by S Doyle
That his fiancée had been cheating on him. For months!
And did I have to do it, anyway? It sounded like Betty was about to break up with him any day.
Instantly I smiled. All hope was not lost. Garrett was going to need someone to console him after the breakup, and I planned to be just that person.
I would be so loyal to him he would forget Betty ever existed!
I was back, and when I stepped back into the house I felt like a prisoner who had just been granted a reprieve.
SABRINA
Two weeks later
I stopped in front of the window of the diner downtown. I could see it was filled, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. I watched as Garrett slid out of the booth and then bent over to kiss Betty before heading to the counter to pay the bill.
It had been two weeks since I saw her with the man she called Luke. The man she’d made out with. The man she’d gone to a hotel with. Two weeks and she hadn’t broken up with Garrett yet.
Two weeks where he was still obviously being duped by his seeming sweetheart who, in fact, was a horrible, lying bitch.
Who could possibly cheat on Garrett? Why would anyone want to cheat on Garrett?
It made no sense. Not that I wasn’t grateful. The fact that Betty was cheating on him and intended to end things meant I was going to get another shot at Garrett. But when? How long did this go on? More importantly, how long did I let this go on?
After all the drama with Ronnie taking off and canceling the wedding, I’d had to focus on my family. Ronnie was gone. Bea was distraught. Hank was pissed. My mother had left to go shopping, there was a big surprise. I was trying to hold everyone together and failing miserably at it. Ronnie was the center of this family, not me!
I had thought that by now Betty would have done it and broken the engagement. But she hadn’t.
What if she didn’t? What if she was just stringing Luke along for the ride?
Garrett had to know.
He walked out of the diner and stopped when he saw me.
“Hey, Brin. Sorry, Sabrina. Any word from Ronnie?”
I shook my head.
“Do you know why she freaked out and called off the wedding?”
Again, I shook my head. I knew the town was talking about it. It was supposed to have been the wedding of the century. Now it was gone. Just like that.
“Garrett, do you have a second?”
“Sure. I’m heading back to the station. Can you walk with me? Or should I say, can you walk in those shoes?”
I looked down at my classic Jimmy Choo beige bumps. The way these shoes were designed I could run a marathon in them, but I get why men who worked for the sheriff and raised bulls didn’t get that.
I walked beside him, my stomach churning. This was going to be horrible. Awful. What if he lost it? What if he cried?
I would be there for him. No matter what.
“I have to tell you something and it’s awful. But I can’t not tell you. Not anymore.”
“Okay. This sounds ominous.”
We reached the station, which was just a block down from the diner. We stopped in front of the steps that would lead us inside, but I didn’t think Garrett would want to hear this news in front of his colleagues. It was going to be upsetting enough. I don’t know that I would want someone to see me in this situation.
“Hey there, Garrett.” A deputy walked out of the station and took the steps at a jog. He smiled at me. “Why look, it’s little Sabrina King. What happened this time Sabrina? Another lost necklace? Break-in? Maybe you’ve got someone following you.”
He laughed and I blushed.
“Cool it, Dave,” Garrett said.
“Whatever you say, Garrett.” Dave chuckled a little more then got into the squad car that was parked in front.
“Sorry about him. He’s an ass.”
“It’s okay. This is…this is important. That night at the party, Betty said a friend was coming to pick her up at the house.”
“Another nurse, yeah.”
“Well I was outside on the front lawn getting some air and I saw someone drive up. It was a man. A large man and they…well they…they kissed. Like, seriously made out. And then Betty said…”
“Brin,” Garrett interjected. “Stop. Stop right now.”
“No, but I have to tell you. He told her to break up with you and…”
“Brin.” This time it was more of a bark. His face was tight and he looked genuinely pissed. Not at the situation, but at me. “Enough. You’ve been pulling this shit for years and it’s got to stop. I get it. You have a crush on me. Get over it. No more stunts. No more lies. Geez, this is Caroline all over again.”
I shook my head “I’m not lying. He was there. His name was…”
“I’m done, Brin,” he said, cutting me off. “Done listening. You’re embarrassing yourself and it has to stop.”
The breath whooshed out of me. “You don’t believe me.”
“No. I don’t. I don’t buy that someone took your fancy necklace and dropped it in the trash. I don’t believe that someone was breaking into your house the other night. No one around here would be stupid enough to take on The King’s Land security. Now, are we done here? I’ve got a job to do.”
“She’s not good enough for you,” I muttered.
“Well, she’s not a liar, Brin. Sorry, Sabrina. You Kings, you’re all so fucking sure of yourselves and your money. You just assume you can have whatever you want. I thought you were different. I thought you were sweet. But now I can see you’re just as manipulative as your mother. Nothing better than a cowboy princess in her fancy shoes. Grow up, Sabrina. Get a fucking real life.”
I watched him take the stairs and slam the station door behind him.
Pissed. Angry. All of it directed at me.
