The Cowboy and the Princess

by Lori Wilde

  “Annie.” Brady held out his hand. “It’s okay to tell the truth. Who do you want to be with? Where do you want to be?”

  “You,” she whispered. “I want to be with you and Orchid. I want to be in Texas with our friends. And Lady Astor wants to be with Trampas. She’s pregnant, you know.”

  “Then come with me.” Brady reached out for her hand.

  She was on a roller coaster. A wild adventure she never dared dream could be hers. She turned to the bridegroom. “I am sorry, Teddy, but I am not the woman for you.”

  Teddy stood there stunned, openmouthed, not fully grasping what was happening.

  Bravely, Annie tossed her bouquet to the ground, stepped up to the microphone at the pulpit, and faced the crowd. Brady clung to her hand, squeezing tightly. Her lifeline. Infusing her with strength. She could do anything as long as he was beside her.

  “I,” she announced, in a wavy voice filled with a million emotions, “am not a true princess.”

  Then all hell broke loose.

  Epilogue

  You might be a princess if . . . you live happily ever after.

  The media dubbed it the Royal Wedding That Wasn’t. Annie’s confession hit Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and in under a minute, it went viral, crashing servers around the globe, and forever cementing tiny Monesta in the top ten royal scandals of the last one hundred years.

  Even though Annie and Brady wanted to immediately take off for Texas, it wasn’t that easy. There were pieces to be picked up, loose ends to tie, legal issues to address, and relationships to mend.

  It turned out King Phillip was actually relieved to have the secret out in the open. He confirmed Rosalind’s story, adding his point of view and that of Queen Evangeline. He told Annie how much he loved her, and it filled her heart with joy to hear him say it. They talked for hours, something they had never done before.

  “You are always welcome here,” he said, “and I will always consider you my daughter, but I understand that it is time for you to discover who you really are. If you have any lingering questions, you can call me anytime.”

  “What about Rosalind?” Annie asked. “She violated her contract. Will she be ostracized from Monesta?”

  “I could never cast out your real mother,” he said. “Consider the contract null and void.”

  They parted on the most amicable of terms, both relieved and joyful that they were able to forgive and forget.

  Once Annie had received the king’s blessing, it was time to smooth things over with Teddy. At first he was miffed, but that turned out to be only because he believed she’d made him out to be a fool. Dubinstein was in an uproar over the whole thing, and that put him in a petulant mood. But once he learned that Brady was a horse whisperer, his ears perked up. “Could he come to Dubinstein? I have an ailing polo horse that’s dear to my heart.”

  So Brady went to Dubinstein with Teddy to heal his horse while Annie stayed behind in Monesta to run the gauntlet first with media interviews and then with the royal lawyers. Brady wanted to stay by her side during the ordeal, but she wanted to spare him the nitty-gritty so she asked him to act as an ambassador of sorts, smoothing over Dubinstein’s hurt feelings.

  Between the lawyers and King Phillip, it was agreed that she could keep her monthly stipend from Queen Evangeline, even as they officially stripped her of her title. It was all right. Annie did not feel wounded by legal machinations. She understood. She wasn’t a princess and she was proud of it.

  Even though she was allowed to stay in Monesta, Rosalind accepted Annie’s offer to move to Texas. Annie and Rosalind would have plenty of time to get to know each other as mother and daughter.

  Brady did such a swift and thorough job of rehabilitating Teddy’s horse that Teddy made him the royal horse whisperer of Dubinstein. Annie and Brady were welcome in both Dubinstein and Monesta any time they chose to visit.

  But neither one of them could wait to get back to Jubilee.

  The minute Annie set foot on Texas soil she knew she was home. The Jubilee Cutters Co-op threw a big welcome home party that lasted far into the night.

  Brady and Annie were married a month later at Mariah’s cowboy chapel on Green Ridge Ranch. All the usual suspects were there. Joe and Mariah and Jonah. Ila and Cordy. Prissy and Paul. Lissette and Kyle. And Rosalind.

  They tied the ring to Trampas’s collar and he served as ring bearer. The bride wore cowboy boots and so did the groom. When the nuptials were over, they rode off on Pickles to the Dempsey ranch that Brady had bought. It was going to be their new home.

