace would sound like Mom at this point.
“I have to run,” her mother’s voice said. “I love you, Sophie. You can do this. Bye.”
Don’t leave me. Don’t ever leave me. I miss you.
The phone was silent.
This afternoon, Sophia had only wanted to hide away and fall apart in private. Now, she was terrified to. If she started crying again, she would never, ever stop.
She nearly ran to the hall closet and pushed aside the old coats and jackets to find the fuse box. They were all on, a neat row of black switches all pointing to the left. She flicked a few to the right, then left again. Then a few more. If she reset every one, then she would have to hit the one that worked the refrigerator.
It made no difference. The refrigerator was still dead when she returned to the kitchen. The food was still thawing in the sink. Her life still sucked, only worse now, because now she missed her mother all over again. Grace sounded like Mom, and she’d left her like Mom. At least when Mom had died, she’d left the refrigerator running.
What a terrible thing to think. Dear God, she hated herself.
Then she laughed at the incredible low her self-pity could reach.
Then she cried.
Just as she’d known it would, once the crying started, it did not stop.
I’m pregnant and I’m scared and I want my mother.
Sophia sank to the kitchen floor, hugged her knees to her chest, and gave up.
* * *
Would he or wouldn’t he?
Travis rode slowly, letting his mare cool down on her way to the barn while he debated with himself whether or not he’d told the sister he would check on the movie star tonight, specifically, or just check on her in general. He was bone-tired and hungry, but he had almost another mile to go before he could rest. Half a mile to the barn, quarter of a mile past that to his house. A movie star with an attitude was the last thing he wanted to deal with. Tomorrow would be soon enough to be neighborly and ask how she was settling in.
The MacDowell house, or just the house, as everyone on a ranch traditionally called the owner’s residence, was closer to the barn than his own. As the mare walked on, the house’s white porch pillars came into view, always a pretty sight. The sunset tinted the sky pink and orange behind it. Mesquite trees were spaced evenly around it. The lights were on; Sophia Jackson was home.
Then the lights went out.
On again.
What the hell?
Lights started turning off and on, in an orderly manner, left to right across the building. Travis had been in the house often enough that he knew which window was the living room. Off, on. The dining room. The foyer.
The mare chomped at her bit impatiently, picking up on his change in mood.
“Yeah, girl. Go on.” He let the horse pick up her pace. Normally, he’d never let a horse hurry back to the barn; that was just sure to start a bad habit. But everything on the River Mack was his responsibility, including the house with its blinking lights, and its new resident.
The lights came on and stayed on as he rode steadily toward the movie star that he was going to check on tonight, after all.
Chapter Three (#u22144fd9-9111-5272-83b3-d3ba8f12f47d)
Travis couldn’t ride his horse up to the front door and leave her on the porch. There was a hitching post on the side that faced the barn, so he rode around the house toward the back. The kitchen door was the one everyone used, anyway.
The first year he’d landed a job here as a ranch hand, he’d learned real quick to leave the barn through the door that faced the house. Mrs. MacDowell was as likely as not to open her kitchen door and call over passing ranch hands to see if they’d help her finish off something she’d baked. She was forever baking Bundt cakes and what not, then insisting she couldn’t eat them before they went stale. Since her sons had all gone off to medical school to become doctors, Travis suspected she just didn’t know how to stop feeding young men. As a twenty-five-year-old living in the bunkhouse on canned pork-n-beans, he’d been happy to help her not let anything get stale.
Travis grinned at the memory. From the vantage point of his horse’s back, he looked down into the kitchen as he passed its window and saw another woman there. Blond hair, black clothes...curled up on the floor. Weeping.
“Whoa,” he said softly, and the mare stopped.
He could tell in a glance Sophia Jackson wasn’t hurt, the same way he could tell in a glance if a cowboy who’d been thrown from a horse was hurt. She could obviously breathe if she could cry. She was hugging her knees to her chest in a way that proved she didn’t have any broken bones. As he watched, she shook that silver and gold hair back and got to her feet, her back to him. She could move just fine. There was nothing he needed to fix.
She was emotional, but Travis couldn’t fix that. There wasn’t a lot of weeping on a cattle ranch. If a youngster got homesick out on a roundup or a heartbroken cowboy shed a tear over a Dear John letter after a mail call, Travis generally kept an eye on them from a distance. Once they’d regained their composure, he’d find some reason to check in with them, asking about their saddle or if they’d noticed the creek was low. If they cared to talk, they were welcome to bring it up. Some did. Most didn’t.
