Lone Star Prince

by Cindy Gerard

“Yes, sir,” he said quietly.

  Unaccountably angry that the child felt so cowed by his presence that he couldn’t even look at him, Greg curled a finger under his little pointed chin.

  Damned if he didn’t flinch, then fight the instinct and hold himself yet more erect.

  “Do I scare you, son?”

  A little Adam’s apple bobbed once as he swallowed. “No, sir.”

  He was scared down to his toenails, Greg realized and felt a swell of admiration for the effort it took him to hold his ground.

  “Well that’s good—because you have nothing to fear from me. Okay?”

  A pair of summer-blue eyes finally braved a look at his. Greg could see him consider if he could trust him, then reserve judgment until proof or the cavalry arrived.

  “Now your mom,” Greg said, giving the child time to digest what he’d said, “there’s a person to fear.”

  “Not my mom,” William said, rushing to her aid.

  Greg pulled a face. “You telling me you’re not afraid of your own mom? Why I heard tell she ate little boys for breakfast, and those she didn’t eat, she gave twenty lashes with a wet noodle every night before she sent them to bed.”

  The beginning of a smile tugged on the corners of William’s mouth. “She doesn’t do that.”

  “She doesn’t? Well what does she do then?”

  He thought for a moment. “She tells me stories.”

  “About bad moms who eat little boys and—”

  “No,” William quickly cut in, his voice stronger, his eyes more involved and just hinting at animation. “She tells me stories about cowboys.”

  “Cowboys, huh?”

  “Yeah. Texas cowboys.”

  Greg refused to let himself think he had been one of the cowboys in those stories a mother would tell a son—even though something deep inside wanted to believe just the opposite.

  “You’ve pretty much got a thing for cowboys, don’t you, bud?”

  “Yes, sir. And horses. Cowboys feed their horses.”

  “Ah. So, you figured if you’d come down to the barns and feed old Bea here some oats, you just might end up being a cowboy too, huh?”

  A charming mix of guilt and hope brightened his big eyes.

  Greg thought for a moment, thought better about what he was about to do, then thought, what the hell. The boy wanted to be a cowboy, he could, by God, be a cowboy.

  He nodded toward the mare. “How about we saddle her up?”

  If possible those enormous eyes grew even bigger. “I could ride her?”

  Greg smiled. “Would you like that?”

  The boy was so thunderstruck, all he could do was nod.

  “Well, come on, then, Wild Bill, let’s get this show on the road.”

  Greg stood and, on instinct, held out his hand. On instinct, the little boy took it.

  And something inside Greg warmed and expanded.

  William’s hand felt small and fragile enclosed in his big palm and callused fingers. Yet it fit. As they walked side by side to the tack room to get a brush and a bridle, Greg couldn’t shake the pleasant sensation that it fit just fine.

  They had just finished brushing down the mare—Greg on one side, William perched on a step stool on the other—when Anna came racing into the barn, her long hair flying.

  “William,” she cried in relief when she spotted him. “I’m going to be a cowboy,” he bubbled happily, oblivious to the panic on his mother’s face.

  Greg was oblivious to nothing. Not the high flush of color on her mottled cheeks. Not the snug fit of her jeans, the delicacy of the hand that reached up to tuck a long strand of pale-gold hair behind the perfect shell of her ear. Not the rise and fall of her breasts beneath the pale blue V-neck sweater that bared the slender column of her throat and revealed the milky whiteness of her skin.

  Anna rushed to William’s side, then stopped suddenly when she realized that William and Greg appeared to be in league together.

  “He’s fine, Anna.” Greg smiled across Bea’s broad back and felt a warmth flood through him when William’s answering smile was quick and unguarded. “He understands now that he and Tito should have asked permission before coming down here. They won’t be doing it again. Right, Wild Bill?”

  “Right.” He glanced at his mom, his excitement overriding any attempt at contrition. “We’re brushing Bea because a cowboy always has to take care of his mount. And then I’m going to ride her.”

