by Caro Carson
That definitely didn’t deserve an answer.
The cameraman lifted the huge lens and took a few photos of Travis. “We’ll identify you.”
It would be humorous if they showed the photos to the local sheriff to file a complaint against him. Travis knew the sheriff and most of the deputies, of course, but it was more than that. This was Texas cattle country. The rules had been in place here for well more than a century. If a cattleman didn’t want you on his property, then you got off his property. The sheriff would laugh these men out of his office for complaining about a foreman doing his job.
The driver pulled his head back into his car. Stuck it out the window again. “C’mon, Peter. Get in the car.”
Once the cameraman was in, the driver revved the engine. He inched the vehicle forward, then revved the engine some more.
Pushy little bastards.
So these were paparazzi. Had to be. Travis imagined it would be a nuisance to have them following him and taking pictures while he walked down a public street. Coming onto someone else’s land and sticking a camera in their face took nuisance to a different level. Trespassing was illegal. Trespassing and then taking photographs took a lot of gall.
Years of this would wear on a person. Travis had a better idea now of just how much it had worn on Sophia.
The car lurched forward a full car length, rushing his horse before slamming on its brakes. Samson threw his head up and gave it the side-eye, but he stayed under control. Travis gave him a solid pat on the neck, turned in his saddle, and pulled his hunting rifle out of its carrying case. He pulled a single bullet out of the cardboard box he kept in his saddlebag.
Carrying a rifle was part of Travis’s job. Predators had to be dealt with; they’d found the remains of a calf that had been lost to a predator just yesterday. Travis would never kill a man over photographs, but he’d never let a car kill a horse, either. If he were to fire this weapon, every cowboy in hearing distance would come to check it out. If Travis happened to fire that signal shot in the direction of one of the car’s tires, well, things like that happened.
One thing that wasn’t going to happen? These men weren’t getting any closer to Sophia.
Travis opened the rifle’s chamber. Empty, as it should be unless he was about to use it. He slipped the bullet into place and locked the bolt into position. It made a satisfying metallic sound for the benefit of the trespassers. Travis set the rifle across his thighs and waited.
The driver and the cameramen started making incredulous hand gestures. Then the driver laid on the horn, nice and loud. Nice and long.
Travis smiled. Wouldn’t be long now.
Clay had already been on his way, so he arrived first. A few minutes later, Buck, a young hand working his second year on the River Mack, rode up. Buck was as good-natured and laid-back as they came, but between the text messages and the car horn, he arrived looking serious. The men stayed on their horses, flanking Travis.
“This road’s getting mighty crowded,” Travis said.
The driver laid on the horn again, longer and louder.
“Seems rude,” Clay said.
“Doesn’t he?”
The driver got out of the car. “This is very interesting. What are you guys hiding? Why don’t you want us to visit our friend?”
“We may be here awhile,” Travis said to his men. “He doesn’t understand the concept of private property.”
The driver addressed Travis’s men, too. “Either of you fellas know Sophia Jackson?”
Well, hell. Now it was like playing poker. Travis had to act like he didn’t know the cards he held in his own hand.
“Her sister lives here in Austin. We spotted the sister coming out of a bridal shop, then she drove out here to this ranch.” The driver squinted at Clay. “Isn’t that interesting?”
“Not particularly.”
Travis would have to call Alex this evening and let him know Grace was being followed.
“Rumor has it that Sophia Jackson’s sister is planning a wedding on this ranch.” He made a show of taking his wallet out of his back pocket. “We’re just looking for a little confirmation.”
“The movie star?” Buck was genuinely incredulous. “What in the hell is this man talkin’ about?”
“I believe he thinks we run a catering service,” Travis deadpanned. “You cater any weddings lately?”
Buck laughed, although Travis doubted he’d been that funny. Buck just liked to laugh.
The cameraman gestured to his grandiose lens. “Look, I’m just trying to do my job. To capture all the beauty of a wedding, I need to scope out the venue first. Is there a gazebo? Will there be a reception tent? Is Sophia Jackson going to be the maid of honor?”
Buck leaned around Travis to speak to Clay. “I thought you were digging an irrigation ditch today. Didn’t know you built weddin’ gazebos for movie stars.” He cracked himself up with his own joke.
The driver, however, got impatient or insulted. It didn’t matter which. What mattered was that he shoved his wallet back in his pants and got behind the wheel again. With his hand on the horn, he put his car in gear. It rolled toward the horses slowly but relentlessly.
Buck stopped laughing.
“Is he playing chicken with us?” Clay asked no one in particular.
Travis didn’t believe in playing chicken. He didn’t like trespassers, and he didn’t like horses being threatened with a car that could kill them. He picked up the rifle, sighted down the barrel, and fired.
The front left tire deflated instantly.
“Never did like games,” Travis said, using thigh and knee to keep Samson calm after the gunfire.
“It’s about to get real,” Clay murmured.
“Yep.”
The driver started shouting, jumping out of his car and waving his arms like a caricature of a New York taxi driver. The cameraman got out and started photographing his flat tire.