He’d give Sophia Jackson her space, then. Whatever was making her sad, it was hers to cry over. Tomorrow night would be soon enough to check in with her.
Just as he nudged his horse back into a walk, he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, Sophia dashing her cheek on her shoulder. He tried to put it out of his mind once he was in the barn, but it nagged at him as he haltered his mare and washed off her bit. Sophia had touched her cheek to her shoulder just like that when he’d first approached her on the road this afternoon. Had she been crying when she’d hung on to that heifer?
He rubbed his jaw. In the car, she’d been all clenched fists and anxiously bouncing knee. A woman on the edge, that was what he’d thought. Looked like she’d gone over that edge this evening.
People did. Not his problem. There were limits to what a foreman was expected to handle, damn it.
But the way she’d been turning the lights off and on was odd. What did that have to do with being sad?
His mare nudged him in the shoulder, unhappy with the way he was standing still.
“I know, I know. I have to go check on her.” He turned the mare into the paddock so she could enjoy the last of the twilight without a saddle on her back, then turned himself toward the house. It was only about a hundred yards from barn to kitchen door, an easy walk over hard-packed earth to a wide flagstone patio that held a couple of wooden picnic tables. The kitchen door was protected by its original small back porch and an awning.
A hundred yards was far enough to give Travis time to think about how long he’d been in the saddle today, how long he’d be in the saddle tomorrow, and how he was hungry enough to eat his hat.
He took his hat off and knocked at the back door.
No answer.
He knocked again. His stomach growled.
“Go away.” The movie star didn’t sound particularly sad.
He leaned his hand on the door jamb. “You got the lights fixed in there, ma’am?”
“Yes. Go away.”
Fine by him. Just hearing her voice made his heart speed up a tick, and he didn’t like it. He’d turned away and put his hat back on when he heard the door open.
“Wait. Do you know anything about refrigerators?”
He glanced back and did a double take. She was standing there with a dish towel on her head, its blue and white cotton covering her face. “What in the Sam Hill are you—”
“I don’t want you to see me. Can you fix a refrigerator?”
“Probably.” He took his hat off as he stepped back under the awning, but she didn’t back up to let him in. “Can you see through that thing?”
She held up a hand to stop him, but her palm wasn’t quite directed his way. “Wait. Do you have a camera?”
“No.”
“How about a cell phone?”
“Of course.”
“Set it on the ground, right here.” She pointed at her feet. “No pictures.”
He fought for patience. This woman was out of her mind with her dish towel and her demands. He had a horse to stable for the night and eight more to feed before he could go home and scarf down something himself. “Do you want me to look at your fridge or not?”
“No one sets foot in this house with a cell phone. No one gets photos of me for free. If you don’t like it, too bad. You’ll just have to leave.”
Travis put his hat back on his head and left. He didn’t take to being told what to do with his personal property. He’d crossed the flagstone and stepped onto the hard-packed dirt path to the barn when she called after him.
“That’s it? You’re really leaving?”
He took his time turning around. She’d come out to the edge of the porch, and was holding up the towel just far enough to peek out from under it. He clenched his jaw against the sight of her bare stomach framed by that tight black clothing. She hadn’t gotten that outfit at any Western-wear-and-feed store. The thigh-high boots were gone. Instead, she was all legs. Long, bare legs.
Damn it. He was already hungry for food. He didn’t need to be hungry for anything else.
“That’s it,” he said, and turned back to the barn.
“Wait. Okay, I’ll make an exception, but just this one time. You have to keep your phone in your pocket when you’re around me.”
He kept walking.
“Don’t leave me. Just...don’t leave. Please.”
He shouldn’t have looked back, but he did. There was something a little bit lost about her stance, something just unsure enough in the way she lifted that towel off one eye that made him pause. The way she was tracking him reminded him of a fox that had gotten tangled in a fence and wasn’t sure if she should bite him or let him free her.
Cursing himself every step of the way, he returned to the porch and slammed the heel of his boot in the cast iron boot jack that had a permanent place by the door.
“What are you doing?” Her head was bowed under the towel as she watched him step out of one boot, then the other.