The worst part wasn’t the pain of knowing I was never going to be with Garrett. The worst part was knowing the pain he was eventually going to face. Because it would kill him to know that he was being cheated on, and it would kill him again once he learned I was right about it.
I looked around main drag of this small Texas town and thought there was nothing here for me.
Ronnie, my only ally in the house, was gone. Mother hadn’t stuck around. It was doubtful Hank would care if I left.
I thought about getting out of there. I thought about getting out of Texas altogether.
So that was my plan. Leave and continue to be the thing everyone thought I was.
Nothing more than a cowboy princess.
4
SABRINA
Five Years Later—LA Studio
“You can’t be serious,” my agent, Darleen, said.
“Deadly,” I said with only a hint of irony.
“Sabrina.” Sam, the executive producer of the show, tried to cajole me. “The emails are scary. No one is suggesting otherwise. But you’re in the third year of a hit reality TV show. You can’t just walk away from Cowboy Princess.”
“I’m the star, right?”
“Yes! You are the star. You are the reason the show has so many fans. It’s a goldmine. You’ve built a brand. You have a presence on every social media out there.”
Not anymore, I didn’t. I was shutting all my accounts down.
“If it’s my show, and we’re here today negotiating a new contract, then I get what I want. What I want is out. I’ve already run this by my family attorney, and Madison agrees that I have no legal obligation to renew.”
Darleen leaned into me so that only I could hear her. “Excellent move. They have to up your salary per episode now.”
I turned to her, furious. I was so tired of this. So tired of no one listening to me. What sucked about that was that I had done this to myself. I had become this thing. This character. This Cowboy Princess. And no one thought I had a brain anymore.
“This isn’t a trick, or a move, or a strategy. I’m tired of having cameras in my life twenty-four seven while I go about doing absolutely nothing. The st
alker, whoever he is, just solidified my position. I’m tired of LA. I’m tired of this life. I don’t want to be a target anymore.”
“So, what?” Sam asked. “You go back to shopping and partying in Dallas full time instead of part time? Is that really any different?”
I knew I wanted to go home. Even though I wasn’t sure why.
Hank was dead. Ronnie and Clayton I guess were getting back together. Which meant she was spending more time at Clayton’s place back in Dallas. Bea was doing whatever Bea did, but she hadn’t stayed long at The King’s Land.
But something about the idea of home right now just felt right. Like I needed to touch base before I could figure out what came next.
I suppose the worst had already happened. Hank was dead, his daughters disinherited. Although I assumed with Ronnie agreeing to marry Clayton that meant he would at least help out Bea. That was, of course, assuming Dylan didn’t come home to claim the estate.
He hadn’t shown up yet and it had been weeks since Hank died. Ronnie was the only one who had his email address and she was saying he hadn’t even responded. No one thought he wanted the inheritance, but that kind of money wasn’t something you could just walk away from.
And if he didn’t come back? If he did turn his back on all of his sisters? Well, then, I supposed it wouldn’t be much different than what he’d done for the last ten years.
It was like everything was suddenly shaken loose in my life, and it made me think, maybe for the first time since I left Dusty Creek.
Was this it? Was this my life?
Because it seemed so empty.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get home,” I said. I had some savings that would see me through for a while. Maybe now was the worst time to be walking away from the show, with everything so up in the air regarding the inheritance. But these last weeks had been nothing short of horrifying…
And then there was Felix.
“I know I’ll feel safe for the first time in weeks and that’s worth a lot to me,” I finished.
“How many times have I told you?” Sam railed. “These cyber stalkers never do anything serious. Emails, tweets, Facebook messages. It’s all behind a computer where they are safe.”
“And the dead cat left outside my home?”
That had been the last straw. Felix wasn’t mine. He’d been a feral cat that hung out in the woods behind my house in the Hollywood Hills. I kept a food dish in the backyard for him, for when he’d failed in his hunt. That was all. Not really a pet, not mine.
His neck had been broken, his body laid on my doorstep.
Because of my fame, he had suffered.
In that moment I knew I was over it.
“Another stunt. Something to rattle you. You don’t even know if it was the same guy. Could be some fan who thought it would make it on to the show.”
I hadn’t allowed it. I didn’t want to give any more attention than this person was already getting with the various Hollywood “news” shows reporting that I was the apparent victim of a stalker. Thank God Ronnie and Bea both hated those types of shows.
No, just like Hank’s death and funeral, and returning to The King’s Land, there were some parts of my life I wasn’t willing to share.
“I’m sorry, Sam. Sorry Darleen. I get why this is important to you both, it’s just not important to me anymore, and I have to believe people would start to notice that and stop watching.”
I got up even as they continued to protest, but I was done listening.
I felt good. I felt strong. Confident in my decision.
I also felt like I needed pedicure… but that was typical for me.
SABRINA
Dallas—Katy Trail
As the song ended I started to slow my pace until finally I was walking. I took the buds out of my ears and let my breath return to normal.
The hiking trail that ran through the middle of Dallas next to an old rail line was pretty empty at this time of morning on a workday. Still, there were a handful of tourists who had maps of the trail in their hands. Some mothers taking their kids out in strollers. An older gentleman walking his mutt.