  Greg was quick to quell the panic on Anna’s face. “Bea’s nineteen, Anna. She’s baby-sat more kids than a day-care center. I’ll just lead them around the indoor arena to let Will here, find his seat. Okay with you?”

  Very evidently, it wasn’t okay. Greg could see it in her eyes, in the way she knit her fingers together until she blocked the blood flow. But it would be her decision, one he would respect. One, when she made it, filled him with a pride over which he had no ownership.

  “Do...do you care if I watch?” she asked William. “It’s not every day a mom gets to see her very own cowboy make his first ride.”

  William beamed. Greg gave her a slow smile when what he wanted to do was eliminate her worries with a soft kiss to her furrowed brow. Too aware of the effect she had on him and needing to waylay it, he set down his brush.

  “You need to stand back while I saddle her up, okay pardner? You watch, though, so you can learn how to do it yourself someday.”

  All business, his intelligent blue eyes glued to Greg’s every move, William watched without comment or question. Only his shifting feet gave away his building excitement.

  “Ready to mount up?”

  William’s nod was quick and confident. “I’m going to ride like the wind.”

  Greg chuckled. To his relief, Anna did the same as her excitement for her son overrode her own reservations.

  As he helped little William onto the big horse’s back and witnessed the child’s unbridled happiness and the shimmering pride in his mother’s eyes, Greg slid, quite easily, into a decision he hadn’t been aware he’d been weighing.

  The surprise of it didn’t stun him as much as it should have. Neither did it scare him. And he should have been scared. Running scared. Relief, instead, outdistanced any sane reaction. Relief was as sweet as the look on Anna’s face, worth every delay of an insight that had been far too long in coming.

  He was done fighting. Just like that, he was tossing down the gloves. He was done battling with his feelings, with his doubts, with his anger. Anna was not the cold, calculating aristocrat his bruised pride had painted her to be. She was just a woman. A woman with obligations that ruled her choices. A woman with strong loyalties and an inbred sense of duty.

  Yeah, it had hurt like hell that she had let him leave her four years ago. It had hurt like nothing he had ever experienced before or wanted to experience again. But she hadn’t let him go because she hadn’t wanted to be with him. He should have realized that four months ago—the moment he’d first seen her. Those expressive green eyes had told him exactly how she felt. Only his pride had refused to let him see it.

  She still loved him. She had loved him from the beginning. In fact, she’d let him go because of that love. She’d felt she’d had no choice. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe, he realized, too late, he should have fought harder.

  And maybe what should have and could have didn’t have any place in what was happening between them now.

  What was happening now was, she was here—the Anna he remembered. Kind. Compassionate. Caring. In the smile she had just given up for her son, he saw a glimpse of the young woman he had fallen in love with that European summer. He’d seen a spark of the girl who had loved without reservation, had thrown caution to the wind and given him four of the best days of his life.

  That girl was still there. And now, so was the woman. In the kiss they had shared on their wild flight from the media mob, he’d found that woman. The one who melted at his touch. The one who turned him into the man he was only able to be in her arms.


  Loving her wasn’t an option. It was clear to him now that it had never been an option. Just as it was clear that he’d never stopped caring. He’d just stopped believing.

  As he walked the mare around the arena, he accepted that it might not be wise to open himself up to loving her again. But he’d done wise for the past four years. Wise was isolating and lonely. Wise was comprised of short-term, empty relationships and hollow feelings. No, wanting Anna may not be wise. Needing her, however, had become undeniable. And weren’t things different now? She was here on his turf. She was here on his terms. And he was past the point of not taking advantage of those sweet, if unholy facts.

  William laughed in delight as Greg led him in a slow circle around the arena, then stepped up the pace to a trot. He glanced at Anna as they trotted by, saw the happiness of her heart through her eyes—and that vital, compelling hope, sealed the deal.

  She was his. Then. Now. Forever. He’d work it out. Somehow, he’d find a way to work it out.