“You’re worried about the wrong thing. The cell phone isn’t a problem. A man coming from a barn into your house with his boots on? That could be a problem. Mrs. MacDowell wouldn’t allow it.” And then, because he remembered the sister’s distress over the extremes to which the paparazzi had apparently gone in the past, he dropped his cell phone in one boot. “There. Now take that towel off your head.”
He brushed past her and walked into the kitchen, hanging his hat on one of the hooks by the door. He opened the fridge, but the appliance clearly was dead. “You already checked the fuse, I take it.”
“Yes.”
Of course she had. That had been why the lights had gone on and off.
She walked up to him with her hands full of plastic triangles. “These wedges were in the doors. I took them out because I thought maybe you had to shut the door all the way to make it run. I don’t see any kind of on-off switch.”
The towel was gone. She was, quite simply, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Her hair was messed up from the towel and her famously blue eyes were puffy from crying, but by God, she was absolutely beautiful. His heart must have stopped for a moment, because he felt the hard thud in his chest when it kick-started back to life.
She suddenly threw the plastic onto the tile floor, making a great clatter. “Don’t stare at me. So, I’ve been crying. Big deal. Tell all your friends. ‘Hey, you should see Sophia Jackson when she cries. She looks like hell.’ Go get your phone and take a picture. I swear, I don’t care. All I want is for that refrigerator to work. If you’re just going to stand there and stare at me, then get the hell out of my house.”
If Travis had learned anything from a lifetime around animals, it was that only one creature at a time had better be riled up. If his horse got spooked, he had to be calm. If a cow got protective of her calf, then it was up to him not to give her a reason to lower her head and charge. He figured if a movie star was freaked out about her appearance, then he had to not give a damn about it.
He didn’t, not really. She looked like what she looked like, which was beautiful, red nose and tear stains and all. There were a lot of beautiful things in his world, like horses. Sunsets. He appreciated Sophia’s beauty, but he hadn’t intended to make a fuss over it. If he’d been staring at her, it had been no different than taking an extra moment to look at the sky on a particularly colorful evening.
He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the counter. “Is the fridge plugged into the wall?”
She’d clearly expected him to say something else. It took her a beat to snap her mouth shut. “I thought of that, but I can’t see behind it, and the stupid thing is too big for me to move. I’m stuck. I’ve just been stuck here all day, watching all my food melt.” Her upper lip quivered a little, vulnerable.
He thought about kissing just her upper lip, one precise placement of his lips on hers, to steady her. He pushed the thought away. “Did you try to move it?”
“What?”
“Did you try to move it? Or did you just look at it and decide you couldn’t?” He nodded his head toward the fridge, a mammoth side-by-side for a family that had consisted almost entirely of hungry men. “Give it a shot.”
“Is this how you get your jollies? You want to see if I’m stupid enough to try to move something that’s ten times heavier than I am? Blondes are dumb, right? This is your test to see if I’m a real blonde. Men always want to know if I’m a real blonde. Well, guess what? I am.” She grabbed the handles of the open doors and gave them a dramatic yank, heaving all her weight backward in the effort.
The fridge rolled toward her at least a foot, making her yelp in surprise. The shock on her face was priceless. Travis rubbed his jaw to keep from laughing.
She pressed her lips together and lifted her chin, and Travis had the distinct impression she was trying to keep herself from not going over the edge again.
That sobered him up. He recrossed his arms. “You can’t see them, but a fridge this size has to have built-in casters. No one could move it otherwise. Not you. Not me. Not both of us together.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Now you do.”
She seemed rooted to her spot, facing the fridge. With her puffy eyes and tear-streaked face, she had definitely had a bad day. Her problems might seem trivial to him—who cared if someone snapped a photo of a famous person?—but they weighed on her.
He shoved himself to his tired feet. “Come on, I’ll help you plug it in.”
“No, I’ll do it.” She started tugging, and once she’d pulled the behemoth out another foot, she boosted herself onto the counter, gracefully athletic. Kneeling on Mrs. MacDowell’s blue-tiled counter, she bent down to reach behind the fridge and grope for the cord. Travis knew he shouldn’t stare, but hell, her head was behind the fridge. The dip of her lower back and the curve of her thigh didn’t know they were being fully appreciated.