It had been the perfect place to escape to after brunch with the girls.
Ronnie and Bea were worried about me, I knew. So much that Bea had driven all the way from Austin just to meet up with us. But I wasn’t about to tell them the things the stalker had done so far. Bea would most likely think I was making it up or exaggerating. Ronnie would only double down on the worry, and she had enough on her plate with Clayton.
Instead, I’d asked about the wedding plans she’d made so far and she’d looked at me like I had two heads. I had given her a brief outline of what she needed to be doing now to hit a June wedding, and I swear, all the color had run out of her face.
All in all I continued to play my part as the Twinkie sister. Someone who didn’t take anything too seriously.
Although Bea had been shocked I was leaving the TV show. I thought about how she’d reacted.
“But you loved being the Cowboy Princess,” Bea said.
“Of course I did,” I lied. “But now Ronnie is going to marry Clayton, which means we’re not about to lose everything, so I don’t really need it anymore. The show was getting too stifling. I think I want to travel.”
“You hope you don’t need it anymore,” Bea said ominously. “Nothing is official yet.”
“Dylan’s not coming back,” Ronnie insisted. “And Clayton promised me he would take care of us. All of us.”
“You don’t know that he’s not coming back,” Bea said. “Worse, you don’t know how Dylan would treat us if he did come back. What were we to him but one summer?”
“That makes me sad,” I said. “If that’s all we were to him.”
Bea snorted. “Whatever. So you’re going back to Dusty Creek? That’s your idea of traveling?”
I shook off the memory. Bea was one of the few people in my life who’d always understood there was a contradiction between what I said and what I did.
Still, I was glad I had come back to Dallas first to let them know I was going back to The King’s Land and that I was officially done with the show. I also had to tell all my “friends” in the area that they would no longer be my B-list backups.
Jackie and Rachel were cool. They had great taste and they looked good with me when we shopped and even better as a distraction for guys who would try to pick me up only to leave with one of them.
We’d had fun, but I didn’t think I would miss hanging out with either of them. They were trust fund babies who, like me, were always looking for a distraction.
They would find somebody else to distract them.
Tomorrow, though, I would head back to The King’s Land and start to get my shit straight.
I was young. I was maybe or maybe not rich. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.
So, why can’t you figure out what you want to do?
I shook my head at my inability to answer my own question, and that’s when I saw him.
He was thirty, maybe forty feet ahead of me. Not walking. Just stopped at the end of the trail. His face was covered by a black hoodie, but I got the sense that he was young. Lean, but definitely a guy. I don’t know what it was—the lack of dog, the lack of a map. No phone, no buds in his ears.
Just a stillness. A sense that he was watching me.
Every hair on the back of my neck went up and without even thinking I turned and started running as fast as I could down the trail. I looked over my shoulder and saw he’d started to run after me. I didn’t think then. I put my head down and sprinted as fast as I could.
I saw two women with some preschool kids around their legs walking farther along up the trail and I screamed.
“Help me!”
Immediately they stopped and turned. The one woman picked up her child, the other moved her kid behind her.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry but he’s following me…”
I turned and point
ed behind me, but when I did he was gone.
“He was…he was running after me.”
The two women seemed stunned but as soon as they realized there was no immediate threat they patted my arm as if to comfort me.
“Do you want us to call 911?” the woman holding her child asked me.
I took my phone out of the armband where I wore it for jogging. I could do that. I could call 911. But what would be the point? A man in a black hoodie had been on a running trail, running, and then he disappeared.
I was letting the stalker get to me. There was no way he would have followed me to Dallas. I was being jumpy.
I shook my head. “No, I must have…overreacted. Sorry if I scared the kids.”
“It’s all right, honey. Better to be safe than sorry,” said the other woman. “Do I know you? Because you look very familiar to me.”
“Oh, wait,” the other woman said. She had put down her child now that the coast was clear. “You’re the Cowboy Princess! Oh, my gosh! Tammy, it’s her. Sabrina King. We watch your show all the time!”
I smiled.
“Can we get a picture?” The woman named Tammy was already taking out her phone.
Sure. Why not? After all, I hadn’t really been chased by a threatening man in a dark hoodie. Had I? I gave them my best TV smile and held my pose as they snapped a selfie with me.
I couldn’t get back to The King’s Land fast enough.
GARRETT
Pine’s Ranch
I walked through the door to the clean scent of lemon. It was my cleaning lady’s day to visit and I always loved how the place smelled after she’d been here. I took off my utility belt and firearm and laid it down on the table in my foyer.
The plan was to grab a shower, have a cold beer, and heat up whatever Juanita had left me in the fridge.
The other nice perk to my cleaning lady was she loved to cook and she said I was too skinny for a man. She’d made it her mission in life to fatten me up. While I didn’t think it was possible, if she wanted to indulge me with some of the finest homemade Mexican food this side of the border, I wasn’t going to object.