“Make sure you get my gate in the background, so you can explain to the sheriff how far onto private property you were when your tire blew up.” Travis turned to flip his saddlebag open and get another bullet out of the cardboard box. “I’ll say this one more time: turn your car around and get off my ranch.”
“But you shot out my tire. You shot it.” The driver was more incredulous about that than Buck had been about movie stars.
“You got a spare, don’t you?” Travis pulled back the bolt on the rifle and chambered another round. “How many spares you got?”
Clay nodded toward the west. “Company’s coming.”
Travis glanced at the two riders coming toward them with their horses at an easy trot. “Good. Haven’t seen Waterson in a while.” He looked back at the driver. “You get to changing that tire. We have some visiting to do.”
It took the driver and cameraman longer to figure out how to get their spare out of the trunk and set up the jack than it did for Luke Waterson and one of his hands to reach the road. Luke was one of the owner-operators of the James Hill ranch, which bordered the River Mack.
He rode up to Travis and shook hands. “Happened to be in the neighborhood when I heard someone’s car horn get stuck. Then the gunshot made it interesting.”
“Nice of you to stop by.”
“What do we have here?”
Travis leaned his forearm on the pommel of his saddle, keeping the rifle in his other hand pointed away from men and horses. “I believe this here is what you’d call the paparazzi.”
“Paparazzi? Which one of you is famous?”
As the men laughed, Travis spoke under his breath to Luke. “Mrs. MacDowell has a houseguest.”
“I see.” Luke tched to his horse and turned him in a circle, until he stood beside Travis. “Looks like we’ll be staying until these paparazzi can get their tire changed a
nd get on their way. How long do you think that’ll take?”
“They’re a little slow on the uptake,” Travis said. “I’m gonna say twenty minutes.”
“I’ll take fifteen.”
Clay was skeptical. “Ten bucks says thirty.”
In the end, it took them the full thirty minutes, so Clay collected enough beer money to last him a month. Buck was sent to follow the car out to the county road. Waterson and his man headed back to the James Hill. Clay went back to clearing out pond weeds.
Travis turned his horse toward the house.
He had that impatient feeling again, that need to lay eyes on Sophia. Need was perhaps the wrong term. The photographers hadn’t made it very far onto the ranch, so there was no need to think she was in any kind of distress. She was probably talking to the horses or taking a nap or even holding those yoga poses that had turned him into a voyeur. Travis wanted to see Sophia again.
Want and need were all twisted up inside him when it came to Sophia. If he just checked on her, then he’d be able to put his mind at ease and go back to his routine.
Travis told himself that lie for a mile, until the white pillars of Mrs. MacDowell’s front porch came into view, and he saw Sophia standing there, hurling tomatoes at the sky.
Chapter Fourteen
He might as well have been invisible.
He’d turned Samson out to the pasture and put on a fresh shirt. His hair still probably smelled like smoke, but Sophia noticed none of it when Travis walked up the front porch steps and joined her by the white pillars. She didn’t acknowledge him at all.
It didn’t matter. He leaned against a pillar and felt the tension inside him ease, anyway. She was here. He was here. It felt good.
She continued her little ritual as if she were in the middle of a meditation. She chose a tomato from a basket, examined it carefully, and then threw it with considerable skill.
“Had a bad day?” he asked.
“You could say that.”
“I’m about to make it worse.”
She paused, tomato cupped in her hand.
“I just met my first paparazzi.”
“Oh.” Her knuckles turned white on the tomato, but as he watched her, she loosened her grip. “I could crush this, but then I’d have to clean up the stupid mess myself.”
“You could throw it.”
She did.
“Nice arm,” he said.
“My daddy taught me.”
Right there, just like that, Travis felt something change. The hard squeeze on his heart was painful.
Standing on the porch less than an arm’s length from Sophia, he saw her as a child, one who loved her daddy, a young girl determined to learn how to throw a baseball. She might have had pigtails, or she might have been a tomboy in a ball cap, but she’d been somebody’s little girl.
Now she was a too-beautiful woman but a very real person, doing the best she could in the world, same as everyone else. She was mostly kind; she had her flaws.
She was irresistible. And the reason she was irresistible was because he was falling in love with her.
Strangers with cameras came to photograph her because that was a crazy side effect of her job. It had nothing to do with Travis and Sophia, two people standing on a porch, throwing tomatoes.His arm was already warmed up from a day spent chopping trees and handling horses and sighting down a hunting rifle for one easy tire shot. He picked up a tomato and threw it for distance, centerfield to home plate.
“Wow,” she said.
“My dad taught me.”
“Do you see your dad very often?”
Rather than answer, he picked up another tomato. Although he’d played shortstop, he took his time like a pitcher on the mound. Wound up. Threw.
“Now you’re just showing off.”
He winked at her, as if he were still a young college jock. “I can throw a baseball farther than a tomato.”
She picked up another one. Studied it. Threw.