When she got the fridge plugged in, it obediently and immediately hummed to life. She jumped down from the countertop, landing silently, as sure of her balance as a cat. He caught a flash of her determination along with a flash of her bare skin.
Hunger ate at him, made him impatient. He picked his hat up from its hook by the door. “Good night, then.”
“Where are you going?”
“Back to work.” He shut the door behind himself. Stomped into the first boot, but his own balance felt off. He had to hop a bit to catch himself. He needed to get some food and some sleep, then he’d be fine.
The door swung open, but he caught it before it knocked him over. “What now?”
“I need groceries.”
There was a beat of silence. Did she expect him to magically produce groceries?
“Everything melted.” She looked mournfully over her shoulder at the sink, then back at him, and just...waited.
It amazed him how city folk sometimes needed to be told how the world ran. “Guess you’ll be headed into town tomorrow, then.”
“Me? I can’t go to a grocery store.”
“You need a truck? The white pickup is for general use. The keys are in the barn, on the hook by the tack room. Help yourself.”
“To a truck?” She literally recoiled a half step back into the house.
“I don’t know how else you intend to get to the grocery store. Just head toward Austin. Closest store is about twenty miles in, on your right.”
“You have to get the groceries for me.”
“Nope. It’s May.” He stuck his hat on, so his hands were free to pick up his second boot and shake the cell phone out of it.
“It’s May? What kind of answer is that? Do you fast in May or do a colon cleanse or something?”
He looked up at her joke, but his grin died before it started. Judging by the look on her face, she wasn’t joking. “The River Mack rounds up in May.”
She looked at him, waiting. He realized a woman from Hollywood probably had no idea what that meant.
“We’re busy. We’re branding. We have to keep an eye on the late calving, the bulls—”
He stopped himself. He wasn’t going to explain the rest. Managing a herd was a constant, complex operation. Bulls had to be separated from cows. The cow-calf pairs had to be moved to the richest pastures so the mamas could keep their weight up while they nursed their calves. Cows who had failed to get pregnant were culled from the herd and replaced with better, more fertile cattle.
Sophia flapped one hand toward the kitchen behind her. “I have nothing to eat. You have to help me.”
He stomped into his second boot. “Not unless you’re a pregnant cow.”
At her gasp, he did chuckle. “Or a horse. Or a dog. You could be a chicken, and I would have to help you. I keep every beast on this ranch fed, but you, ma’am, are not a beast. You’re a grown woman who can take care of herself, and you’re not my problem.”
She looked absolutely stricken. Had he been so harsh?
“Listen, if I’m going toward town, I don’t mind picking you up a gallon of milk. That’s just common courtesy. I expect you to do the same for me.”
“But I can’t leave the ranch.”
“Neither can I.” He touched the brim of his hat in farewell. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got horses to feed before I can feed myself.”
Chapter Four (#u22144fd9-9111-5272-83b3-d3ba8f12f47d)
A pregnant cow.
It was fair to say women pretty much spent their lives trying not to look like pregnant cows. Yet if Sophia Jackson, Golden Globe winner and Academy Award nominee, wanted help on this ranch, she needed to look like that cow she’d hugged in the middle of the road.
She didn’t look like that. She looked like a movie star, and that meant she would get no help. No sympathy.
That was nothing new. Movie stars were expected to be rolling in dough and to have an easy life. Everyone assumed movie stars were millionaires, but she was more of a hundred-thousandaire. Certainly comfortable and a far cry from her days pointing at mattresses with a smile, but the money went out at an alarming rate between jobs. Even when she was not being paid, Sophia paid everyone else: publicists, managers, agents, fitness trainers, fashion stylists...and her personal assistant, Grace.
Sophia had to pay them to do their jobs, so that she could land another job and get another burst of money. An actor only felt secure if the next job got lined up before the current job stopped paying. Then, of course, the next job after that needed to be won, a contract signed, and more money dished out.
There would be no new jobs, not for nine months. Sophia slid her palm over her perfectly flat, perfectly toned abs. The whole pregnancy concept didn’t seem real. It was a plus sign on a plastic stick and nothing more. She didn’t feel different. She didn’t look different.
Alex the Stupid Doctor had explained that she was only weeks along, and that for a first-time mother, especially one who stayed in the kind of physical shape the world expected Sophia to be in, the pregnancy might not show until the fourth or fifth month. Maybe longer.
