The Princess And The Cowboy. Martha Shields

and a lingering glance from the door, Melissa left. A few minutes later, Josie heard the commotion of the wedding guests wishing the new couple well. She took a deep breath and slipped into the empty hall.

      She grabbed a bottle of champagne and a couple of glasses as she passed the kitchen. Accessories to complete her disguise. With another deep breath, she opened the door and stepped boldly through.

      What was probably less than a minute seemed like an hour, but she made it into the stable without raising an alarm. She paused to catch her breath as she entered the cool shade, but didn’t linger.

      Placing the champagne on a bale of hay, she picked up her voluminous skirts and ran down the wide corridor between the stalls that housed dozens of blooded thoroughbreds and quarter horses. The familiar smells and sounds of the stable comforted her, but she didn’t pause to enjoy the rare solitude. She ran straight for the tack room.

      Kicking her skirts aside, she reached behind the second row of saddles on the left. No bundle.

      Concerned, she began pulling saddles from their racks to look behind them. No bundle. Anywhere. One of the hands must have found it, and either returned it to the house or stolen it.

      Alarm blared through her. What was she going to do now? She didn’t have any money or any clothes except the gown.

      She forced herself to breathe, to fight the panic making her heart race. What should she do? Give up? Go back to Montclaire and marry Alphonse Picquet? Watch the bedrock ripped from her island, slab by slab?

      No, that’s the one thing she couldn’t do.

      Josie glanced down at her clothes. The skirt was full. She could ride in it. And she was wearing diamond earrings and a necklace she could exchange for American dollars.

      She had to go through with her plan. Though it was ripping apart at the seams, it was the only option she had.

      “Yes, ma’am.” Buck Buchanan rolled his eyes toward the gray metal ceiling of the camper on the front end of his horse trailer. Why couldn’t his mother just forget he existed?

      “Now, Hardin, I’m counting on you coming home tomorrow night. It’s your father’s birthday, after all, and you know how I hate an uneven table. Besides, Susan needs an escort.”

      He didn’t know which he hated worse—his mother calling him by the name she’d given him at birth, or the fact that she’d set him up again with some California debutante she wanted him to marry.

      “Tomorrow night? Sorry. No can do. I’ll be heading for—”

      “You have to, Hardin. You’re giving the party.”

      “I’m what?”

      “I’m at the ranch right now.” There was a definite shudder in her voice. “How do you think I got your number this time? I found the cell phone bill in your file drawer.”

      Buck ground his teeth so hard he could hear the enamel scraping against itself. His parents—his mother especially—hated the Double Star Ranch. To them, it represented their ranching roots, which they’d worked as hard as any ditchdigger to “rise above.” That his mother was giving his father’s party at the ranch Buck had inherited from his grandfather, instead of their three-million-dollar mansion in Sacramento, meant she was stepping up her campaign to get him married.

      He knew why. It wasn’t because she wanted grandkids to pamper. Oh, no. His thirtieth birthday was just around the corner, and it galled her that he hadn’t cemented the Buchanans’ place among the California elite by marrying some rich American princess.

      Like Susan. He knew her and dozens like her. Spoiled, selfish, with hair, skin and nails as perfect as the best salons could make them. They’d never done a lick of work in their lives, and would be horrified at the suggestion they ought to.

      “Hardin. I’m counting on you.”

      That’s all his mother had to say—those four little words, in that half-hurt, half-disbelieving tone of voice. She was his mother, after all. Even though she vehemently disapproved of the cowboy life he lived, he loved her.

      He sighed heavily, not caring whether she heard it or not. “I’ll be there.”

      She sighed happily, as if she’d doubted the outcome of her call. Like he’d ever been able to refuse her. His mother was a master at applying guilt. It was amazing how much she could heap on him with a dainty silver teaspoon.

      “I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

      “Goodbye, son.”

      Buck didn’t reply. He pushed the End button on his cell phone and hurled it onto the camper bed set high on the gooseneck portion of the trailer.

      Why had he answered the damn phone? He should’ve known it wouldn’t be his lawyer this late. But he’d been distracted after checking the Internet for the day’s stock prices. He’d picked it up without thinking.

      Now he was stuck—not only with a damn dinner party, but with his parents’ presence at his ranch. No telling how long his mother would stay if she was determined to get him married by the time he turned thirty.

      He shoved open the flimsy camper door so hard it banged against the side of the trailer. He dropped to the ground in one step, bypassing the fold-down step leading up to the tiny cramped quarters he called home most of the year. The two-inch slanted heel of his cowboy boot dug into the dirt and spewed a shower of earth as he spun toward his horse.

      Agamemnon waited patiently, tied to the back of the trailer. The blood bay gelding didn’t shy at Buck’s display of pique, just gave him a cool look as if to say, “Mother got the best of you again, huh?”

      “I don’t want to hear it, Aggie.” Buck placed a hand on the gelding’s rump as he stepped around him and into the trailer. He grabbed the padded horse blanket made especially for steer wrestlers and threw it on the bay’s back. “She cornered me. There was nothing I could do about it.”

      Get yourself hitched. That’ll shake the loop out of her lasso.

      Buck paused with his hands on the saddle as his grandfather’s words drifted back to him. Buck’s mother had been after him to marry some rich society girl ever since he’d come home with a master’s degree in finance from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

      He’d escaped the same way he’d escaped his socialite parents’ clutches since he was a boy—by going to the ranch his mother and father eschewed as beneath them. His grandfather, Bowen Buchanan, had been alive then and welcomed him, protected him.

      Buck had earned his nickname on the Double Star by riding anything that couldn’t stand a saddle. He’d lived in relative peace until five years after he graduated—when his grandfather died.

      Since then, his mother’s unrelenting pursuit of a “suitable” daughter-in-law had driven him from the ranch his grandfather left him. He’d gone rodeoing to escape. Most of the time she didn’t know where he was or the unlisted number of his cell phone, so he had weeks of precious solitude.

      Then, when he least expected it, she’d find him.

      Get hitched. He rolled the idea around in his mind as he picked up his bulldogging saddle and settled it on Aggie’s back.

      Getting married would certainly foil any plans his mother had about foisting some debutante off on him. But hell, he’d been looking for a woman to love ever since he graduated. He sure didn’t want a spoiled, rich, American princess whose only thoughts were of which parties she was invited to or the designer gowns she’d wear to them.

      He wanted a woman who was as comfortable in a doublewide as she was on the back of a horse. A woman who didn’t mind mucking out stalls.

      A trailer-park queen. That’s what he wanted. He’d always preferred women a little on the trashy side. But he wanted one with a brain, so she wouldn’t bore him to death for the rest of his life.

      He