Betting on the Cowboy. Kathleen O'Brien

      CHAPTER ONE

      BRIANNA WRIGHT PULLED up to the Townsends’ elegant Boston Back Bay mansion under a starry black sky, handed her car over to the valet with a forced smile and rushed up the stairs breathlessly. Darn it, she was late. Really late. Ten o’clock. No, almost eleven—thank you so much, gridlocked airport traffic!

      Now she’d missed three hours of her own party—well, the party her company, Breelie’s, had produced, anyhow—and Townsend’s fiftieth birthday bash was already in full swing. Music and laughter poured through the open, brilliantly lit windows.

      Too much laughter, perhaps, so early? She frowned. The open bar must be getting a workout.

      Oh, well. Townsend was a tire magnate, and his millions could cover the liquor tab no matter how high it went. At least it sounded as if the guests were having fun.

      She didn’t know why that should surprise her—the parties planned by Breelie’s rarely flopped. But something about this event had always bugged her a little. Maybe it was just that the “harem” theme had never appealed to her. That didn’t matter, of course. Whatever the client wanted, he got. Or, in this case, whatever the client’s trophy wife, Iliana Townsend, wanted, she got.

      Bree just hoped Charlie hadn’t gone overboard. Not that she thought he had. As her fiancée and her business partner, he deserved her complete trust. And he had it...of course he did. It was just that...

      She’d been out of town for most of the planning, which obviously accounted for some of her discomfort. She trusted Charlie implicitly, of course, but...

      She did wish he had answered his cell phone more often this week. When Charlie went dark, it usually meant he was spending more money than he felt like justifying over the phone. He trusted his ability to persuade anyone of anything, but only as long as they were within the target range of his surface-to-surface ballistic charm.

      As she passed under a faux ogee arch and into the unrecognizable entry hall, she suddenly froze in place. She stared, openmouthed, at the glittering, jingling, splashing, sparkling madness before her.

      For an instant, she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry.

      This was the high-society party she had hoped would put her event-planning company on the Boston A-list? This...this...circus?

      What in God’s name had Charlie been thinking? The room writhed with half-naked humanity. Belly dancers. Sword swallowers. Eunuchs. Champagne fountains, ruby-grape pyramids, peacock-feather fans and tables groaning with bacchanalian treats. Charlie had created an entire fake Persian seraglio, complete with a hundred over-the-hill sultans flirting with two hundred giggling harem “girls.”

      Bree’s temples throbbed, and her airplane-food dinner suddenly turned poisonously acidic.

      Damn it, Charlie! She’d told him a thousand times that, in the upscale Boston society event-planning business, reputation was more important than anything else. Anything. Even more important than the bottom line.

      And, long before this, she’d had a niggling feeling they were getting a reputation for being...

      Well, vulgar.

      She set her jaw as a trio of belly dancers wriggled by with a tinkle of gold coins in the air and a skitter of gold flickers on the walls. A sword swallower followed behind, ogling the dancers’ hips. Behind him—a snake charmer with a real live snake slithering around his shoulders.

      Oh, dear God. If vulgarity were an Olympic event, this pretentious absurdity would definitely take the gold.

      Her hands tightened into fists at her sides. Charlie might be a genius at coaxing money out of rich women, but Bree was going to strangle him for this.

      If she could just find him.

      Instead, as she scanned the crowd, the only person she recognized was Bill Townsend, the guest of honor himself. But he didn’t look honored. He looked furious. His dark eyes and full lips glowered, and he moved like an angry bull, his bulky shoulders plowing a path through the guests as if they were so many inconveniently placed mannequins. His bushy mustache and eyebrows resembled Tom Selleck more than Yul Brynner, but the scimitar at his side suddenly seemed more lethal than any prop ever should.

      Though he passed within two feet of Bree, he didn’t notice her any more than he noticed any of the others. He kept up his furious stride until he reached the burbling, three-tiered champagne fountain in the center of the ridiculous room.

      Iliana, his forty-five-year-old trophy wife who always looked like a beautifully embalmed twenty-year-old, was nowhere in sight. Had the couple been fighting? Great. If the host and hostess ended up having a big row tonight, Bree’s party would be remembered for that, not the hours and hours of work she and Charlie had put into it.

      An elderly, diffident sultan, whose headdress was bigger than his whole body, approached Townsend, hand outstretched, a “happy birthday” smile on his face. Townsend turned his back on the man rudely. He grabbed a silver chalice from a passing waiter, thrust it under the honey-colored stream, letting the bubbles spill all over his fingers, then knocked the champagne back in one harsh toss.

      Bree groaned under her breath. This could get ugly. Where the heck was Charlie? He needed to find Iliana, who might be able to handle her drunk husband. The women were always Charlie’s responsibility. He was good with bored trophy wives. He could always pump out an extra squirt of charm and coax them into ever-higher displays of extravagance.

      Unfortunately, at the moment, he seemed to be just as absent as the hostess. Bree shut her eyes, trying to swallow her fury. But really. Maybe strangling was too good for him.

      “Ms. Wright?”

      She opened her eyes. A tall “eunuch” stood in front of her, holding a tray of wineglasses. She eyed them carefully, wondering how many bottles they’d run through. If Townsend was already in a foul humor, he might balk at an astronomical liquor tab, after all.

      “Everything okay, Ms. Wright?” The eunuch hesitated, looking nervous. Poor guy. She had a reputation, she knew, for being a stickler.

      “No. I mean yes, everything’s fine.” It wasn’t this poor guy’s fault. He appeared as miserable as she felt. So she propped up her artificial smile, hearing her guardian’s voice in her head. Kitty Afton, the Boston divorcée who had taken Bree in after her mother’s murder, had believed that cheerfulness was next to godliness. Even in the early days, when surely she knew Bree was heartbroken and traumatized, Kitty had scolded her new protégée for letting her lips lose their pleasant feminine curve. “No one likes a sad sack, Brianna. You’ll catch more flies with honey.”

      The waiter-eunuch nodded uneasily, then moved on. Bree checked Townsend again. He hadn’t budged from the fountain. He was refilling his chalice, though his eyes glittered, and a sparkling trail of champagne already trickled from his chin like golden spit.

      She couldn’t wait for Charlie or Iliana. She’d have to try to handle Townsend herself. Reluctantly, Bree merged into the melee of guests, somehow keeping the smile on her lips.

      “Mr. Townsend?”

      He turned, the chalice halfway to his mouth, and glared at her over the rim. As he took in her simple slate-blue sheath, his eyes narrowed. “What are you supposed to be? Didn’t you get the memo? This is a costume party. You’ve got to look like an idiot or you don’t get in.”

      She deepened her smile, as if he’d meant it as a joke. But the bitterness in his voice was unmistakable. The drinking was a symptom of a deeper problem...not the cause. She really needed to find Iliana and get things patched up.

      “I’m not actually a guest,” she explained. “I’m Brianna Wright. My company, Breelie’s, is the one you hired to—”

      “You’re...” He lowered the golden vessel, spilling liquid precariously close to her shoes, but ignoring