She could have filmed another movie in that time...
But nobody in Hollywood wanted to work with her...
Because she’d fallen for a loser who’d killed her hardworking reputation.
Round and round we go.
Always the same thoughts, always turning in that same vicious cycle.
If only she hadn’t met DJ Deezee, that jerk...
She picked up the goose salt shaker and clenched it tightly in her fist. For the next nine months, instead of paying her entourage’s salaries, Sophia would be paying rent on this house. The rent was cheaper than the stable of people it took to sustain fame, which was fortunate, because the money coming in was going to slow considerably. Her only income would be residuals from DVD sales of movies that had already sold most of what they would ever sell—and her old manager and her old agent would still take their cut from that, even though they’d abandoned her.
She was going to hide on this ranch and watch her money dwindle as she sank into obscurity. Then she’d have to start over, scrambling for any scrap Hollywood would throw to her, auditioning for any female role. Her life would be an endless circle of checking in with grouchy temps, setting her head shot on their rickety card tables, taking her place in line with the other actors, praying this audition would be the one. She wasn’t sure she could withstand years of rejection for a second time.
She shouldn’t have to. She’d paid her dues.
The ceramic goose in her hand should have crumbled from the force of her grip, the way it would have if she’d been in a movie. But no—for that to happen, a prop master had to construct the shaker out of glazed sugar, something a real person could actually break. Movies had to be faked.
This was all too real. She couldn’t crush porcelain. She could throw it, though. Deezee regularly trashed hotel rooms, and she had to admit that it had felt therapeutic for a moment when he’d dared her to throw a vase in a presidential suite. Afterward, though...the broken shards had stayed stuck in the carpet while management tallied up the bill.
She stared for a moment longer at the goose in her hand, its blank stare unchanging as it awaited its fate. “There’s nothing we can do about any of this, is there?”
The kitchen was suddenly too small, too close. Sophia walked quickly into the living room. It was bigger, more modern. Wood floors, nice upholstery, a flat-screen TV. A vase. The ceilings were high, white with dark beams. She felt suddenly small, standing in this great room in a house built to hold a big family. She was one little person dwarfed by thousands of square feet of ranch house.
She heard her sister’s voice. Her mother’s voice. You’ve got nowhere else to go. You cannot live with me.
She couldn’t, could she? Her sister was in love, planning a wedding, giddy about living with her new husband. There was no room for a third wheel that would spin notoriety and paparazzi into their normal lives.
And her mother... Sophia could not move back home to live with her. Never again. Not in this life. Other twenty-nine-year-olds might have their parents as a safety net, but Sophia’s safety net had been cut away on a highway ten years ago.
The ceilings were too high. The nausea was rising to fill the empty space, and it had nothing to do with pregnancy, nothing at all. Sophia squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in her clenched fists. The little beak of the salt shaker goose pressed into her forehead, into her hard skull.
The house was too big. She got out, jerking open the front door and escaping onto the wide front porch. In the daylight, the white columns had framed unending stretch of brown and green earth. At night, the blackness was overwhelming, like being on a spaceship, surrounded by nothing but night sky. There were too many stars. No city lights drowned them out. She was too far from Hollywood, the only place she needed to be. All alone, all alone...
This was not what she wanted, not what she’d ever wanted. She’d worked so hard, but it was all coming to nothing. Life as she’d known it would end here, on a porch in the middle of nowhere, a slow, nine-month death. Already, she’d ceased to exist.
She hurled the salt shaker into the night, aiming at the stars, the too-plentiful stars.
The salt shaker disappeared in the dark. Sophia’s gesture of defiance had no effect on the world at all.
I do exist. I’m Sophia Jackson, damn it.
If she didn’t want to be on this ranch, then she didn’t have to be.
You know how to drive, don’t you? Turn the car around, then, instead of blowing that damned horn.
There was a truck, the cowboy had said. A white truck. Keys in the barn. She ran down the steps, but they ended on a gravel path, and her feet were bare. She was forced off the path, forced to slow down as she skirted the house, crossing dirt and grass toward the barn.
I don’t want to slow down. If I get off the roller coaster of Hollywood, I’ll never be able to speed back up again. I refuse to slow down.
