The Cowboy's Cinderella. Carol Arens

the River Queen had disappeared from view. “I’m here, Ivy, you don’t need to worry.”

      * * *

      Ivy was worried.

      No longer worried about falling out of the saddle, but on this second night camping outside, she wondered if she would ever sleep again.

      The land, while not quite silent, was lacking in the comfort of human sounds. With the exception of Travis’s deep, even breathing, that is. The man slept like a baby in his mama’s arms.

      At home on the Queen, Ivy had been lulled to sleep by the gentle rocking of the boat and the knowledge that someone was always awake and keeping watch. She would stir in the night to hear footsteps going past her door, then whispered voices as the watch changed hands.

      Out here there were rustling critters in bushes, owls and bats overhead...worst of all were the howls of coyotes and wolves moaning over the land.

      She sat up suddenly from her bedroll, too aware that there were no walls, no buffer of water between her and them.

      “Travis?” she called. He lay stretched out, relaxed, on the far side of the fire.

      He lifted his hat from his face to...yes, to glare at her. But, gull-durn it, it wasn’t her fault that the wolf sounded closer and bigger than it had five minutes ago.

      “That wolf’s getting closer. Little Mouse is nervous about it.”

      “Not a wolf, a coyote, and it won’t come near the fire.”

      He’d assured her of that three times in the past few hours, but in her opinion, it did sound closer.

      “She’s also cold. She’s used to being in my room all warm and cozy.” Truthfully, the mouse was probably toasty inside her pouch. It was Ivy who was cold.

      And sore. Every time she felt a mite comfortable trying to rest on the ground, her muscles would begin to ache. One couldn’t spend all day in the saddle without paying a price.

      All right, Travis could, she would have to admit. But as much as he assured her that her aches would go away, she didn’t believe it...not any more than she believed this little fire would keep a pack of hungry predators at bay.

      Travis sat up, rubbed his hand over his face. Then with a groan, he reached for the woodpile and tossed two logs on the fire. Sparks crackled toward the treetops.

      “That better?”

      “Warmer,” she admitted. “But it seems to me that it sends a big signal, letting those hungry critters know where we are.”

      “They already know it. Have you gotten any sleep at all?” he asked in a gruff, accusing voice.

      She shook her head. Maybe it would help if she loosened her braid like she did at home.

      Untying the leather thong, she shook her head then ran her fingers through the messy hank. She had a brush but it was in her saddle pack and that was at the edge of the small clearing where the firelight did not reach. She was not going over there for anything.

      “How long ’til daylight, I wonder?” Not that it would be such a relief since she would then be required to get back in the saddle. A whole new collection of aches and pains would cramp her muscles and make her bones hurt.

      “Four hours,” he said, seeming certain about that even though there was no watchman calling out the hour to the pilot.

      “I’m sorry for sounding sharp.” He got up from his side of the fire and came to hers. He sat down a friendly distance away.

      Funny how she wished he’d move even closer. He was large enough to give off a wave of warmth.

      “After a while, you’ll get used to this.” He indicated the dark beyond the fire’s reach.

      “If that’s so, why’d you bring your gun over here?”

      “It’s for the two-legged varmints.”

      “Folks?”

      “Ivy, haven’t you ever run across someone who wanted to harm you?”

      “Reckon I might have, but my uncle and the roustabouts were always nearby.”

      He set the gun down between them. Maybe he figured if a two-legged marauder did invade their camp, she would help by picking up the side arm and dispatching the troublemaker in a single shot. He would not be reassured to know that Uncle Patrick did not hold with guns aboard the Queen. She was as likely to shoot Travis as the invader.

      Since she felt as helpless in her new world as a bald baby, she didn’t tell him this.

      “I’ve been wondering,” Travis said, sounding conversational.

      If conversation would keep him awake and on her side of the fire she’d speak everything that came across her mind.

      Beginning with, “So have I. Will my...that is, well, my husband...will he mind sharing his home with Little Mouse?” Not that it mattered in the end. She had kept her existence a secret from Uncle Patrick; she could as easily keep her a secret from...what was his name? Waldo, Wilfred? Winston? Gosh almighty! She’d been so caught up in everything she’d plum forgot her intended’s name.

      “What made you decide to come with me? To take on all this?” Travis asked, ignoring the interruption of her nonsense question. “You might have refused...left us to deal with things on our own?”

      “Uncle Patrick sold the boat. I no longer had a home.”

      “That wasn’t all of it.” He looked at her, clearly searching behind her eyes for the true answer.

      “Agatha, of course.” She was the one and only reason.

      At the end of all this was the person she had been longing for all her life. The one she had thought was a dream, an imaginary friend. No longer a hazy desire. Agatha was a flesh-and-bone sister. She had stepped out of the mist and become family.

      And with the new bond Ivy would find—or rediscover maybe—love. The fact that she had no solid memories of Agatha did not take away from the new emotion Ivy felt for her.

      “No one else would have been able to make me leave my uncle, no matter how much a landlubber he becomes after the Queen.”

      “All of us on the Lucky Clover are beholden to you.”

      “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I reckon if it weren’t for my sister I wouldn’t be here.” Gull-durn it, she did sound ungrateful. Mighty ungrateful when he’d offered her something that most women never even dreamed of. “I’ll do my best not to let you down.”

      “I don’t see how you could,” he said.

      “I could take one look at my groom and run like a Sunday Chicken.”

      “William English is a handsome man.”

      William...she’d do her durndest to remember it next time.

      “I don’t know a thing about running a ranch.”

      “You won’t need to. That’s my job.”

      “But I want to. If it’s really mine, I won’t sit about as useless as a feathered hat.”

      “You don’t like pretty feathered hats? Most ladies do.”

      “Why I’d feel sorry for the bird those feathers first belonged to every time I put it on. Besides, they’d tickle my neck. I tell you, Travis, when it comes to their appearance, ladies can be as foolish as peacocks. Struttin’ around in their finery with nary a care for comfort. Downright traps is what those feathers and lace are.”

      Travis made a noise under his breath. Sure wasn’t a happy sound. More like a curse but without the word formed.

      He crawled back to his side of the fire, stretched out then covered his face with his hat.

      “Don’t