by Caro Carson
For once in her life, she was the one doing the staring.
“B-baseball?” she repeated. Then, because she’d stuttered, she sneered a little, just to let him know she didn’t care. “What would a cowboy know about baseball? There aren’t enough humans around here to get a game going.”
She caught the slightest shake of his head as he crossed his arms over his chest—a move that did lovely things to stretch that T-shirt tight around his biceps. His smile lingered. He found her amusing. Damn him.
“True enough. This cowboy played shortstop in college. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about besides horse names and baseball?”
She wondered how much of her thoughts he could guess. Could he see how much she wished she hadn’t ruined her chances with a guy like him by making a huge mistake with a guy like Deezee?
You’re an actor, Sophia. Don’t let him see anything.
It was easier just to alienate people so they’d leave her alone. Her bridges were already burned. To hell with it.
“College? For a cowboy? What do they teach you, not to step in horse manure?”
Finally, finally, she’d pricked through his infuriatingly calm exterior. His eyes narrowed as she held his gaze defiantly.
That’s right, I am a rattlesnake. You don’t want to mess with me. She didn’t want any man to mess with her, ever again.
His voice remained even. “My degree is in animal sciences from Texas A&M. They expect students to be smart enough to avoid horse manure before they enroll.” He looked at her flip-flops, pointedly, and she fought the urge to curl her toes out of sight. “But I guess some people never do figure out what boots are for.”
“Are you going to kick me out of your barn again?”
Please. Put me out of my misery. I’m screwing everything up here. Send me back to that awful, empty house and let me fall apart.
“I’m not your babysitter. You do what you want. If you don’t have the common sense to stay out of trouble, well, some folks have to learn the hard way.”
“I think I can avoid cow patties, thank you very much. I have eyes.”
Travis pushed away from the post. “Then you might want to get going. It’s getting dark real quick. It’ll be harder to see those cow patties, and critters that like to bite toes will start coming out, too. Those flip-flops aren’t going to protect you from a snake or a rat.”
A rat. She glanced around the aisle. This place was too neat and organized for rats.
“We keep a barn cat,” Travis said, reading the skepticism she hadn’t bothered to hide. “She’s a good mouser, but she does earn her keep.”
He wasn’t going to kick her out. She was going to have to force herself back to the lonely house. She acted like it didn’t freak her out. “I’m leaving, anyway.”
“I’ll walk you to the door.”
She jerked her arm out of his reach and stepped sideways, the side of her foot hitting a square hay bale. It felt like hitting a porcupine, except for her toes. Her toes made contact with something furry.
“A rat!” She nearly knocked Travis over, jumping away from the hay bale.
He caught her with a hand on her arm, but he was already frowning at the floor, bending down and reaching—
“Don’t touch it.” She tried to yank him away from the rat. He stood up with something brown in his hand and she let go of his arm. “Ew.”
“It’s not ‘ew.’ It’s a kitten.”
It wasn’t moving. For the first time since Travis had woken Sophia from her nap, she felt the nausea rising. “Did I—do you think I... I didn’t hurt it, did I?”
She felt him looking at her, but she had eyes only for the kitten, the tiniest one she’d ever seen. Travis pressed its baby paws with his thumb, wiggling each limb as he did. “Nothing seems to be broken or bent. You didn’t hurt it.”
Thank goodness. She sank weakly onto the hay bale, then leaped up as the hay poked her rear right through her designer romper from Milan.
Travis didn’t seem to notice. His attention was on the kitten. He pulled at the collar of his T-shirt and tucked the brown fluff in, keeping it in place with one hand.
“Shouldn’t we put it back so the mother cat will be able to find it?”
“He’s cold. The mother cat must have abandoned him a while ago. If I can get him warmed up, we might be able to slip him back in with his brothers, but this is the second time the mother has moved him out of her nest.”
“Why would she do that?”
Travis shrugged, the kitten completely hidden by his hand. “She might sense that there’s something wrong with it.”
“But you said it’s not hurt.”
“As far as I can see. The mother might know something I don’t. Or the mother might have decided two kittens are all she can handle, so the third one gets abandoned.”
“She leaves it out to die? That’s awful. Can’t you do something about that?” Anxiety tinged her voice, but she didn’t care. Her anxiety to not see a kitten die felt pretty intense.
“I am doing something about that,” he said drily. “I’ve got a kitten stuck down my shirt.”
“You’re going to keep it?” That sounded good. Really good.
He sat on the hay bale, the heavy denim of his jeans so much more practical than her white silk. “This kitten is really young. His eyes aren’t open yet. His best bet for survival is with his mother.”
Her anxiety spiked right back up. “But he has a terrible mother. She left him, just left the pitiful thing all alone. He’s better off without her.”
“No, he isn’t.” Travis spoke firmly, but he was looking at her with...concern. It took her a moment to recognize concern on a man’s face. For the past ten years, the only person who’d ever looked at her with concern had been Grace. Her sister was the only one who’d ever cared.