She stepped on a rock and hissed at the pain, but she would not be denied. Instead of being more careful, she broke into a sprint—and stepped on an even sharper rock. She gasped, she hopped on one foot, she cursed.
I’m being a drama queen.
She was. Oh, God, she really was a drama queen—and it was going to get her nowhere. The truck would be sitting there whether she got to the barn in five seconds or five minutes. And then what? She’d drive the truck barefoot into Austin and do what, exactly?
I’m so stupid.
No one had witnessed her stupidity, but that hardly eased her sense of embarrassment as she made her way more carefully toward the barn. It was hard to shake that feeling of being watched after years of conditioning. Ten years, to be precise, beginning with her little sister watching her with big eyes once it was only the two of them, alone in their dead parents’ house. But Sophie, do you know how to make Mom’s recipe?
Don’t you worry. It will be a piece of cake.
Sophia knew Grace had been counting on her last remaining family member not to crack under the pressure of becoming a single parent to her younger sister. Later, managers and directors had counted on Sophia, too, judging whether or not she would crack before offering her money for her next role. She’d had them all convinced she was a safe bet, but for the past five months, the paparazzi had been watching her with Deezee, counting on her to crack into a million pieces before their cameras, so they could sell the photos.
The paparazzi had guessed right. She’d finally cracked. The photos were all over the internet. Now no one was counting on her. Grace didn’t need her anymore. Alex had stuck Sophia in this ranch house, supposedly so she’d have a place where no one would watch her. Out of habit, though, she looked over her shoulder as she reached the barn, keeping her chin up and looking unconcerned in the flattering light of the last rays of sunset. There was no one around, only the white pickup parked to the side. The cowboy must have gone to get his dinner.
Well, that made one of them. Sophia realized the nausea had subsided and hunger pangs had taken its place. Maybe inside the barn there would be some pregnant-cow food she could eat. She slid open the barn door and walked inside.
Not cows. Horses.
Sophia paused at the end of the long center aisle. One by one, horses hung their heads over their stall doors and stared at her.
“You can quit staring at me,” she said, but the horses took their time checking her out with their big brown eyes, twitching their ears here and there. The palette of their warm colors as they hung their heads over their iron and wood stalls would have made a lovely setting for a rustic movie.
There were no cameras here, no press, no producers. Sophia stopped holding her breath and let herself sag against the stall to her right. Her shoulders slumped under the full weight of her fatigue.
The horse swung its head a little closer to her, and gave her slumped shoulder a nudge.
“Oh, hello.” Sophia had only known one horse in her life, the one that the stunt team had assigned her to sit upon during a few scenes before her pioneer character’s dramatic death. She’d liked that horse, though, and had enjoyed its company more than that of the insulting, unstable director.
“Aren’t you pretty?” Sophia tentatively ran the backs of her knuckles over the horse’s neck, feeling the strength of its awesome muscles under the soft coat. She walked to the next stall, grateful for the cool concrete on the battered soles of her feet.
The next horse didn’t back away from her, either. Sophia petted it carefully, then more confidently when the horse didn’t seem to mind. She smoothed her hand over the massive cheek. “Yes, you’re very pretty. You really are.”
She worked her way down the aisle, petting each one, brown and spotted, black and white. They were all so peaceful, interested in her and yet not excited by her. Except, perhaps, the last one with the dark brown face and jet-black mane. That horse was excited to snuffle her soft nose right into Sophia’s hair, making Sophia smile at the tickle.
“It’s my shampoo. Ridiculously expensive, but Jean Paul gives it to me for free as long as I tell everyone that I use it. So if he asks, do a girl a favor and tell him you heard I use his shampoo.”
How was that going to work, now that she was out of the public eye? She rested her forehead against the horse’s solid neck. “At least, he used to give it to me for free.”
The horse chuffed into her hair.
“I’d share it with you, but I might not get any more, actually. Sorry about that, pretty girl. Before this is all over, I may have to borrow your shampoo. I hear horse shampoo can be great for people’s hair. Would you mind?”
“Did you need something else?”
Sophia whirled around. Mr. Don’t-or-Else stood there, all denim and boots and loose stance, but his brown eyes were narrowed on her like she was some kind of rattlesnake who’d slithered in to his domain.
“I thought you were gone,” she said. She adjusted her posture. She was being watched after all. She should have known better than to drop her guard.
“You are not allowed in the barn without boots on.”