  Rosalind looked after Orchid for a few days at the cabin while Annie and Brady honeymooned, sealing their love with lots of long, lingering kisses.

  “So,” Brady said, as he undressed his bride, sliding the white wedding gown off her shoulders. “Are there any lingering secrets we need to reveal?”

  “None here,” she said. “How about you?”

  “What you see is what you get. Plain and simple.”

  “Cowboy,” she said, leaning up to kiss him on the end of his nose. “No matter how much you like to pretend otherwise, there is nothing plain or simple about you.”

  He tightened his arms around her. “I can’t believe how much time I spent running from this.”

  “What?”

  “Commitment. Roots.”

  “I’m glad you did. Just think what would have happened if you’d settled down before you met me.”

  “You’d be the Princess of Dubinstein right now.”

  “You rescued me again, Brady Talmadge. You have a thing for damsels in distress.”

  “On the contrary, Mrs. Talmadge, you rescued me. Without you, without Orchid, I’d still be a lonely old cuss pulling my home behind me telling myself I was happy in my isolation. You showed me the world, Annie. You gave me a reason for being.”

  She wrapped her arms around his waist. “So about those five unbreakable rules . . .”

  “They’ve all been shattered to bits.”

  “I was thinking we needed new unbreakable rules.”

  “Rules for what?”

  “A long and happy marriage.”

  He reached for the zipper on her dress. She held her hair off her shoulders. “I’m up for it. What do you have in mind?”

  “Rule number five. Never go to bed angry.”

  “I’m in.”

  “You get to make up rule number four,” she said. “This marriage is a democracy, not a monarchy.”

  “How about No secrets.”

  “That works for me.” She slipped her arms around him.

  “You get to make up rule number three.” He nibbled her neck.

  “Never stop dreaming.”

  “Gotcha,” Brady reached up to finger the dream catcher earring nestled in her earlobe.

  “Your turn.” She ran a hand down his back, tracing the crisscross of scars there.

  “Let go of the past,” he said firmly. “Forgive and forget.”

  “That just leaves rule number one.”

  They looked each other in the eyes. Brady kissed her tenderly. “What are your thoughts on rule number one?”

  “That’s easy. Never, ever stop loving each other.”

  “Princess Buttercup,” he said. “I never, ever will.”

  Then he scooped her into his arms and carried her to bed and they made love, soft, slow, and sweet until they both knew through the very marrow of their souls that this union was their true destiny.

  And they lived happily ever after.

  Keep reading for

  a sneak peek at

  Lori Wilde’s next

  Jubilee, Texas novel

  A COWBOY FOR CHRISTMAS

  Coming in Fall 2012

  Only from Avon Books

  When she got right down to it, Lissette Moncrief’s infatuation with cowboys was what really started all the trouble.

  There was something about those laconic alpha males that stirred her romantic soul. Their uniforms of faded Wranglers, sc
uffed cowboy boots, jangling spurs and proudly cocked Stetsons represented rugged strength, fierce independence and a solemn reverence for the land. Their stony determination to tame wild horses, mend broken fences and tend their families made her stomach go fluttery. Their cool way of facing problems head on, no shirking or skirting responsibilities weakened her knees.

  A cowboy was stalwart, and steady, honest and honorable, stoic and down-to-earth. At least that’s what the movies had taught her. From John Wayne to Clint Eastwood to Sam Elliott, she’d crushed on them all. She loved Wayne’s self-confident swagger, Eastwood’s steely-eyed ethics and Elliott’s toe-tingling voice.

  When she was sixteen, Lissette and her best friend, Audra, had snuck off to see a fortune-teller at the Scarborough Renaissance Fair in Waxahachie. Inside the canvas tent, Lady Divine, a pancake-faced woman in a wheelchair, spread spooky-looking cards across an oil-stained folding table. She wore dreadlocks tied up in a red bandana and a flowy rainbow caftan. On the end of her chin perched a fat brown mole with long black hairs sprouting from it like spider legs. The tent smelled of fried onions and the farty pit-bull terrier mix stretched out on a braided rug in front of her.

