A Cowboy's Wish Upon a Star Read online

  “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.

&nbs
p; “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

  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 see
n 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.