The horse snuffled some more of her hair, clearly approving of her even if her owner didn’t. “What’s this horse’s name?”
“No bare feet in the barn.” The cowboy indicated the door with a jerk of his strong chin—his very strong chin, which fit his square jaw. A lighting director couldn’t ask for better angles to illuminate. The camera would love him.
Travis Chalmers. He’d tipped his hat to her this afternoon as he’d sat on his horse. Her heart had tripped a little then. It tripped a little now.
She’d already brought her ankles together and bent one knee, so very casually, she set one hand on her hip. It made her body look its best. The public always checked out her body, her clothing, her makeup, her hair. God forbid anything failed to meet their movie star expectations. They’d rip her apart on every social media platform.
Travis had already seen her looking her worst, but if he hoped she’d crack into more pieces, he was in for a disappointment.
Sophia shook her hair back, knowing it would shine even in the low light of the barn. “What’s the horse’s name? She and I have the same taste in shampoo.”
“He’s a gelding, not a girl. You can’t come into the barn without boots or shoes. It’s not safe. Is that clear?”
Sophia rolled her eyes in a playful way, as if she were lighthearted tonight. “If it’s a boy horse, then what’s his name? He likes me.”
The cowboy scoffed at that. “You seem to think all of my stock like you.”
“They do. All of them except you.”
Travis’s expression didn’t change, not one bit, even though she’d tossed off her line with the perfect combination of sassy confidence and pretty pout. He simply wasn’t impressed.
It hurt. He was the only person out here, her only possible defense against being swallowed by the loneliness, and yet he was the one person on earth who didn’t seem thrilled to meet a celebrity.
Supposedly. He was still watching her.
The audition wasn’t over. She could still win him over.
The anxiety to do so was familiar. Survival in Hollywood depended on winning people over. She’d had to win over every casting director who’d judged her, who’d watched her as impassively as this cowboy did while she tried to be enchanting. Indifference had to be overcome, or she wouldn’t get the job and she couldn’t pay the bills.
With the anxiety came the adrenaline that had helped her survive. She needed to win over Travis Chalmers, or she’d have no one to talk to at all. Ever.
So she smiled, and she took a step closer.
His eyes narrowed a fraction as his gaze dropped down her bare legs. She felt another little thrill of adrenaline. This would be easy.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
“I’m—” She tilted her head but kept her smile in place. “What?”
But he was impatient, walking past her to glare at the floor behind her. “What did you cut yourself on?”
She turned around to see little round, red smears where she’d stopped to greet each horse. “It must have been a rock outside. I stepped on a couple of rocks pretty hard.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
He glanced at her and had the grace to look the tiniest bit embarrassed. “Good that it wasn’t anything sharp in the barn. If it had been a nail or something that had cut you, then it could cut a horse, too.”
“Thanks for your concern.” She said it with a smile and a little shake of her chandelier earrings. “Nice to know the horses are more valuable than I am.”
“Like I said earlier, it’s my job to take care of every beast on this ranch. You’re not a beast. You should know to wear shoes.”
She wasn’t sure how to answer that. She couldn’t exactly insist she was a valuable beast that needed taken care of, and she certainly wasn’t going to admit she’d run outside in a panic. Actors who panicked didn’t get hired.
“Come on. I’ll get you something for the bleeding.”
He walked away. Just turned his back on her and walked away. Again.
After a moment, she followed, but she hadn’t taken two steps when he told her to stop. “Don’t keep bleeding on the floor.”
“What do you want me to do?” She put both hands on her hips and faced him squarely. Who cared if it didn’t show off her figure? She’d lost this audition already.
“Can’t you hop on one foot?”
This had to be a test, another trick to see if she was a dumb blonde. But Travis turned into a side room that was the size of another stall, one fitted out with a deep utility sink and kitchen-style cabinets.
He wasn’t watching her to see what she’d do, so maybe it wasn’t a joke. After a moment of indecision, she started hopping on her good foot. The cut one hurt, anyway, and it was only a few hops to reach the sink.
Travis opened one of the cabinets. It looked like a pharmacy inside, stocked with extra-large pill bottles. He got out a box of bandages, the adhesive kind that came in individual paper wrappers. The kind her mother had put on her scrapes and cuts when she was little.
I am not going to cry in front of this man. Not ever again.