  Lady Divine studied the card alignment. She tapped her lips with an index finger and grabbed hold of Lissette’s tentative gaze, but she didn’t say anything for a long dramatic moment.

  “What is?” Lissette whispered, gripping the corner of the cheap greasy table, bracing for some horrific prestidigitation like, you have no future.

  “Cowboy.”

  “What?” Lissette thrilled to the word.

  “There’s a cowboy in your future.”

  “Will he become my husband?”

  “Only time can say.”

  Eagerly, she leaned forward. “Is he handsome? What’s he like?”

  “Dark.” Lady Divine’s voice turned ominous.

  “In personality or looks?”

  “This cowboy will influence you deeply. He brings great change.”

  “In a bad way?” She knotted a strand of fringe dangling from the sleeve of her jacket.

  Lady Divine shrugged. “What is good? What is bad? Who can know? You can’t avoid this cowboy. He is inevitable.”

  The fortune-teller continued with the reading, but Lissette absorbed none of the rest of it. She was so stunned by how the woman had zeroed in on her cowboy infatuation. Later, she and Audra had dissected the woman’s uncanny prediction. They were in Texas, after all. The likelihood of running across an influential cowboy at some point in her future were far above 50/50. Not such a mystifying forecast in that context.

  Most people would have blown off the reading, dismissing it as nothing more than the slick pitch of a smarmy woman who made her money telling gullible people what they wanted to hear. But for a girl besotted with cowboys the fortune-teller’s prophecy had not only mesmerized Lissette but set her up for heartache.

  If she hadn’t been convinced that a cowboy was her future, she would never have ignored the warning signs. If she hadn’t romanticized Jake into a modern-day version of John Wayne, she wouldn’t have married him. If he hadn’t sounded like Sam Elliott on steroids, she wouldn’t have heard the lies he told her. If she hadn’t duped herself into thinking that he was the second coming of Clint Eastwood, she wouldn’t have had a child with him. If she hadn’t swallowed the cowboy mystique hook, line and sinker, she wouldn’t be here in Jubilee, Texas, the cutting horse capital of the world, dealing with this new life-shattering situation all by herself.

  Then again, how could she regret anything that had given her a son?

  She glanced at her two-year-old, Kyle, who was seated in the grocery cart. Unable to draw in a full breath, she ran a hand over Kyle’s soft brown curls as he sat in the grocery cart eating cheddar goldfish crackers from a lidless sippy cup decorated with images of gray Eeyore. Cheesy, yellow crumbs clung to his cupid bow lips and there was a grape juice stain on his light blue T-shirt.

  Genetic non-syndromic autosomal recessive progressive hearing loss.

  The words were a mouthful that boiled down to one gut-wrenching truth. Kyle was slowly going deaf. Medical science could not cure him, and it was all her fault.

  Turns out both she and her late husband, Jake, unwittingly carried a recessive connexin 26 mutation and poor Kyle had lost the genetic lottery. So said the audiologist, geneticist and pediatric otolaryngologist whose Fort Worth office she’d just left with the astringent smell of cold antiseptic in her nose and a handful of damning paperwork and referrals clutched in her fist.

  Deaf.

  Such a frightening word. It sounded too much like dead.

  Deaf.

  Her poor fatherless baby.

  Foggy as a sleepwalker, Lissette pushed her grocery cart down the baking products aisle of Searcy’s Grocery, past an array of orange and black cupcake sprinkles, candy molds in the shapes of ghosts and pumpkins, and haunted gingerbread house kits.

  Her lips pressed into a hard line, resisting any stiff attempts she made to lift them into a smile for fellow shoppers. Misery bulged at the seams of her heart until it felt too swollen to fit inside her chest. It beat, as if barely stitched together, in halting ragtag jolts. A sense of impending doom pressed in on her, hot and smothering.

  It couldn’t be true that her child was losing his hearing in slow, agonizing increments, never to be reclaimed. She had to seek a second opinion.

  A third.

  And a fourth if necessary.

  But with what? Consultations did not come cheaply.