Nausea tried to get her attention, but Sophia pushed it away. She didn’t want to acknowledge it or what it might mean.
“You’ve never had a cat before, have you?” Travis asked.
“Ages ago, but she was neutered. You should neuter your cats. You have to neuter this one’s mother right away. She’s a bad mother. She doesn’t deserve to have any more babies.” Sophia pressed the back of her hand against her mouth abruptly to conquer the nausea.
But it was too late. The thing she didn’t want to think about was now at the forefront of her mind: the little plus sign on that stick. Motherhood. Babies.
The word pregnant might not seem real to her, but Grace and Alex had been so deadly serious about it. They’d sat her down at Alex’s kitchen table to talk through the options.
Sophia had immediately pounced on giving the baby up for adoption. It sounded simple. There’d be this baby that she would never even have to see, really, and the adoption agency would find the perfect couple. The couple would be happy. The baby would be happy. No harm all around.
That pregnancy test had probably been wrong, anyway, but adoption was a simple solution for a simple equation: one unwanted baby plus one couple who wanted a baby equaled success. Sophia would be doing a good deed. End of family meeting.
“Sophia.” There was a definite note of concern in Travis’s voice now, to match the way he was looking at her. “She might not be a bad mother. Sometimes Mother Nature knows more than we do. But for what it’s worth, I agree with you about having cats neutered. This kitten’s mother found us a couple of weeks ago. She moved herself in and was already pregnant. Accidents happen.”
Oh god, oh god, oh god...
Tonight, faced with a few ounces of fluff she’d almost stepped on, Sophia suddenly realized what she’d left out of the equation: herself. Doing a good deed? She was the failure in the equation, not the hero. She was giving the baby away because she knew, deep down, she would be a terrible mother. She’d
tried so hard with Grace, but she’d failed. Grace didn’t even want to live with her anymore.
Travis had said the cat might have decided she couldn’t handle that baby. Sophia knew she couldn’t handle a baby, either. So what did that make Sophia? A terrible, horrible, selfish cat.
Travis tucked his chin into his collar and spread his fingers out, trying to see the kitten. “He’s moving around. That’s a good sign.”
Sophia backed away from him, scared of the little bit of brown fluff and all that it represented.
“I’m going to go now.” Her voice sounded thin, too high. “Good luck with the kitten.”
She turned tail and ran. And ran. As fast as she could in the stupid flip-flops, she ran so that she was out of breath when she got back to the house.
It helped. It was only a sprint, maybe the length of a football field, nothing like the miles she’d had to put in to prepare for battling monsters in Space Maze, but she felt a little more normal. She felt her lungs and ribs expanding, contracting, taking in extra air. Muscles she hadn’t used in weeks were suddenly awake, alive. She smoothed her hand over her stomach. The nausea was gone, and she felt hungry.
What she didn’t feel was pregnant. Not one bit.
The pregnancy test’s instructions had cautioned over and over that the results were not always accurate. Really, all that had happened was that Sophia had skipped a period, which was an easy thing to do. She probably wasn’t even pregnant.
She was here to hide from the paparazzi, that was all. Her sister and Alex had both told Travis that. Sophia would lie low here for a few more weeks and let the media turn its attention elsewhere. Once they began a feeding frenzy on some other celebrity couple, Sophia would fly back to LA and start hunting for a new agent.
And you should make an appointment to get your tubes tied, because now you know you wouldn’t be happy if you really were pregnant, and you’d be a lousy mother who couldn’t take care of a baby, anyway.
She glanced out the kitchen window toward the barn, where some knocked-up stray cat was apparently her spirit animal. If the kitten-killing cat had been sent to show Sophia how much she was lacking, she’d done her job tonight. It was a good thing Sophia was planning on letting someone adopt the baby, because she wouldn’t be a good mother. It was a crushing revelation.
The only light on in the whole house was the little one over the stove. That was plenty. The boxes of nonperishable food were still lined up on the kitchen counter, and Sophia had spent the week working her way through them, left to right. She didn’t need a lot of light to pour herself another bowl of organic raisins and bran flakes.
She sat at the table and poked at the dry cereal with her spoon for a while. The organic milk substitute had gotten warm that first day, so she’d dumped it down the drain. Without a housekeeper, a personal shopper, or a sister, it hadn’t been replenished yet.
Sophia didn’t care. She just wanted to sleep, even after the nap she hadn’t meant to take outside today. That had been a stupid slip up. It would have blown her cover if anyone except Travis had come by.
She couldn’t get her act together enough to do a simple thing like hide. She’d dared to go outside because the house felt too empty. The sun had felt good on her skin after four days indoors, so she’d stretched out and fallen asleep.
No surprise there. She’d been tired for years. She’d been looking for a break when she’d taken Grace for that vacation in Telluride, but five months of Deezee hadn’t been very refreshing. She was more tired than ever now.
Except when she talked to Travis. She’d felt alive and awake when Travis had walked into that barn with no shirt on. Nothing like a half-naked, incredibly buff man to snap a girl out of a fog.
