A Cowboy's Wish Upon A Star. Caro Carson
toned abs. The whole pregnancy concept didn’t seem real. It was a plus sign on a plastic stick and nothing more. She didn’t feel different. She didn’t look different.
Alex the Stupid Doctor had explained that she was only weeks along, and that for a first-time mother, especially one who stayed in the kind of physical shape the world expected Sophia to be in, the pregnancy might not show until the fourth or fifth month. Maybe longer.
She could have filmed another movie in that time...
But nobody in Hollywood wanted to work with her...
Because she’d fallen for a loser who’d killed her hardworking reputation.
Round and round we go.
Always the same thoughts, always turning in that same vicious cycle.
If only she hadn’t met DJ Deezee, that jerk...
She picked up the goose salt shaker and clenched it tightly in her fist. For the next nine months, instead of paying her entourage’s salaries, Sophia would be paying rent on this house. The rent was cheaper than the stable of people it took to sustain fame, which was fortunate, because the money coming in was going to slow considerably. Her only income would be residuals from DVD sales of movies that had already sold most of what they would ever sell—and her old manager and her old agent would still take their cut from that, even though they’d abandoned her.
She was going to hide on this ranch and watch her money dwindle as she sank into obscurity. Then she’d have to start over, scrambling for any scrap Hollywood would throw to her, auditioning for any female role. Her life would be an endless circle of checking in with grouchy temps, setting her head shot on their rickety card tables, taking her place in line with the other actors, praying this audition would be the one. She wasn’t sure she could withstand years of rejection for a second time.
She shouldn’t have to. She’d paid her dues.
The ceramic goose in her hand should have crumbled from the force of her grip, the way it would have if she’d been in a movie. But no—for that to happen, a prop master had to construct the shaker out of glazed sugar, something a real person could actually break. Movies had to be faked.
This was all too real. She couldn’t crush porcelain. She could throw it, though. Deezee regularly trashed hotel rooms, and she had to admit that it had felt therapeutic for a moment when he’d dared her to throw a vase in a presidential suite. Afterward, though...the broken shards had stayed stuck in the carpet while management tallied up the bill.
She stared for a moment longer at the goose in her hand, its blank stare unchanging as it awaited its fate. “There’s nothing we can do about any of this, is there?”
The kitchen was suddenly too small, too close. Sophia walked quickly into the living room. It was bigger, more modern. Wood floors, nice upholstery, a flat-screen TV. A vase. The ceilings were high, white with dark beams. She felt suddenly small, standing in this great room in a house built to hold a big family. She was one little person dwarfed by thousands of square feet of ranch house.
She heard her sister’s voice. Her mother’s voice. You’ve got nowhere else to go. You cannot live with me.
She couldn’t, could she? Her sister was in love, planning a wedding, giddy about living with her new husband. There was no room for a third wheel that would spin notoriety and paparazzi into their normal lives.
And her mother... Sophia could not move back home to live with her. Never again. Not in this life. Other twenty-nine-year-olds might have their parents as a safety net, but Sophia’s safety net had been cut away on a highway ten years ago.
The ceilings were too high. The nausea was rising to fill the empty space, and it had nothing to do with pregnancy, nothing at all. Sophia squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in her clenched fists. The little beak of the salt shaker goose pressed into her forehead, into her hard skull.
The house was too big. She got out, jerking open the front door and escaping onto the wide front porch. In the daylight, the white columns had framed unending stretch of brown and green earth. At night, the blackness was overwhelming, like being on a spaceship, surrounded by nothing but night sky. There were too many stars. No city lights drowned them out. She was too far from Hollywood, the only place she needed to be. All alone, all alone...
This was not what she wanted, not what she’d ever wanted. She’d worked so hard, but it was all coming to nothing. Life as she’d known it would end here, on a porch in the middle of nowhere, a slow, nine-month death. Already, she’d ceased to exist.
She hurled the salt shaker into the night, aiming at the stars, the too-plentiful stars.
The salt shaker disappeared in the dark. Sophia’s gesture of defiance had no effect on the world at all.
I do exist. I’m Sophia Jackson, damn it.
If she didn’t want to be on this ranch, then she didn’t have to be.
You know how to drive, don’t you? Turn the car around, then, instead of blowing that damned horn.
There was a truck, the cowboy had said. A white truck. Keys in the barn. She ran down the steps, but they ended on a gravel path, and her feet were bare. She was forced off the path, forced to slow down as she skirted the house, crossing dirt and grass toward the barn.
I don’t want to slow down. If I get off the roller coaster of Hollywood, I’ll never be able to speed back up again. I refuse to slow down.
She stepped on a rock and hissed at the pain, but she would not be denied. Instead of being more careful, she broke into a sprint—and stepped on an even sharper rock. She gasped, she hopped on one foot, she cursed.
I’m being a drama queen.
She was. Oh, God, she really was a drama queen—and it was going to get her nowhere. The truck would be sitting there whether she got to the barn in five seconds or five minutes. And then what? She’d drive the truck barefoot into Austin and do what, exactly?
I’m so stupid.
No one had witnessed her stupidity, but that hardly eased her sense of embarrassment as she made her way more carefully toward the barn. It was hard to shake that feeling of being watched after years of conditioning. Ten years, to be precise, beginning with her little sister watching her with big eyes once it was only the two of them, alone in their dead parents’ house. But Sophie, do you know how to make Mom’s recipe?
Don’t you worry. It will be a piece of cake.
Sophia knew Grace had been counting on her last remaining family member not to crack under the pressure of becoming a single parent to her younger sister. Later, managers and directors had counted on Sophia, too, judging whether or not she would crack before offering her money for her next role. She’d had them all convinced she was a safe bet, but for the past five months, the paparazzi had been watching her with Deezee, counting on her to crack into a million pieces before their cameras, so they could sell the photos.
The paparazzi had guessed right. She’d finally cracked. The photos were all over the internet. Now no one was counting on her. Grace didn’t need her anymore. Alex had stuck Sophia in this ranch house, supposedly so she’d have a place where no one would watch her. Out of habit, though, she looked over her shoulder as she reached the barn, keeping her chin up and looking unconcerned in the flattering light of the last rays of sunset. There was no one around, only the white pickup parked to the side. The cowboy must have gone to get his dinner.
Well, that made one of them. Sophia realized the nausea had subsided and hunger pangs had taken its place. Maybe inside the barn there would be some pregnant-cow food she could eat. She slid open the barn door and walked inside.
Not cows. Horses.
Sophia paused at the end of the long center aisle. One by one, horses hung their heads over their stall doors and stared at her.
“You can quit staring at me,” she said, but the horses took their time checking her out with their big brown eyes, twitching