  Swallowing back her pain, Lissette refocused on her goal. Shopping for baking supplies. That was the answer to her money troubles.

  Searcy’s was the only locally owned supermarket in Jubilee, the cowboy-infused town that Jake had settled her in four years ago before he first shipped off to the Middle East. In the beginning, she’d embraced the place, the community, the culture, the cowboys, but then, bit-by-bit, her eyes had been opened to the truth. Cowboys were like everyone else. Some good. Some bad. All fallible. It had been a mistake to romanticize a myth. No man could give her a fairytale. She understood that now and she was determined to provide for herself. No more depending on a man for anything.

  The store, with its narrow aisles, sometimes felt like a womb—comforting, cozy, communal—but today, it felt like a straitjacket with the straps cinched tight. Maybe it was the candy pumpkin molds, but an unexpected nursery rhyme popped into her head.

  Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater had a wife and couldn’t keep her. Put her in a pumpkin shell and there he kept her very well.

  “Da . . .” Kyle gurgled with the limited vocabulary of a child half his age. “Da.”

  Shoppers crowded her. She needed to get to the flour, but Jubilee’s version of two soccer moms—i.e., Little Britches rodeo moms—stood leaning against the shelves gossiping, oblivious to those around them.

  Lissette cleared her throat, but the moms either ignored her or didn’t hear her. Something she’d grown accustomed to as the middle child, book-ended by more attractive, gregarious sisters.

  “Um,” she ventured, surrendering a smile. “Could one of you ladies please hand me a ten-pound sack of cake flour?”

  “Did you hear about Denise?” the shorter of the two women asked the other as if Lissette hadn’t uttered a word. “She up and left Jiff for a man eight years younger than she is.”

  “Get out! Denise? No way.”

  “I tell you, losing all that weight went straight to her head. She thinks she’s God’s gift to men now that she can squeeze into a size four.”

  “My cousin, Callie, is single and searching,” the taller one mused. “I wonder if Jiff’s ready to start dating.”

  Feeling invisible, Lissette sighed and bent over, trying to reach around them to get to the flour, but the ten-pound bags were on the bottom shelf. The woman with the single cousin had her fashionable Old Gringo cowboy boots cocked in such a way that Lissette couldn’t reach it.

  Normally, she would h
ave stopped at Costco for a fifty-pound bag when she’d been in Fort Worth, but those big bags were so hard for her to lift and besides she’d driven the twenty-six miles back to Jubilee in a such a fog she didn’t even remember leaving the medical complex.

  She straightened. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask the women to kindly step aside when a ten-year-old boy on wheeled skate-shoes darted past, almost crashing into Lissette’s elbow. She jumped back and gritted her teeth, anxiety climbing high in her throat.

  Kyle was staring at her, studying her face.

  Calm down.

  She was on edge. Kyle would pick up on her negative energy and that was the last thing he needed. If she thought her morning had been lousy, all she had to do was imagine what it felt like to her son—poked and prodded and unable to understand why.

  It hit her then, how confusing life must be when you couldn’t hear. How much communication you missed. Then again, in some regards, that might be a blessing. Did she really need to hear about Denise and Jiff’s crumbling marriage? Her own marriage had been filled with so many thorns that the occasional sweet bloom couldn’t make up for all the painful sticks.

  “Da.” Kyle raised his small head, his usual somber expression searching her face through impossibly long eyelashes—Jake’s eyelashes—as if seeking an answer to the silent question. Why can’t I hear you, Mommy?

  Why hadn’t she suspected something was wrong? Why hadn’t she realized that her baby could not hear? Why had it taken a nudge from her best friend, Mariah Daniels, for her to make a doctor’s appointment?

  She’d been angry at first when Mariah said, “It’s funny that Kyle doesn’t respond when you ask him to do something.”

  Lissette told herself Mariah was jealous. Kyle was so much quieter than her son, Jonah, who was six months younger. But then she started noticing how Kyle watched her hands more than he watched her face. How he never cared for toys that made noise. How his language skills lagged behind Jonah’s. How he often seemed so willful, never listening when she cautioned.