  In the meantime, he would simply let it happen. He would ride on this rich sense of freedom that suddenly swamped him. Enjoy the slow uncoiling of a painful tightness that had grown in the past four years and crowded inside his chest like a loaded spring.

  Anna was his. She was his, and this time he wasn’t letting her go.

  If dawn at Casa Royale was spectacular, that evening Anna learned that dusk could be an event of equal beauty. In the cool soft breeze of early evening, feathery clouds had stacked up on the gray line of the horizon, looming over the endless flatness of the landscape. On its slow descent, the huge orange ball of sun knifed through the breaks of cloud cover in magnificent shades of blue, purple, coral and gold.

  Anna had spent four months in Royal. It was a small town, filled with the wonderful flavor of small-town people. She’d met a mix of classes, from the working poor to the Texas equivalent of the socially elite. But what she knew of Texas had been restricted to the city streets, the heat of midday, the city park and the downtown renovation project.

  Gregory’s ranch, however, represented everything she hadn’t seen. Everything she had ever imagined Texas to be. The wide open spaces. The oil wells flanking the access roads. The vastness and the stark, severe beauty of a lost horizon and the biggest sky she’d ever seen.

  And now, she’d discovered the most beautiful sunsets in the world. As she sat on a stone bench in the garden, she realized that she’d go through that ugly mob scene at the diner again if even one more day on the ranch was the prize. And having held the prize in her hand, it was going to be that much harder to let it go.

  She’d felt attuned to the land from the moment they’d driven out of the city limits and set sail on the relentless wind. Once Harriet had arrived with William, it was as if something that had been out of sync in her life for a very long time clicked quietly into place. Even the nightmares had stopped.

  “I believe the line is, penny for your thoughts.”

  Startled out of her musings, she turned to the sound of Gregory’s voice.

  He was standing in the shadows. Tall. Strong. Simply watching her—and while it didn’t make any sense, she was struck by the notion that he hadn’t happened upon her by accident. If that was the case, when he’d seen her, he could have simply turned and left. She never would have known he was there.

  He had come out here looking for her. Looking for her, when only yesterday, he couldn’t have made a bigger point of always walking away.

  When he stepped out of the shadows, her breath caught. When she met eyes that were more pensive than probing, a mouth gentled by the same soft lines he’d shown William this afternoon, she knew without a doubt that she was right. He had sought her out.

  Some of the tension his presence incited ebbed, then flowed to an edgy anticipation, a pulsing awareness of the man and the significance of his actions. Not knowing how to react to this unexpected development, she braced her palms on the bench on either side of her hips and resumed her study of the sky. “I was just thinking how beautiful it is here.”

  When he said nothing, she let out a deep breath. Tried to steady a heartbeat that faltered when he moved nearer. Nearer. Not farther away.

  She braved a look over her shoulder at him, brushing away a strand of hair the wind had teased into the corner of her mouth. He had propped a booted foot on the bench beside her hip, crossed his forearms over his knee and was sharing her view of the sunset.

  “I don’t get out here often enough.”

  She studied the bold lines of his face, shadowed beneath his hat, then offered an opinion on why. “You work too hard.”

  He shrugged, his gaze locked comfortably on the horizon. “Maybe.”

  On the wings of that opinion came a conclusion she’d been forming since September. “You’re very wealthy, aren’t you?”

  He angled her a look. Smiled. “Filthy with it.”

  She thought about that. Thought of the unholy irony. His blood lines would never be blue, yet he could probably buy and sell her financially insolvent country several times over. A commoner her parents would have run out of Obersbourg on a gilded, upper-crust rail four years ago.

  The rich colors of dusk ebbed slowly to a velvet darkness as they sat there. But for the undercurrents of something vital, something viable skimming just beneath the surface, the silence was more comforting than uncomfortable.

  “I like your Texas,” she volunteered finally. Because it was true. Because she felt cocooned in thoughts the silence invited. Dangerous thoughts about what it had been like to make love with him. What it would be like to make love with him again.

