A Cowboy's Wish Upon a Star Read online

  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!

  Dear Reader,

  The wonderful Jane Austen once wrote that the heroine of her book Emma was a woman “whom no-one but myself will much like.” I confess, I’m feeling the same way about the heroine of the book you are holding in your hand at this moment.

  Sophia Jackson, like the wealthy heiress Emma, seems to have it all. She’s a movie star. She’s gorgeous. At just twenty-nine years of age, she’s achieved a high level of success. But Sophia is not living as charmed a life as it appears. In fact, her life is falling apart, and she knows it’s the result of her own carelessness and bad choices. She doesn’t believe she really deserves to have good things happen to her anymore—and so she makes everything worse before it gets better.

  At the heart of her insecurity is an unexpected pregnancy. I think readers who are parents will identify with the anxiety that comes with a first pregnancy. How do you know if you have what it takes to raise a baby? I thought the hospital was crazy to let me leave with my first newborn; wasn’t it obvious that my husband and I were clueless?

  Fortunately, we figured things out, as most new parents do. In this book, Sophia Jackson must figure out what’s best for her coming baby, for her life and, most of all, for the man she falls madly in love with. And I hope you, dear reader, will like Sophia as much as I do by the last page!

  Cheers,

  Caro Carson

  A Cowboy’s Wish Upon a Star

  Caro Carson

  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.

  Books by Caro Carson

  Harlequin Special Edition

  Montana Mavericks: What Happened at the Wedding?

  The Maverick’s Holiday Masquerade

  Texas Rescue

  Her Texas Rescue Doctor

  Following Doctor’s Orders

  A Texas Rescue Christmas

  Not Just a Cowboy

  The Doctors MacDowell

  The Bachelor Doctor’s Bride

  The Doctor’s Former Fiancée

  Doctor, Soldier, Daddy

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

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  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

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Excerpt from The Cowboy’s Christmas Lullaby by Stella Bagwell

  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 surpris
e 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.