The expression in his eyes had taken her breath away. Boy meets girl. Boy wants girl. Or rather, man wants woman. Woman had wanted him right back, with an intensity that she couldn’t handle.
No surprise there, either. She couldn’t handle anything in her life. But she’d felt like she was really alive for the first time in ages, so she’d been determined to see how far he would go.
Not very far. One touch with her finger, and he’d literally stepped back from her and put on a shirt. So much for her bankable box office sex appeal. She’d lost her career, her sister—and her ability to attract a man. She sucked. Her life sucked.
On that note, she left her bowl on the table, stumbled into the living room, and did a face plant on the sofa. She never wanted to wake up again.
Chapter Seven
“Sophia, wake up.”
She jerked awake, heart pounding.
“It’s just me. Travis. Are you okay?”
She sat up on the couch and dropped her face in her hands, willing her heart to slow down. She hated to be startled awake, because her first instinct was to flail about in case Deezee and his crew were in the middle of pulling some prank, like drawing on her face with a Sharpie just before she was expected to make an appearance. It’s funny, baby, whatchu getting upset for?
She’d had to cancel that appearance, disappointing fans and angering her manager.
“I’m not okay. You just scared me to death, shaking my arm like that.”
“Sorry. Nothing else was waking you up.”
She was waking up now, fully aware of where she was and who was standing over her. “What are you doing here?”
“Checking on you.”
“What are you doing in my house? Did you just open the door and walk in?”
“Yes.”
“What are you, some kind of stalker?”
“No.”
His implacable, even tone set her teeth on edge. “But you just walked into someone else’s house. You don’t see anything wrong with that, do you?”
“I knocked first.” His cell phone was in his hand, but he slipped it into his back pocket.
She stood up, furious. “I deserve privacy. I rented this house. I get that you’re all Mr. I-Run-This-Place, but the house is mine for the duration. You can’t just walk in any time you please. Have you been spying on me while I was sleeping? Standing over my bed without me knowing it every night?”
“Of course not. Quit spooking yourself.”
“Spooking myself? What does that mean? That’s not even a thing.”
“You’re letting your imagination run away with you. I walked in just now because we don’t tend to stand on ceremony out here in the country. We can’t. If someone’s in trouble, you have to help. You can call nine-one-one, but it can take a long time for help to arrive. We take care of each other.”
The man sounded like he actually believed what he was saying. He was oblivious to the invasion of her privacy. Living in the country couldn’t be that different than living in the city.
“You had no reason to think I was in trouble.”
“I thought I’d come and tell you some good news, but it looked like nobody was home.”
“So?”
“If you hadn’t come back to the house, then where were you? You ran out of the barn like a bat out of hell, so I figured you’d made it back to your place in a couple of minutes, but it didn’t look like you were here. You’d run somewhere else. It’s full dark out there. You aren’t wearing much, and a person can start to lose body heat pretty quick once the sun goes down. You only had on flip-flops. If you’d gotten hurt—”
“I was right here on my own couch, minding my own business.”
“Good. Now I don’t have to saddle up Arizona and go out to look for you.”
You would have done that for me? But the calm way he was looking at her, the steadiness of his voice told the truth. Just the fact that it had even occurred to him to go looking for someone who might be missing was...
It made her feel kind of protected. A nice feeling.
Crap. I
t was hard to stay mad at a man who’d honestly been worried about her. Not just worried, either. He actually would have done something about it.
She crossed her arms over her chest, but she couldn’t force any real sting into her voice. “Well, we need to have an understanding that you won’t sneak into my house again. Where I’m from, that’s called breaking and entering. It creeps me out. Even the paparazzi don’t dare to walk in my door. Don’t do it, okay?”
He took his time thinking about his answer. “All right.”
“I mean it.” She didn’t need any man mounting horseback search parties for her sake. She didn’t.
“This wasn’t sneaking in,” he said. “You have my word I never will. But if I think you’re in trouble, I’m going to do whatever it takes to help you, whether you like it or not.”
Sophia blinked. Why, you bossy son of a—But then she realized she was looking at his back because he’d left the living room to go into the kitchen. She hurried after him.
He had already turned on the lights in the kitchen. He picked up her dry bowl of cereal. “Is this all you ate today?”
She stopped cold. There was only one reason a man would ask about that. Only one reason. “The paparazzi got to you already, didn’t they?”
His gaze narrowed again.
I’m not the rattlesnake, dude. You are.
“I want to see your cell phone.” She was seething. “How long have you been in here, photographing Sophia Jackson’s hideout? Documenting Sophia Jackson’s Hollywood diet secrets? Did you take pictures of me sleeping? Did you?”
“You’re spooking yourself again.”
“How much did they pay you? The kid at the deli by my condo got two thousand dollars for writing down my sandwich orders for a week. He took a photo of my sister picking up a bag with subs in it. When I didn’t order a sandwich the next day, he lied and took a photo of someone else’s sandwich. He got the cash. You know what I got?”