  “It’s so big. The land. The wind. The sky.” The people, she added silently. The fact that you are a part of it.

  Again, he was quiet for a time. “It’s not an easy land. But if a man accepts it for what it is, he’ll get along well enough.” He angled her a thoughtful look when she turned her face to his. His gaze skimmed from her eyes to her mouth, where it remained.

  When he reached out, hooked his little finger on that pesky strand of hair that the wind delighted in teasing, she stopped breathing. When he tucked it gently behind her ear, it was all she could do to keep from leaning mto his touch, turning her cheek to his broad, warm palm.

  His gaze lingered on hers for the longest of moments before he resumed his study of the sky. “It appears Texas likes you, too.”

  A fluid warmth flooded her even as his brief touch left her wanting more. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her. She knew what she saw. And she liked it. In the few months since she’d been here, she’d put on a little weight—weight she’d needed to steal the gauntness from her cheeks. Her skin had taken on a soft, honeyed tan from even her infrequent encounters with the sun.

  Aware, suddenly, of a silence that begged for more than what either of them could afford to say, she studiously avoided looking his way. “I think maybe it was Manny’s cooking ... and now Juanita’s.” She smiled and wished desperately, helplessly that he would kiss her. Then wished she simply could accept that it wasn’t going to happen. That it couldn’t happen. “If you’d put me anywhere but in a restaurant, both William and I probably would have starved to death.”

  Something about the stillness had her seeking his eyes again. When she connected with his dark gaze, a shiver that had nothing to do with the night breeze eddied through her body.

  “I seem to recall a meal or two you fixed for us once upon a time.” His voice was husky, his tone spoke of memories involving more than meals.

  Gooseflesh gave way to a flushed warmth, a tingling heat that dovetailed with remembered passion. The memory flowed, instant and vivid: The little second-floor flat with its tiny balcony that he’d rented during his week’s leave in Obersbourg. Midnight, candlelight, rumpled sheets...

  The sound of Cosmo barking at one of the cats down at the horse barns eased her back to the moment. “Slicing cheese and washing grapes hardly constitutes cooking.”

  Her words trailed off in a h
aze of sensation as his gaze caressed and enticed her to remember, just as he was remembering, the sultry friction of skin on skin, the heady taste of wine on his tongue, the juicy, crisp sweetness of the grapes that passed from his mouth to hers.

  She turned away, heated by the memory, longing for the reality, as one by one the evening stars pricked the dome of the cobalt sky, glittering in the distance like tiny lanterns strung haphazardly across the heavens.

  She searched the night sky, remembering love, engulfed in longing. Waiting, waiting for him to sit down beside her, take her into his arms, tell her how much he wanted her. The connection she felt with him at that moment was so acute, so focused that several thundering heartbeats passed before she realized he was gone.

  He’d walked back into the house and left her alone.

  Several stunned moments more ticked slowly by before she accepted how badly she didn’t want to be alone.

  She wanted him back. She wanted him here. And she could have sworn, as they’d shared the intimacy of the night and the magic of memories, that he had wanted her, too.

  But wanting, she reminded herself dutifully, had no place in her life. It never had. It never would.

  A sudden gust of wind skimmed across her skin, then raced away, inciting a tiny, riotous whirlwind. She watched, in a detached sort of fascination, as it eddied across the garden floor, lifting leaves and scattering them skyward to mingle and dance with stardust before falling in an untidy tumble back to earth again.

  Back to earth. Just like she needed to settle her heart back to earth. Back to Texas, where she feared it would stay long after she returned to Obersbourg.

  Seven

  Greg whistled softly between his teeth as he strolled into the kitchen the next morning. He had risen early, dressed for outside work and headed to the barns. It felt good. Damn good to push something other than paper and corporate competitors’ buttons for a change Hell, it had even felt good to push a broom—which he’d done for a better part of the morning. He’d pitched in and helped clean out the foaling barn in preparation for the colts that would be dropping shortly after the first of the year.