Czytaj książkę: «A Cowboy's Wish Upon A Star»

Chapter One

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.