A Cowboy's Wish Upon A Star. Caro Carson

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 seen 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.

      Right. Because of that little plus sign, Grace thought Sophia needed some stress-free alone time to decide what she wanted to do with her future, as if Sophia had done anything except worry about both of their futures for the past ten years. Didn’t Grace know Sophia was sick of worrying about the future?

      Barefooted, Sophia went to the paper bags and pulled out all the cold and wet items and stuck them in the sink. They’d already started sweating on the tiled countertop. She dried her cheek on her shoulder and faced the fridge.

      It had been deliberately turned off by the owner, a woman who didn’t want to stay in Texas and relax