He tapped the counter by the sink. “Hop up. Wash your foot off in the sink.”
“Why don’t you come here and give me a little boost?”
He stilled, with good reason. She’d said it with a purr, an unmistakably sexual invitation for him to put his hands on her.
She hadn’t meant to. It had just popped out that way, her way to distance herself from the nostalgia. Maybe a way to gain some control over him. He was giving her commands, but she could get him to obey a sexual command of her own if she really turned on the charm.
Whatever had made her say that, she had to brave it out now. Sultry was better than sad. Anything was better than sad.
She tossed her hair back, her earrings jingling like a belly dancer’s costume. She turned so that she was slightly sideways to him, her bustline a curvy contrast to her flat stomach.
“The counter’s too high for me. Give me a hand...or two.”
Come and touch me. Her invitation sounded welcoming. She realized it was. He was nothing like the sleek actors or the crazy DJs she’d known, but apparently, rugged outdoorsman appealed to her in a big way. You’ve got a big green light here, Mr. Cowboy.
“Too high for you,” he repeated, without a flicker of sexual awareness in his voice. Instead, he sounded impatient as he cut through her helpless-damsel act. “I already watched you hop up on Mrs. MacDowell’s counter tonight.”
Of course the counter height had been a flimsy excuse; it had been an invitation. She refused to blush at having it rejected. Instead, she backed up to the counter and braced her hands behind herself, letting her crop top ride high. With the kind of slow control that would have made her personal yoga instructor beam with approval, she used biceps and triceps and abs, and lifted herself slowly onto the counter with a smooth flex of her toned body. People would pay money to see a certain junior officer do that in a faraway galaxy.
Travis Chalmers made a lousy audience. He only turned on the water and handed her a bar of soap.
She worked the bar into a lather as she pouted. Even Deezee wouldn’t have passed up the chance to touch her. Actually, that was all Deezee had ever wanted to do: touch her. If it wasn’t going to end in sex, he wasn’t into it. She’d texted him ten times more often than he’d texted her between dates. His idea of a date had meant they’d go somewhere to party in the public eye or drink among VIPs for a couple of hours before they went to bed together. There’d been no hanging out for the sake of spending time together.
Sophia held her foot still as the water rinsed off the suds. She’d mistaken sex for friendship, hadn’t she?
“It’s not a deep cut. You should heal pretty quickly.” Travis dabbed the sole of her foot dry with a wad of clean paper towels, which he then handed to her. Before she could ask what she was supposed to do with damp paper towels, he’d torn the paper wrapper off a bandage and placed it over the cut. He pressed the adhesive firmly into her skin with his thumb. There was nothing sexual in his touch, but it wasn’t unkind. It was almost...paternal.
“Do you have kids?” she asked.
For once, he paused at something she’d said. “No.”
You ought to. There was something about his unruffled, unhurried manner...
Dear God, she wasn’t going to start missing her father, too. She couldn’t think about parents and sister any longer. Not tonight.
She snatched her foot away and jumped lightly off the counter, landing on the foot that hadn’t been cut. She held up the wad of damp towels. “Where’s the trash?”
“You need those paper towels to wipe up the blood on your way out. I’ll get you something to wear on your feet.”
On her way out. She was dismissed, and she had to go back to the empty house in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t want Travis to fetch her boots; she wanted him to carry her. He was a man who rode horseback all day. A cowboy who stood tall, with broad shoulders and strong hands. He could carry her weight, and God knew Sophia was tired of carrying everything herself.
She wanted his arms around her.
But she’d failed this audition. He wasn’t interested in her when she was either bossy or cute. He wasn’t fazed by her sultry tone, and he didn’t care about her hard-earned, perfect body. He wasn’t impressed with her in any way.
She gingerly stepped into the center aisle to see where he’d gone. Across from the medical room was another stall-sized space where it seemed saddles got parked on wooden sawhorses. The next room was enclosed with proper walls and a door, with a big glass window in the wall that looked into the rest of the barn. She could see a desk and bookcase and all the usual stuff for an office inside. She felt so dumb; she hadn’t known barns had offices and medical clinics inside.
Travis came in from the door at the far end of the aisle from the door she’d used. He dropped a pair of utilitarian rubber rain boots at her feet. “These will get you back to the house. Return them tomorrow, before sundown.”
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