“Why are you killing tomatoes?” he asked.
“I’m sick of them.” Her little hiss of anger ended in an embarrassed duck of her chin. “It’s wasteful, though, isn’t it? But I’m not a bad person. They were just rotting in place, anyway.”
His heart hurt for her again, for the way she didn’t want to be thought of as a bad person. The little girl had grown up to be defensive for a reason. She was judged all the time, not just for whom she dated, but for how her face looked, what she wore, what kind of sandwich she ate.
“I’ll tell you a rancher’s point of view. The tomatoes came from the land, and you’re putting them back into the land. That’s not wasteful. Birds are going to come out of nowhere tonight and have a feast, and I bet you’ll see a few tomato plants popping up here next spring. In the catalog of possible sins a person could commit, I’d say throwing a tomato is pretty damn minor. You’re not a bad person.”
“I won’t be here next spring.” She sounded wistful. It was a gentle warning as well, whether for herself or for him, to not get too attached.
“I know.” He threw another tomato, a sidearm hard to first base to beat the runner.
“So, do you see your dad or not?” she asked.
“Dad and I are on speaking terms again.”
“What happened?”
“He slept with a married woman. It wasn’t with my mother.”
“I’m so sorry.” Her voice, her posture, all of it softened toward him. For him. “That must have been awful.”
“Tore up two families with one affair. But it’s been fifteen years. We talk. Take in a game together when I’m in Dallas. Do you see your dad?”
“My dad passed away. The same instant as my mom, actually. Car crash.”
He couldn’t pick up another tomato.
“It’s been ten years. I was nineteen. I became Grace’s legal guardian. She was all I had left. She is all I have left. Now she’s getting m-married.”
The tiny stutter said it all.
“In September.” She took a breath, and a little of the actress appeared. “Grace came out here today to tell me she’d set the date. She’s planning everything without my help, since I’m kind of a liability in public, with the mob scenes and stuff. She’s running her own life. She doesn’t need me anymore, and I’m so proud of her for that. I really am. And she’s happy and excited and everything a bride should be, and I’m so happy about that, too.”
Travis waited.
Sophia traced the edge of the tomato basket with her fingertip. “But deep down, I wish she still needed me, and that, for certain, makes me a bad person.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
It was shockingly easy to pull her into his arms. It was shockingly perfect, the way she fit against his chest. She burrowed into him, her cheek on his collarbone. She brought her arms around his back, as if they’d always hugged away the hurt like this, as if they’d always fit together.
“Who is watching?” she asked. Not Is anyone watching? Just who.
“No one. It’s only three o’clock. The men are working.”
He set his cheek against her hair, the scent of her shampoo less dominant than the smell of sunshine. She’d spent the day outdoors, then, not in the dark and the air conditioning.
He savored the smell of her skin as he held her, but the embrace was not entirely about comfort. Hunger demanded attention. Travis felt her breasts soft against his chest, felt the heat of her palm on his shoulder blade, and told himself it was enough.
“The paparazzi aren’t watching?”
“They won’t be back unless they can afford a lot of new tires. They got a flat. It will happen again. Every time.”
Tension spiked in her every muscle. “But they’ll be back. They’ll keep coming back.”
> He hushed her with a shh and another, the same way he soothed a filly being approached by a rider for the first time. “They think Grace might be scouting out the ranch as a place to have her wedding. When she gets married somewhere else in September, they’ll stop wondering if her famous sister will show up out here.”
“Oh. That’s possible. You might be right.”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
She lifted her cheek. “Don’t be so nice to me.”
“It’s very easy to be nice to you.”
She set her hand on the side of his face, and he closed his eyes at the sweet shock of a feminine touch.
It had been a while since he’d been touched by a woman, but it was more than that. It mattered that it was Sophia’s fingertips that smoothed their way over his cheek, Sophia’s palm that cupped his jaw. Sophia, Sophia—he couldn’t get her out of his head, not since the moment he’d first laid eyes on her.
When her thumb traced his lower lip, he opened his eyes just to see her again.
She looked sad. “This has no future.”
“What doesn’t?” He knew, but he wanted all the cards spread on the table.
“This thing between us. It has nowhere to go.”
“I know.” He bent his head, and he kissed her. Like the hug, it was as natural as if they’d always kissed. Of course he would press his lips to hers. Of course.
“I don’t know where I’ll be a year from now. I don’t know where I’ll be a month from now.”
“I know where you are this moment.” He placed a kiss carefully on her upper lip, to stop the tears that were threatening to start. “We have this moment.”
She kissed him. Her mouth was soft but her kiss was strong. No hesitation. When he thought he’d like to taste her, she opened her mouth and tasted him. In contrast to her words of warning, she kissed him without any doubts.
He had no doubts, either. If this kiss on the porch was all they could ever have, he still wanted it. He needed one moment, just one moment, to stop denying this power between them. Want and need were the same thing: he needed to kiss her more than he wanted to breathe. He wanted to kiss her more than he needed to breathe.
