could come up with a temporary replacement of her own.
Enter Jill Brown, with stars in her eyes.
She had left Sam in the loving care of her sisters and flown out to Las Vegas to step onto the ice as a Featured Mouse and Cinderella understudy. And she had hated every minute of it. Her dreams were shattered. She felt like a fool for thinking that a showgirl lifestyle, so incompatible with Sam’s needs, could have made her happy.
The show was a cheap takeoff of the far more glamorous Disney version. The performers were badly paid and badly treated, and tensions between the cast members were high. Jill had missed Sam more than she’d have thought possible, every minute of every day. The knowledge that he was happy and well cared for with Cat, Suzanne and Pixie didn’t help.
She was supposed to endure almost six more weeks of this?
Maybe it should have helped when Trixie, the regular Cinderella, came down with a bad dose of flu on Jill’s first Saturday in Las Vegas. To skate as Cinderella should have been a dream come true, but it wasn’t.
Lying in bed in a darkened room, Trixie had overwhelmed Jill with advice and instructions, in a pained, croaky voice. “And don’t forget that publicity thing afterward. The ‘Cinderella Marathon’ thing.”
“What?”
“The ball thing, the contest, with the cable channel.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“You just have to stick around the hotel. It’s in the big function room. You’re the so-called ‘Celebrity bride.’ They’ll tell you what to do. You haven’t heard about it? There’s been a lot of publicity about the rules and prizes, and all.”
“No, I haven’t heard about it.” I’ve been too busy crying into my pillow, missing Sam and wishing I’d never come.
“It’s no big deal, but you know management will kill you if you don’t show.”
“I know.”
So she had “shown” for the “Cinderella contest thing” in the big function room just as she was supposed to do, without the slightest idea what it was all about….
“This is it,” Gray said, wheeling the pickup to a halt in front of a big metal shed.
Jill was impressed by the sizeable collection of buildings grouped nearby. She could only guess what they were used for. Milking? Did the McCalls run the kind of cattle that got milked? Somehow, she thought not.
In the distance, she could glimpse the large new house on the hill, the place that the McCalls were renting out in order to stretch their cash flow a little. It was separated from this section of the ranch by three fences and a line of healthy young trees, their leaves ablaze with fall color.
Gray jumped out of the truck, and she watched him for a moment before getting out herself. He was such a capable looking man, as upright and sturdy as a tree trunk, both in body and heart, but she had known from the moment they met that he was hurting. Something in his life wasn’t right, and he had his back to the wall as he fought his circumstances.
She didn’t know the whole story, but she knew some of it, thanks to the way they’d talked that night in Las Vegas six months ago. His father had overstretched their finances with the purchase of a neighboring ranch immediately before his death. As a result, Grayson, his newly widowed mother and his fit but elderly grandfather were in danger of losing the land that had been in the McCall family for over eighty years.
Until seeing the place for herself today, Jill hadn’t been able to grasp what that meant. Now, she was just beginning to understand. This place was substantial, beautiful, and expensive to run—rewarding of success and dramatically unforgiving of failure.
And somehow the thought of Gray failing, of losing the fight to save his family ranch after the blow of his father’s death, suddenly mattered to her. It mattered in a way that made her throat tighten and took her breath away. She didn’t want to think of him failing after such a struggle, through no fault of his own.
This was what the word “real” meant, she understood.
“Real” wasn’t the bewildering whirl of their publicity-stunt Cinderella marriage, under the glare of TV lights. The marriage was legal, as Jill’s lawyer had advised, but it wasn’t real. “Real” wasn’t even the unexpected moment of stillness in the midst of it all. The moment when she and Gray had said their vows, still believing them to be a meaningless charade, and had looked into each other’s eyes and felt…magic.
None of those things were real. But this…This was real. Gray’s struggle to keep his ranch and the life he loved was real. No wonder he just wanted to sign those divorce papers, watch Sam get quickly well and wave them goodbye.
Alan was right, she thought. He knew I couldn’t get the magic of that night with Gray out of my head. He knew I had to come here and feel the reality for myself.
Chapter Three
“You don’t have to work so hard, Jill,” Gray said.
He had been glancing up from beneath the hood of the pickup to watch her every few minutes for the past hour and a half. He hadn’t seen her take a break yet.
When they reached the shed, she had insisted on a “real job.” Hiding his skepticism, he’d taken her at her word. It hadn’t been hard to find one for her. She was chipping off rust-blistered paint and coating a derusting treatment onto the bale retriever. The vehicle was falling apart but it had to last out a whole season of winter feeding. There was no way he could afford to get it replaced as his father had planned to do this year.
Some of those rust patches were getting downright dangerous. They had begun to eat into and weaken the metal, and she was taking it seriously. He was amazed at how hard she was prepared to work. She had chips of yellow paint all over Louise’s old red sweater, and a streak of rust across her cheek. The air smelled of the acrid chemical treatment. The noise she had made as she chipped was like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Jill’s neat hips moved in rhythm as she worked. Her pert derriere stuck out when she bent to reach an awkward spot with her brush. Louise’s sweater hugged her figure soft and close, showing her curves. The sight once again affected Gray in a way that was both delicious and uncomfortable.
From time to time she shook her glossy dark hair back out of her eyes. Once she wiped her hands on a rag and re-wound the piece of pink elastic around her jaunty ponytail to keep it more securely out of the way. The movement lifted the neat swell of her breasts, and lifted the sweater to briefly show an inch of silky skin around her waist.
Gray knew women—ranchers’ wives and daughters included—who would have thrown up their hands at the job long ago, but Jill was taking it all in stride. Or maybe she was just releasing pent-up tension. This situation couldn’t be any easier for her than it was for him. She was stuck here on the ranch with a sick child, when all she wanted was to make an arrangement about the divorce and get on with her life.
He closed the hood of the pickup and went over to her.
Short of investing in parts he couldn’t afford—like a whole new engine, maybe—he’d done all he could to make the truck worthy of a grinding ride into
