These people were strangers in the middle of the road, and Travis owed them nothing.
“I’m not in the habit of discussing the ranch’s staffing requirements with strangers.”
The man nodded once. He got it. The woman bit her lip, and Travis understood she was worried about more than herself.
“But since this is your sister, I’ll tell you the amount of ranch hands living in the bunkhouse varies depending on the season. None of us are in the habit of going to the main house to introduce ourselves to Mrs. MacDowell’s houseguests.” Travis spoke clearly, to be sure the woman in the car heard him. “If your sister doesn’t want to be seen, then I suggest she stop standing in the middle of an open pasture and hugging my livestock.”
The black boot stopped bouncing.
Grace dipped her chin to hide her smile, looking as pretty as her movie star sister—minus the blatant sexuality.
“Now if you folks would like to head on to the house, I’ve got to be going.”
“Thank you,” Grace said, but the worry returned to her expression. “If you could check on her, though, yourself? She’s more fragile than she looks. She’s got a lot of decisions weighing her down. This is a very delicate situa—”
The car horn ripped through the air. Travis nearly lost the reins as his mare instinctively made to bolt without him. Goddammit.
No sooner had he gotten his horse’s head under control than the horn blasted again. He whipped his own head around toward the car, glaring at the two adults who were still standing there. For God’s sake, did they have to be told to shut her up?
“Tell her to stop.”
“Like that’ll do any good.” But the man bent to look into the car. “Enough, Sophie.”
“Sophie, please...”
One more short honk. Thank God his horse trusted him, because the mare barely flinched this time, but it was the last straw for Travis. Reins in hand, he stalked past the man and yanked open the rear door.
Since she’d been leaning forward to reach the car horn, Sophia’s black-clad backside was the first thing he saw, but she quickly turned toward him, keeping her arm stretched toward the steering wheel.
“Don’t do that again.”
“Quit standing around talking about me. This is a waste of time. I want to get to the house. Now.” She honked the horn again, staring right at him as she did it.
“What the hell is wrong with you? I just said don’t do that.”
“Or else what?”
She glared at him like a warrior, but she had the attitude of a kindergartner.
“Every time you honk that horn, another cowboy on this ranch drops what he’s doing to come and see if you need help. It’s not a game. It’s a call for help.”
She blinked. Clearly, she hadn’t thought of that, but then she narrowed her eyes and reached once more for the steering wheel.
“You honk that horn again, and you will very shortly find the road blocked by men on horses, and we will not move until you turn the car around and take yourself right back to wherever it is you came from.”
Her hand hovered over the steering wheel.
“Do it,” he said. “Frighten my horse one more time. You will never set foot on this ranch again.”
Her 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.
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,
